Iran Nuclear Deal Odds 2026: From 62¢ to 13¢

Published 5 October 2026 · Prices frozen 5 October 2026, 16:19 UTC

Every page we can find quoting Iran nuclear deal odds is reading one rung on one exchange, and most of them are reading it from before the 60-day negotiating window lapsed on 13 August. That matters more than usual here, because there is not one Iran nuclear market — there are five interlocking contracts across two venues holding $103.0m between them, and they tell a story no single number carries: a deal at 12.50¢, Iran agreeing to give up its uranium at 7.50¢, the US actually holding that uranium at 5.50¢, and the naval blockade lifting at 50.95¢. We read both exchanges in the same pass, pulled the full lifetime daily history on every live rung, swept Kalshi for the boards nobody quotes, and sat down with both rulebooks side by side. One of the two is pricing the wrong contract higher, and the rulebooks say which.

Where the Iran nuclear deal odds stand today

Start with the ladder, because the useful thing about this cluster is that the contracts nest. Lifting a blockade is easier than signing a deal; signing a deal is easier than Iran agreeing to ship its stockpile abroad; agreeing to ship it is easier than the US actually having it. Each step is strictly harder than the one above, and the market prices them in that order.

Three of the five have no Kalshi counterpart, which is worth knowing before you take one venue’s word for “the odds”: Kalshi runs deep boards on the deal and on Hormuz traffic, and nothing on the uranium or the blockade. All five Polymarket boards sit live on our Iran topic page, which refetches every ten minutes; the numbers above are frozen so that the prose and the tables cannot drift apart.

The year-end rung peaked at 62¢ on announcement day

Kalshi’s board is the one with history going back before the memorandum, and it makes the arc unambiguous. The contract on a deal before 1 January 2027 closed at 54¢ on 1 June, peaked at 62¢ on 14 June — the day of the announcement itself — and then gave the whole move back and more.

The detail that changes how you read this: the de-rating did not happen when the deadline passed. By 13 August, the day the 60 days ran out, Kalshi’s year-end rung was already at 10¢, having lost 52 of its 62 points while the window was still open. The deadline itself was worth about a point and a half. Traders gave up on this deal in July; the calendar only confirmed it in August.

The recovery since 1 September is real but small, and it has a cause. Iran’s foreign minister met Qatari mediators in New York during the UN General Assembly in late September, and the US rejected the resulting proposal as unacceptable. Nine cents to fifteen and back to fourteen is a market still listening, not one expecting an outcome.

Thirty-five deadlines have expired, all of them No

These are deadline-ladder markets, so each board accumulates a graveyard of settled contracts, and the graveyard is the most honest thing on the page. Across the four Polymarket boards, 35 dated contracts have expired and every one resolved No, on $86.5m of the $103.0m these boards have traded in total.

Two rungs deserve naming. The deal board carried one dated 13 August — 60 days after 14 June, to the day — and another dated 18 August, for the extension. The extension rung traded $2.73m against the deadline rung’s $1.14m, so more money was staked on the window being stretched than on it being met. Both paid nothing. And the biggest expired contract in the cluster is the 31 May uranium-possession rung at $20.54m: a fifth of all the money here went on a contract that resolved No four months ago.

Kalshi pays on a deal Polymarket would reject

This is the finding, and it is a rulebook one rather than a price one. Kalshi’s condition is a single sentence: if the United States has agreed to, signed, or accepted a new Iran-US nuclear deal before 1 January 2027, then the market resolves to Yes. There is no definition of a deal, no required content, and “agreed to” and “accepted” sit there with no signature attached.

Polymarket’s rules for the same question run past eight hundred words. The instrument must be mutually signed, or formally adopted through a joint statement or an exchange of diplomatic notes. It must be identified as the final deal contemplated by the 14 June memorandum. And it must establish at least one specific obligation limiting Iran’s nuclear program through a concrete, measurable benchmark against which compliance could be tested. The rules then name what will not count: a pledge not to pursue nuclear weapons, a commitment to maintain the status quo, or an agreement to abide by IAEA monitoring and inspections that does not itself restrict the programme.

That asymmetry is not academic, because the inspections-only outcome is the one on the table. Reporting through 2026 has had Iran signalling flexibility on monitoring while refusing zero enrichment outright, and a US side insisting the nuclear file be addressed before the war ends. A deal that restores inspections and parks enrichment for later is a plausible landing zone — and it is a Kalshi Yes and a Polymarket No.

The stricter contract costs more on two of three dates

Put those rulebooks together and you get a constraint, not an opinion. Any instrument that satisfies Polymarket’s conditions also satisfies Kalshi’s — a signed deal with a measurable benchmark has certainly been “agreed to, signed, or accepted”. The reverse is not true. Polymarket’s Yes set sits strictly inside Kalshi’s, so for matching windows the Kalshi price must be the higher of the two. On two of the three dates where the windows line up, it is not.

The year-end pair behaves properly: the looser contract trades a point above the stricter one, which is what the nesting requires. The two nearer pairs run the wrong way, and the November gap of two full points is wide against a 1¢ spread on either venue. Either Polymarket’s near rungs are dear, Kalshi’s are cheap, or — most likely — both are thin: Polymarket’s 30 November contract has traded $127,311 in its life, a twenty-sixth of the year-end rung beside it.

That reading is still useful: the only rung on either venue with enough money behind it to quote is the year-end one, and the right answer to “what are the odds of an Iran nuclear deal” is 12.50¢ for a signed one and about a point more for anything the US might call one.

