Iran Regime Change Odds 2026: Two Markets, Two Answers

Published 24 September 2026 · Prices frozen 24 September 2026, 21:30 UTC

Search for Iran regime change odds and the best-ranked third-party page is a 425-word crypto-news post from January 2026 quoting 65%. The market it described trades at 14.5¢ today, and it was conflating two different contracts even when its number was fresh. That matters because roughly $390m has traded across Polymarket’s active Iran complex, more than any other geopolitical shelf on the venue, and the most quoted figure on it answers a question most readers are not asking. We read both exchanges in the same pass, pulled the lifetime price history on every contract that matters, and enumerated Kalshi’s Iran series to see what the other venue lists. The short version: the Islamic Republic is priced to survive, its new Supreme Leader far more comfortably than in March, and the gap between those two statements is the only number here worth memorising.

Where Iran’s regime and leadership odds stand

Here is the whole complex in one place. Prices are raw last trades with the live quote beside them, because on the thinner rungs the spread is a material part of the story, and the 24-hour column shows you where attention actually sits rather than where it once sat.

Two things jump out before any analysis. First, the US invading Iran and Mojtaba Khamenei losing power are priced at exactly the same number — 14.50¢ each, quoted 14/15¢ each — while the invasion contract carries forty times the daily turnover and nearly four times the depth. Second, turnover on the middle rungs of the leadership ladder has collapsed to almost nothing: the November contract traded eleven dollars in a day. Any conclusion drawn from that ladder’s shape has to survive that fact, and below, one does not.

Regime fall and leadership change are not the same bet

This is the whole article in one section. Two Polymarket contracts share the 31 December 2026 deadline, get quoted interchangeably, and resolve on materially different events.

The leadership market asks something narrower and more personal. It resolves Yes if Mojtaba Khamenei “ceases to be the de facto leader of Iran” — removed, detained, or otherwise prevented from acting — and an announced removal counts regardless of when it takes effect. Nothing in it requires the Islamic Republic to end. A hardliner faction installing a different cleric resolves it Yes and leaves the regime-fall contract untouched.

Because a collapse of the Republic would also end Mojtaba’s tenure, regime fall sits inside leadership change as a subset, and the arithmetic between them is clean.

So the market’s actual view is this: if Iran changes leader before January, it is slightly more likely than not that the Islamic Republic survives the change. That is a specific, falsifiable claim about institutional durability, and it is the opposite of what “65% odds of regime change” headlines imply. It is also the same failure mode we found in the Russian Duma markets, where one verb in the resolution criteria was worth twenty points. Our methodology page sets out how we read rules before printing a price.

One cross-check tests whether the board is internally coherent. Polymarket prices Mojtaba at 84.45¢ to be head of state at the end of 2026, implying 15.55¢ that he is not. Strictly, “ceases to be leader at any point before 31 December” must be at least as likely as “is not leader on 31 December”, so the 14.50¢ rung should not sit below 15.55¢. It does, by 1.05 points — the logically wrong direction. But the quotes overlap: the rung is offered at 15¢ while the No side of the head-of-state contract is offered at 15.9¢ and bid at 15.2¢. The inconsistency closes inside the spread, so there is no trade in it — only a reminder that these boards are arbitraged to about a point and no further.

The leadership ladder, and its December kink

Five contracts asking one question with five deadlines is a term structure. Subtract each rung from the next, divide by what is left, and you get each window’s own implied probability — then convert to a per-month rate so unequal windows compare.

December prices at 2.4 times November and 3.7 times the average month of the first half of 2027. A single month spiking like that inside an otherwise flat curve is the kind of thing that usually means the market has found a dated event.

We do not think it does, and the honest answer sits in the liquidity column of the first table rather than in Iranian politics. The December rung is the deep one — $269,777 of depth and $4.69m of lifetime volume, the most traded contract in the ladder — while the November rung has $85,842 of depth and turned over eleven dollars in a day. When the only actively quoted rungs are the near one and December, the rungs between drift low and the implied December hazard absorbs the difference. Nothing scheduled in Iran that month explains a tripling of monthly risk. Treat the 14.50¢ as the market’s year-end view, and the monthly decomposition as an artefact until the middle rungs trade.

