Contracts on a shutdown by October 1 trade in the low single digits, with the lapse date two weeks away.
The hard lapse date for fiscal 2027 federal appropriations is midnight on September 30, 2026.
The December dates that have circulated in connection with federal funding are not the deadline. They are competing funding-through dates in two chambers' unreconciled continuing resolutions: the Senate's version, H.R. 6500, would fund the government through December 11 and passed 90 to 6 in August, while the House's version, H.R. 9770, would fund through December 4. Those dates describe where the next funding cliff would fall if one of those bills were reconciled and signed, not where the current one falls.
The distinction is not academic. A deadline two weeks out and one approaching three months out imply completely different risk profiles for anyone positioning around federal spending, government contractors, or the data releases that pause during a lapse. That last point has more weight than usual now: the Federal Reserve raised rates on Wednesday and made clear it will be reading incoming inflation and labor data closely, and a lapse would interrupt the federal statistical releases the Committee depends on.
Markets are not pricing a crisis
A contract on a government shutdown occurring on October 1, 2026 was quoted at 1 cent on Kalshi and 3 cents on PredictIt, implying probabilities of roughly 0.5% to 2%.
That is an unusually confident price for a binary event two weeks away in a domain with a long history of brinkmanship. It is consistent with the Senate having already passed a continuing resolution by a 90 to 6 margin, a tally suggesting limited political appetite for a lapse on either side, and that the remaining work is reconciling two bills differing by one week of funding duration rather than resolving a substantive standoff.
One caveat on the odds
A headline circulating in the same period stated that government shutdown odds had spiked to 80%. That figure could not be dated, and it is not reconcilable with a 1 to 3 cent live contract price on the same underlying question.
The most likely explanation is that the two describe different moments. An 80% reading would be consistent with an earlier point in the appropriations process, plausibly during the summer standoff between the chambers before the Senate's continuing resolution passed. It is not consistent with the current state of pricing and should not be read as a live figure.
What to watch
Whether the House and Senate reconcile their continuing resolutions before September 30, and which funding-through date survives. If a stopgap is signed, the operative question becomes whether the next cliff lands on December 4 or December 11, and the sequence repeats with roughly ten weeks of runway.
If nothing is signed, the contract prices quoted above have two weeks to be proven wrong.