Iran Ceasefire Odds 2026: Qeshm Broke One of Two

Published 6 November 2026 · Prices frozen 6 November 2026, 21:19 UTC

Every page reporting the Iran ceasefire odds this week is reporting one number from one board, and that is how you end up with the same market described as 78% and as under 1% on the same afternoon. Both figures were real. They were different contracts.

Polymarket runs three separate ladders on this war, worth $137.4m between them, and they ask three different questions. One of them broke on 3 November. One of them has never printed a No in 113 days. One of them has never printed a Yes in 116. A reader who does not know which board a quote came from cannot tell a settled contract from a live forecast.

So here is all three, read in one pass at 6 November 2026, 21:19 UTC, with the resolution text that decides each one quoted rather than summarised. We pulled every rung, the daily closes either side of the strike, and Kalshi’s full series index. The short version: the strike that settled one ladder could not have touched the other, and the board that went up is the one now being quoted as the one that fell.

Where the Iran ceasefire odds stand today

Three boards, one war. The volumes are close enough that none of them is a sideshow, and their settled records could not be more different.

Read the two zero columns against each other and the shape of the year falls out. The Israel × Iran ceasefire has survived every deadline written for it; the blockade has outlived every deadline written for its end. The US-Iran board is the only one of the three that has changed its mind, and it did so in an afternoon.

Ten rungs went to zero on one strike

US forces carried out what officials described as limited, defensive air strikes on Qeshm Island, an Iranian island in the Strait of Hormuz, reported on Monday 2 November in Washington. Two US officials told NBC News the action was not a resumption of major combat operations, and CNN’s sources tied it to protecting US assets after Iranian fire at a US aircraft. Al Jazeera called it the first US attack on the island since June and reported Iran’s deputy foreign minister playing the incident down while reserving the right to respond.

The board did not care how it was described. Here is the end of the ladder.

Ten rungs, $7.74m of volume, all settled by one event. That is the property of a continues-through ladder nobody warns you about: the rungs are not independent forecasts. Once the ceasefire breaks, every later date is automatically No, so one qualifying action collapses the whole forward curve at the same instant. The board had been open 47 days.

“Defensive” is not a defence in the contract

The US-Iran contract resolves No if the United States “takes a qualifying military action against Iran”, and defines that as an air strike or surface-to-surface missile strike initiated by the United States that directly impacts Iran. The Israel × Iran contract uses the same sentence with one substitution: the action must be initiated by Israel or Iran against the other country.

Everything else in the two texts matches, down to the exclusion list and the dispute procedure. That one substitution is the whole reason a board settled on 3 November while the other did not move a rung: the United States is not a party to the Israel × Iran contract, so a US strike on Iran is not a qualifying action under it at all, however large. The exclusions are worth reading precisely, because the official framing of this strike invited a reasonable but wrong inference.

Read the last two rows together and the blockade question answers itself. Both contracts define Iran as “the terrestrial territory of Iran, including its internal waters” and state that maritime territory and airspace are not encompassed. The blockade has been interdicting shipping since July, and none of it — not one boarding or seizure — could have resolved either ceasefire market. It took a strike on an island. We made the same point about the gap between commencing and holding in our US-Iran invasion odds breakdown, and it is the single most reliable source of mispricing on this war.

The clock is Tehran’s, not Washington’s

Every rung on both ceasefire ladders settles at 11:59 PM Iran Standard Time, which is UTC+3:30 — eight and a half hours ahead of Eastern Time, so an evening in Washington is already the next morning in Bandar Abbas. A strike dated Monday 2 November by US outlets therefore falls on 3 November as the contract counts days, and that is the only reason a rung labelled “continues through November 2” can still pay Yes.

You can watch the market work this out. Both pre-strike rungs fell hard on 3 November and were back at par the next day.

The 31 October rung lost 11.9 points on 3 November and regained 12.7 the following day; the 2 November rung lost 13.2 and regained 15.0. Those are not forecast revisions. They are a board pricing the question of which calendar day the strike landed on, in real time, and arriving at the answer that puts it on 3 November Iran time. Both rungs now bid 99.9¢.

$15.41m is still arguing about the past

This is the part of the board that reads backwards. Every rung dated after the strike has resolved. The only two still open are the two dated before it, and both carry an on-chain resolution status of “disputed”: 31 October with $11.86m, the single largest rung on the board, and 2 November with $3.55m. Together that is $15.41m, or 1.99 times the $7.74m sitting in the ten rungs that settled. The board has finished with the future and is still adjudicating the past.

The contract anticipates exactly this. Where sources conflict on the occurrence, attribution or timing of an action, it stays open until either confirmation by consensus of the resolution sources or three full calendar days in Iran Standard Time from the first credibly reported evidence, after which the incident is adjudicated on the totality of information. Those sources are official US and Iranian government and military information plus credible reporting, and no single statement or denial governs where the totality contradicts it.

The other ceasefire went up on the same news

Here is the result that should stop anyone treating “the Iran ceasefire” as one thing. In the three days after a US strike on Iranian territory, the Israel × Iran ceasefire board rose across its whole curve: the 15 November rung from 65.5¢ to 78.5¢, the 30 November rung from 49¢ to 62¢, and the 31 December rung from 35.5¢ to 48¢. Gains of 13.0, 13.0 and 12.5 points respectively, while the board next door was settling to zero.