From 65¢ to 14.5¢: six months of consolidation

The most interesting thing about this complex is not where it sits but how far it has travelled — every contract in one direction since the spring, the leadership market furthest of all.

Read the March row again, because it is the one that dates this story. On 10 March 2026, the day after the Assembly of Experts announced him, the market gave Iran’s new Supreme Leader a 65% chance of not lasting the year. It had reason to. Ali Khamenei had been killed on 28 February in a US-Israeli airstrike; the succession was decided across three hurried sessions; eight Assembly members boycotted the vote citing IRGC pressure; Ali Larijani, who had argued for an interim leadership council instead of a rapid appointment, was himself killed in an airstrike on 17 March. A father-to-son transfer of the Supreme Leadership was unprecedented for the Islamic Republic and, per the reported vote count of 59 of 88, barely cleared the two-thirds bar.

Six months later the same contract trades at 14.50¢. The regime-fall contract fell from its 52.50¢ January war peak to 6.50¢, the US-invasion contract gave back fifty-three points from its 67.50¢ high on 30 March, and Pahlavi’s chance of setting foot in Iran went from 46.00¢ to 3.85¢. Four independent books, one direction: whatever else 2026 did to Iran, the market spent six months concluding the institution held. Daily moves across all of them are on our 24-hour movers page.

The hardest problem: a leader nobody has seen

There is a reason the leadership contract did not fall to 2¢ with everything else, and it is in the resolution criteria. Mojtaba Khamenei counts as having ceased to be leader if he is removed, detained or otherwise prevented from acting as the de facto leader. That clause is doing enormous work, because no authenticated photograph, video or audio recording of the man has emerged since the strike that killed his father.

So part of that 14.50¢ is not a bet on a coup at all. It is a bet on whether credible reporting ever establishes that the person whose name is on the statements is the person exercising the power — because the market resolves on “a consensus of credible reporting”, and a leader who is incapacitated while the IRGC and the clerical establishment interpret his written directives is a live candidate for “prevented from acting”. Traders pricing this rung are pricing the reporting as much as the politics.

It also explains the one oddity on the head-of-state board. Polymarket lists 123 contracts on who leads Iran at the end of 2026; 121 are open and 30 carry a quote, and those 30 sum to 98.50¢ — about as fully arbitraged as a board this size gets.

The second line is the finding. “No Head of State” at 4.90¢ outprices every individual named challenger by better than 1.7 to 1 — Reza Pahlavi is the best-placed name at 2.90¢, and all 28 named challengers together sum to just 9.15¢ against the incumbent’s 84.45¢. The market is not backing a rival. It is pricing the possibility that at the end of 2026 nobody can be credibly identified as holding the office, which is precisely the ambiguity the absence created. Follow it on the Iran leader board.

A coup attempt is priced above a regime collapse

One more pair on the same deadline, and the ordering is instructive: a widely reported coup attempt by 31 December 2026 trades at 9.50¢ against 6.50¢ for the regime falling.

That ordering is correct rather than contradictory, and the rules say why. The coup market needs a coordinated, deliberate effort by military, security forces or other state actors to overthrow or unlawfully seize control — succeeding is not required. It explicitly excludes uprisings by non-state forces, isolated protests and general unrest, and it excludes foiled plots and arrests where no coup was actually attempted, unless credible independent sources widely characterise the event as a coup attempt. So the three-point gap is the price of an attempt that fails: state actors move, the Islamic Republic’s core structures hold, one contract resolves Yes and the other does not.

Worth noting what that contract has done. It opened at 45.00¢ on 1 July 2026, fell to 5.50¢ within two days, and has traded in a 5–14¢ band since — currently 9.50¢, up a point over thirty days on twenty dollars of daily volume. At $18,486 of depth it is the thinnest book here, and the one to distrust most if it moves. The opposite caution applies to the US-invasion contract in the other direction: at $1.05m of depth and $172,151 of daily turnover it is the one line here that a large order cannot easily move, which is why its 14.50¢ deserves more weight than the identical number on the leadership rung.

