Hegseth Out Odds 2026: Five Boards, Five Prices

Published 9 November 2026 · Prices frozen 9 November 2026, 16:10 UTC

Search the Hegseth out odds this week and you will be handed 13¢, 30¢, 43¢, 45.5¢, 51¢ and 56¢, all described as the probability that the Defense Secretary is gone, all quoted inside the same few days. Every one of those numbers is a real traded price. None of them is wrong.

They are five different contracts, and what separates them is not sentiment but a single clause about when a departure counts. Three pay out the moment a resignation is announced. One pays only when the office is actually empty. One asks who will be first out of the whole Cabinet and does not close until January 2029. Quote the wrong one and you are off by nine points.

So here is all five, read in one pass at 9 November 2026, 16:10 UTC, with the resolution text quoted rather than summarised. We pulled every rung on Polymarket’s 21-name departure board and its three Hegseth ladders, every active rung of Kalshi’s cabinet basket, both of Kalshi’s Hegseth boards and the daily closes either side of Susie Wiles’s exit. The short version: the venue whose rulebook is most generous to a Yes is charging the second-least for it.

Where the Hegseth out odds stand on both venues

Line the ladders up on matched deadlines and the pattern is immediate. Polymarket sits above Kalshi’s vacate-the-office board at every comparable date, and below Kalshi’s announcement board.

The 21 November rung on Polymarket, at 19.5¢, has no Kalshi counterpart. Volume is concentrated at the far end: Polymarket’s 31 December board has traded $2.19m against $843.8k on the 30 November rung and $19.9k on 14 November, so the near-dated prices move on small tickets.

Announcement or departure? The clause that splits the price

This is the whole article in four quotations. Each venue publishes the operative text, and the texts are not the same text.

Three of the four resolve on the announcement. Only Kalshi’s KXHEGSETHOUT needs the office to be empty. Both venues also exclude the same near-misses in their secondary rules: a temporary leave of absence, a suspension or a recusal is not a departure on either board unless the individual “formally and permanently ceases to hold the position”.

Kalshi disagrees with itself by 9 points

The cleanest number on this page needs no cross-venue comparison at all. Kalshi lists both standards itself, on the same underlying, with the same deadlines, so the difference between them is a priced quantity rather than an argument.

The announcement board must always price at or above the vacate board, because every way of being out involves having announced it first. The gap is therefore the market’s estimate of one specific event: Hegseth says he is leaving inside the window and is still Secretary when the window shuts. Six points by 1 December and nine by 1 January is a sensible shape — the longer the window, the more room for a notice period to straddle the deadline. Nine points on a 42.5¢ base is a fifth of the contract’s value sitting in the definition of a word.

Polymarket wrote the announcement contract and priced the other one

Now put Polymarket’s 45.5¢ back on the table. By its own published text it is an announcement contract — the words “regardless of when the announced resignation/removal goes into effect” are not ambiguous. The Kalshi board that asks that question is at 51.5¢ mid. The Kalshi board that asks the stricter question is at 42.5¢ mid.

Polymarket is trading six points below the contract it matches and three points above the contract it does not. Whatever else is going on, at least one of those two venues is pricing the clause wrong, and a reader comparing “Polymarket 45.5¢ vs Kalshi 43¢” — which is the comparison every aggregator makes — is comparing an announcement price against a vacancy price and concluding the two venues roughly agree.

That is not free money. Polymarket resolves on “official information from Pete Hegseth and the U.S. government” with “a consensus of credible reporting” as a fallback, and a disputed announcement is where that fallback gets tested; Kalshi’s wording is tighter. Part of the gap is a discount for adjudication risk rather than an error. But six points is a lot of discount, and the direction is the surprising part: the venue with the looser, more Yes-friendly text is the cheaper one.

Six names have already settled Yes

Polymarket’s 21-name board opened on 5 November 2025 and has been paying out all year. The settlement record is the part of this market nobody writes about, and it is the only hard evidence on the page about how fast this administration actually sheds people.

Six departures across the contract’s 369-day life is one every 61.5 days. Measured from the first settlement to the last — Bongino to Wiles, 323 days — the spacing is one every 64.6 days. Those two numbers agreeing is the useful part: the realised rate has held steady at roughly one departure every two months, through an Iran war and a midterm.

Note which names are on that list. A deputy FBI director, a press secretary and a chief of staff are not Cabinet officers, which matters for the comparison in a moment.

The board is pricing an acceleration

Fifteen rungs are still open, and because each one is an independent question about a different person, their prices can be added. The sum is not a probability — it is an expected count.

So the board prices about 2.09 further departures from those 15 specific names in the 52 days left before 31 December. That is one every 24.9 days, against a realised rate of one every 61.5 days — the market is pricing departures to run roughly 2.5 times faster for the rest of the year than they have all year.

That is defensible after an election the governing party lost, and it is the most falsifiable claim on this page. If 31 December arrives with nobody else having gone, all 15 rungs settle No and $1.56m of volume was wrong about the same thing at once.

One rung deserves pointing at. Stephen Miller is the cheapest name on the board at 4.1¢, and on 6 November he was named White House Chief of Staff, effective Monday 9 November, as ABC News reported. A promotion is not a departure here — the contract asks whether he “ceases to be a member of administration” — so 4.1¢ is the board correctly ignoring a job change. The same logic is why Wiles settled Yes: she left for the president’s political operation, which is not a federal role.