We are not going to tell you why, because nothing in the data attributes it. Al Jazeera’s report of the same window has Iran’s president signalling more diplomacy and Tehran playing the strike down — consistent with a market deciding an Israel-Iran exchange became less likely, but a coincidence of timing rather than a finding. The finding is the sign: the two boards moved in opposite directions on the same news, and any single “Iran ceasefire odds” figure averages away the most interesting thing on the screen.

The record behind that board is worth stating plainly. It opened on 16 July 2026 and has run 113 days. Thirty-two rungs have reached their deadline. All thirty-two resolved Yes. It has never printed a No.

What the curve implies: 2.5% a day, then 0.8%

A continues-through ladder is a survival curve, so you can read a daily break rate straight out of it by comparing adjacent rungs. The conditional survival between two dates is just the ratio of their prices; take the geometric daily rate and you get what the market thinks the risk per day is in each window.

The curve is not flat, and the kink is the finding. Through 15 November the market charges about 2.5% a day; from 30 November onward it charges about 0.8%. That is a factor of 3.07 between the front of the curve and the back. A constant-hazard board with the same 31 December price would sit around 80¢ for 22 November rather than 67.5¢.

In plain terms: traders think the next fortnight is where this ceasefire either fails or settles down. Price the whole horizon off the 31 December rung and you will underrate the next two weeks. The flat-equivalent rate across all 55 days is 1.32% a day — a number that describes no window on the actual board.

116 days, 21 deadlines, not one Yes

The third ladder asks something different again: not whether anyone stops shooting, but whether the US government says out loud that the blockade is over. It opened on 13 July 2026, the day the blockade was reinstated, and has the most lopsided record of the three.

The interesting movement here is the shape, not the level. Since late October the near rungs have been priced out and the far rung priced in: 30 November has gone from 33.5¢ on 31 October to 20.5¢, down 13.0 points, while 31 March 2027 has gone from 55¢ on 22 October to 71.5¢, up 16.5. The market has pushed its expected lifting date back and simultaneously grown more confident it happens eventually. For what the blockade and a physical reopening are not, see our Strait of Hormuz reopening analysis — lifting the blockade and reopening the strait are two different contracts and the difference is large.

One clause deserves flagging because it makes this market easier to resolve than it looks: once a qualifying announcement is made, the board pays Yes regardless of whether it is later reversed, or whether the blockade actually ends in practice. It is a market on a sentence, not on a ship.

Kalshi lists neither ceasefire — here is the nearest thing

There is no cross-exchange comparison to make on the ceasefire itself. We searched Kalshi’s full series index by category and found no series containing “ceasefire” or “blockade”: zero matches across 11,949 series spanning World, Politics, Economics, Companies, Financials, Crypto, Health, Sports, Entertainment, Culture and Transportation. Kalshi does list plenty of Iran exposure — Hormuz shipping traffic, an embassy reopening, sanctions actions, crude production — but nothing paying on a ceasefire or a blockade.

The closest comparable is its US-Iran nuclear-deal ladder, which pays if the United States has agreed to, signed or accepted a new deal before each date. Set against Polymarket’s blockade board on the nearest matching horizons, the two venues are pricing very different propositions.

At the year-end pair, shipping relief is priced 5.52 times a nuclear agreement. That ordering is coherent rather than inconsistent: lifting a blockade is a unilateral announcement the US can make on a Tuesday, while a deal needs Tehran to sign. Our Iran nuclear deal odds piece works through why the two venues disagree about what counts as a deal in the first place, which is a prerequisite for reading that 11/14¢ correctly.

What would move these before 31 December

Four things, in rough order of how much they would move.

The two disputed rungs adjudicate. $15.41m resolves one way or the other, and because the contract caps the conflicting-reports window at three full calendar days from first credible evidence, that is a near-term event rather than an open-ended one.

Any Israeli or Iranian strike on the other. That is the only class of event that touches the 42-rung board, and at 2.5% a day implied through mid-November the market is treating it as live. Note what does not count: further US action, anything at sea, intercepted munitions, and air-defence fire.

A sentence from CENTCOM, State or the President. The blockade board pays on an official announcement and nothing else — and pays even if the announcement is reversed afterwards.

New rungs. The US-Iran board has settled its whole forward curve, so Polymarket may open a fresh ceasefire ladder dated from whenever hostilities next pause. If it does, treat the old board’s zeroes as history, not as a forecast about 2027. Live prices sit on our biggest daily movers page and the analysis index, both refreshed every 10 minutes.

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Sources: the Polymarket Gamma and CLOB public APIs (events 1038648, 711714 and 699735, every rung and the daily closes for each open rung) and the Kalshi public markets API (the KXUSAIRANAGREEMENT-27 series and the full series index by category), all read at 6 November 2026, 21:19 UTC. Resolution terms are quoted from the operative text each venue publishes — the US-Iran ceasefire board and the Israel × Iran board. The strike is as reported by CNN, NBC News and Al Jazeera; accounts differ on detail and the reporting is days old. Earlier phases of the conflict, including the April ceasefire, the 13 April blockade and the 8 July collapse, are as described 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 on this page. The hazard rates are arithmetic on the frozen rung prices, not a forecast. Prices here are a frozen snapshot; the live numbers are on the market pages, which refresh every 10 minutes. Nothing here is financial or betting advice.