Polymarket vs Kalshi: one question, two answers

The natural next move on this site is to put the Kalshi price beside the Polymarket one, as we did for the Venezuela leader market. On the two headline questions that is impossible: Kalshi lists no contract on the Islamic Republic collapsing and none on Mojtaba Khamenei being removed. What it does list is the Pahlavi complex, and there the two venues disagree sharply.

The first row is a 4.15-point disagreement on 730,385 contracts of open interest, which is far too much money for a rounding error — and a good part of it turns out to be a difference in the rules, not in the view. Polymarket requires Pahlavi to physically enter Iran’s terrestrial territory and states that entering Iranian airspace or maritime territory has no bearing on resolution. Kalshi asks only whether he has “physically travelled to and been present within the geographic boundaries of Iran”, which on its face includes the airspace Polymarket carves out. The looser contract should price higher. It does, and anyone quoting the two side by side as a disagreement is quoting a definitional gap as a signal. You can follow the Polymarket side on the Pahlavi entry market.

The rest of the table holds a consistent and slightly odd ordering that both venues agree on: recognition prices above rule. On Polymarket, Washington recognising Pahlavi as Iran’s leader trades at 4.15¢ while Pahlavi actually leading Iran trades at 3.00¢. On Kalshi the same pair reads 6.90¢ against 4.00¢. Two independent order books say it is easier to be declared the leader of Iran than to be it, which is a reasonable thing to believe about an exile movement and a useful sanity-check that neither book is mispriced relative to the other. Both Polymarket lines are on the Pahlavi leadership market.

One methodological note, because it nearly cost us this table. Kalshi serves these contracts through two endpoints that disagree: the series-filtered market list returns null for every cents-denominated price, volume and open-interest field, while the single-market endpoint carries the real values in its dollar fields. Read only the list, as an automated sweep would, and you conclude Kalshi’s Iran shelf has never traded. It has traded 1.88m contracts on the Pahlavi head-of-state line alone.

What to watch: 30 September, then 31 December

Two dated events sit between now and the end of this complex, and the first arrives in six days.

30 September. Two near rungs expire — the regime-fall contract at 0.30¢ and the leadership rung at 0.55¢ — and both will almost certainly settle No. The useful part is what the October and November rungs do as they become the front of the curve. If they hold while the near rungs drop out, the December kink was liquidity and will flatten on its own. If they lift toward the December rung, the ladder was telling us something and we were wrong to discount it. A clean, dated test of section three, six days away.

31 December. Seven of the ten contracts above settle at once, along with the whole 123-contract head-of-state board. The most informative outcome is not whether Mojtaba Khamenei is still in office — the market says 84.45¢ he is — but whether the “No Head of State” line at 4.90¢ becomes arguable. A year that ends with statements still issuing in the name of a man nobody has seen is a year in which that contract’s resolution becomes a genuine dispute, and how Polymarket settles it will teach you more about reading these markets than any price here.

Related on GeoOdds

• Will the Iranian regime fall before 2027 — live odds, chart and the full resolution criteria
• Iran leadership change ladder — every rung from 30 September to 30 June 2027
• Iran coup attempt — live odds on the contract that pays out on a failure
• US recognises Reza Pahlavi as leader of Iran — the recognition line, priced above the rule
• Iran odds hub — every active Iran market, from Hormuz shipping to nuclear milestones
• Strait of Hormuz reopening odds — why the ships lag the press release
• Will China invade Taiwan — the same date-ladder method on a market Kalshi does not list either

Sources: the Polymarket Gamma and CLOB public APIs (events 72347, 649418, 255195, 237598, 73130, 147609, 160366, 139507, 238279 and 145523) and the Kalshi public series and single-market APIs, both read at 24 September 2026, 21:30 UTC; resolution-criteria quotations are from the market rules as published on Gamma and Kalshi. The 2026 Iranian supreme leader election and the 2026 Iranian leadership crisis for the succession dates, the Assembly of Experts vote and the March boycott; Iran International on the 22 September letter and the absence of any authenticated image or recording. Prices captured 24 September 2026, 21:30 UTC and not updated since. Nothing here is investment advice — see our disclaimer.