Kalshi’s basket asks a different question entirely

Kalshi has a cabinet-departure basket too, and putting it beside Polymarket’s is the mistake this comparison invites. Its rungs ask who will be the next person to leave. Only one can ever pay, so the prices compete rather than add, and the bids sum to 83.7¢ instead of 208.75¢.

Three differences make the two baskets non-comparable, and all three run in the same direction. The Kalshi contract does not close until 20 January 2029, so a 48¢ bid on Hegseth being next out is not a statement about 2026 at all. It is mutually exclusive, with an alphabetical tie-break written into the secondary rules if two people announce on the same day. And it covers only Cabinet officers — the heads of the 15 Cabinet agencies plus named administrators — where Polymarket’s universe is “Cabinet members, Executive Office staff, senior policy advisors, ambassadors, or White House staff”.

You can see that last difference being patched in real time. Kalshi re-issued the basket on 6 November and had to write Susie Wiles out of it by name: her departure as Chief of Staff, the rulebook says, “occurred before Issuance and does not count”. On Polymarket she was simply a rung, and it paid.

The same role-versus-administration split shows up on the single names, pointing the other way. Kalshi’s Rubio contract asks about leaving “as Secretary of State” and spells out that “leaving only another role, such as National Security Advisor, does not count”; Polymarket asks whether he leaves the administration at all. A move from State to another post is a Yes on Kalshi and a No on Polymarket, and Kalshi duly prices Rubio’s announcement by 1 January at 16/17¢ against Polymarket’s 11.5¢. Bessent runs the same way, 9/16¢ against 7.4¢.

Impeachment is 77¢, and resigning makes it worthless

There is a sixth board, and it is the one most likely to be misread as a departure forecast. Polymarket pays 77.25¢ that the House impeaches Hegseth by 31 December 2026 — a far higher number than anything on the departure ladders, on $250.7k of volume.

Impeachment is a House majority vote on articles, not a removal. The contract says so: “Neither trial nor conviction by the US Senate, nor removal from office, is necessary to resolve this market to Yes.” Democrats won control of both chambers on 3 November, which is what a 77¢ price on a House vote reflects. As of this snapshot the House has not voted.

The ladder has one flaw worth knowing before you read anything into its longer rungs: it is non-monotonic. It pays 85¢ by 31 March 2027 and 83¢ by 30 June 2027, which cannot both be right, since anything impeached by March is impeached by June. Those rungs carry $33.6k and $18k against $250.7k on the December rung, so treat the two-point inversion as thin-market noise and price the horizon off the December board.

What the Wiles exit did to the price

The interesting move this month is not that Hegseth rose. It is what happened on the day somebody else actually went.

Both boards spiked in the two days after the midterm, then fell hard on 6 and 7 November, the days Wiles’s departure was announced — the basket rung from 56¢ to 33.5¢ and the dedicated board from 55.5¢ to 32.5¢. A departure elsewhere in the building coincided with Hegseth getting cheaper, and both boards then recovered to roughly 45¢ by 9 November.

The tempting reading is that a purge spends its energy: one head rolled, so the next is less likely soon. We will not assert that — nothing here attributes the move, the sample is one event, and these are day-end prints off a 6-hourly series rather than a clean intraday record. What is solid is the shape: a 22-point round trip in four days on the board’s most liquid rung, the kind of volatility that makes any single quoted number stale within hours. Live prices for both markets sit on our Hegseth 31 December market page and the 21-name departure board, both refreshed every 10 minutes.

What would move these before 31 December

A House impeachment vote. It settles the 77.25¢ board and, counter-intuitively, protects the departure board from the clause that would have voided it. Watch the order: a vote before a resignation pays both camps, a resignation first pays only one.

An announcement with a forward effective date. This is the nine-point question. A “leaving in the new year” statement in December resolves Polymarket and Kalshi’s announce board Yes and leaves KXHEGSETHOUT trading. If you follow one number, follow the spread between Kalshi’s two boards — it is the cleanest read on whether traders expect a clean exit or a long goodbye.

Anyone else going first. Fourteen other rungs are live, Lutnick at 22¢ and Patel at 21¢ the next most likely, and 6 November showed one departure can reprice the rest. A second exit would settle Kalshi’s whole next-out basket in one stroke.

Nothing at all. The quietest outcome is the one the realised base rate favours: one departure every two months means the modal number of further exits in 52 days is one, not two. The board is priced for 2.09. For the wider picture, our biggest daily movers page and the analysis index track where the rest of the money is going.

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Sources: the Polymarket Gamma and CLOB public APIs (event 73897, plus events 330222, 1120129 and 352344 — every rung, and daily closes for the two most liquid) and the Kalshi public markets API (KXHEGSETHOUT, KXHEGSETHANNOUNCEOUT, KXRUBIOANNOUNCEOUT, KXBESSENTANNOUNCEOUT and all 25 active KXCABOUT rungs), all read at 9 November 2026, 16:10 UTC. Resolution terms are quoted from the operative text each venue publishes — the Polymarket departure board and the 31 December Hegseth board. Note that Polymarket’s contract text names the office “Secretary of War” while Kalshi’s names it “Secretary of Defense”; this page reports that divergence between the two contract texts and does not assert the official title. The composition of the administration is as published at whitehouse.gov, and the Wiles and Miller appointments are as reported by ABC News; the tenure and controversies behind these prices are summarised here. Kalshi prices are bid/ask from the *_dollars fields and carry no published volume; Polymarket volume and liquidity are dollars, and the two venues’ figures are never added here. Expected departure counts are arithmetic on the frozen rung prices, not a forecast. The live numbers are on the market pages, which refresh every 10 minutes. Nothing here is financial or betting advice.