The uranium is cheaper than the deal

The 60-day window existed to settle one question above all others: what happens to the roughly 440 to 460 kilograms of uranium Iran has enriched to 60%. Reporting has put it at 440.9 kg in June and 460 kg in a March account of the talks, so treat it as a range. Either way it is the file the negotiation was about, and it is the cheapest thing on the board.

Read the gaps and the board is making a specific prediction: whatever gets signed, if anything does, will not move the stockpile this year. Five points separate a deal from Iran merely agreeing to surrender any part of its uranium — and Polymarket’s rules on that contract are generous, counting any amount, and counting a pledge made to the US or to Israel, unilaterally or as part of an agreement. Seven points separate a deal from the US having physical custody, where the rules are strict in the other direction: possession means actual physical custody or control, and announcements of deals or plans to acquire it later explicitly do not qualify.

The peaks column is the part worth sitting with. Iran agreeing to give up the stockpile was a 62.50¢ proposition on 18 April 2026, before the war, and is 7.50¢ now — a 55-point collapse in the one commitment every version of this negotiation has been built around, all of it while the diplomacy was formally alive.

Shipping relief is priced four times the nuclear file

If the nuclear contracts are the cheap end of this cluster, the blockade is the expensive one, and that split is the clearest prediction the market is making. Polymarket prices an official announcement ending, lifting or suspending the US naval blockade at 50.95¢ by year-end — four times the price of a nuclear deal over the same window.

So the market expects the shipping file settled without the nuclear file being settled, and it is pricing the sequence Iran has proposed. The plan Araghchi took to the Qatari mediators asked the US to release frozen funds, lift sanctions and end the blockade, with the strait reopening days later. The US position, as reported, is that there is no agreement to end the war unless the nuclear programme is addressed. On these boards the Iranian sequence is a 51% shot and the American precondition a 12.5% one.

Note also the gap between a blockade announcement at 50.95¢ and Hormuz traffic actually recovering at 18.50¢. One needs a podium; the other needs IMF PortWatch to publish a 7-day moving average of transit calls at or above 60. We walked that second contract in detail in our Strait of Hormuz reopening analysis, and the 32-point spread is the market’s estimate of how long announcement-to-tanker takes.

What the curve says about 2027, 2028 and 2029

Kalshi’s board is the only one here running past this year, and the long end answers a question the headlines do not: is this deal delayed, or dead?

The curve climbs steeply through 2027 — 13¢ by January, 19¢ by March, 36¢ by the end of 2028 — and then almost stops. There are three points between a deal before January 2028 and a deal before 20 January 2029, the day the current presidential term ends. On the mids the gap is narrower still, 34.50¢ against 37.50¢.

That flat final segment is the market saying this is an administration question, not a calendar one: if these two governments agree a deal, the board thinks it happens in 2027 or not at all. Worth noticing too that the long rung peaked at 84¢ on 24 June. A deal before the end of the term read as near-certain three months ago and reads as 39¢ now.

What would actually move these markets

Nothing is scheduled: no deadline is left on this negotiation’s calendar, which is why the boards have gone quiet. What they wait on is a meeting, and Kalshi’s board on that is the most interesting secondary contract here. A senior-level US-Iran meeting before 1 December trades at 27¢ last on a 29 / 32¢ quote, and the 1 January rung shows a 30¢ last trade below its own 40¢ bid — a stale print, and a reminder to read the quote rather than the last trade on thin Kalshi rungs.

A meeting at roughly 40¢ against a deal at 13¢ is a coherent pair: talking resumes more likely than not, and talking has about a one-in-three chance of producing paper. Watch three things, in order. Whether a meeting convenes, because every other contract here is downstream of it. Whether any announced agreement contains a number — a cap, a quantity, a dilution commitment — because that detail is the whole difference between a Kalshi Yes and a Polymarket No. And the blockade board, the one contract here the market expects to resolve Yes, which moves first if the Iranian sequence is taken up.

What we would not do is read the 13¢ as a forecast that diplomacy has failed. It is a forecast that diplomacy does not produce a signed, benchmarked instrument in the next 87 days — a much narrower claim, and one the rulebooks define rather than the news. The wider Iran cluster is priced on our US-invasion analysis and our regime-change piece, and the full set of live boards sits on the Iran topic page.

Related analysis

• US-Iran Final Nuclear Deal — the live deadline ladder, chart and full resolution criteria
• Iran agrees to surrender its enriched uranium — the commitment the talks were built around
• US obtains Iranian enriched uranium — the strict-custody contract
• US announces end of the Iranian blockade — the only rung here above 50¢
• Strait of Hormuz reopening odds 2026 — the IMF PortWatch threshold behind it
• Iran regime change odds 2026 — two markets, two answers

Sources: the Polymarket Gamma and CLOB public APIs (events 620025, 310530, 329654, 699735 and 455875) and the Kalshi events, series and candlestick APIs (KXUSAIRANAGREEMENT-27 and its ten rungs, KXUSIRANMEETING-27 and KXHORMUZNORM-26MAR17), all read at 5 October 2026, 16:19 UTC. Resolution-criteria quotations, the 14 June 2026 memorandum and the 13 July 2026 blockade reinstatement are from the market rules as published on Gamma and Kalshi. The late-September talks in New York, the Iranian sequencing proposal and the US rejection of it were reported by Al Jazeera, which also records the 440.9 kg figure for Iran’s 60%-enriched stockpile; the 60-day structure of the memorandum is set out in CSIS’s state-of-play analysis. The transit-call series that settles the Hormuz contracts is published by IMF PortWatch. Our price and probability conventions are set out in the methodology. Prices captured 5 October 2026, 16:19 UTC and not updated since. Nothing here is investment advice — see our disclaimer.