Nobel Peace Prize Odds 2026: There Is No Favourite

Published 20 September 2026 · Prices frozen 20 September 2026, 16:10 UTC

Every page currently ranking for Nobel Peace Prize odds does the same thing: it lists the top five names, converts them to percentages, and calls the longest one the favourite. One of the pages on the first result still has Donald Trump installed at 2/1 — a price the real market has not paid since last autumn, and it trades at 2.40¢ today. That matters because $24.3m has gone through Polymarket’s book and over a million contracts through Kalshi’s, and neither of them supports a favourite at all. We read both exchanges in the same pass, added up each book by hand, matched the two candidate lists name by name, and walked the price history back to the day each contract opened. The result is a market with no leader, two houses that disagree by 44 points on the total, and a historical record that says the highest-priced name is usually not the one who wins.

Where the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize odds stand

Here is the top of each book. The Nobel Peace Prize odds below are raw prices, not normalised probabilities — the normalising is the whole argument of the next section, and doing it too early is how the ranking pages go wrong. Kalshi quotes are shown with the bid and ask alongside the last trade, because several of its contracts have a last price that no longer sits between its own quotes.

Read the first column downwards and the striking thing is how quickly it collapses. The longest price is 14.50¢ and the tenth name is already under 3¢. Compare that with the Venezuela leader market, where a single contract carries most of the book, or with the midterms balance-of-power book, where one outcome trades at 60¢. This is what genuine uncertainty looks like when it is priced honestly.

The book that adds up to 68.55¢

Add up every priced contract on each exchange and you get two numbers that cannot both be describing the same event. This is the finding nobody else publishes, and it is more useful than any individual price on the page above.

Polymarket is 31.45¢ underround. Kalshi is 12.80¢ overround. The usual explanation for an underround — a thin book nobody has bothered to arbitrage — does not survive contact with the numbers here: even summing the best asks, the price of buying every single listed name, you get to only 76.90¢. You can buy the entire Polymarket field for 77 cents and be guaranteed a dollar if any listed name wins. That trade has sat there unexecuted on a market with $1.88m of resting liquidity, which means it is not an oversight. It is a price.

What it prices is the 40 empty slots. Polymarket built this event with placeholder contracts named Person A through Person AX precisely so a name can be added when the committee picks somebody nobody listed, and the missing 31.45¢ is the market’s estimate of how likely that is. Kalshi has no such contract. Its 24 names are the entire universe its book admits, so its sum has to exceed 100¢ — and the 12.80¢ on top is the spread the market makers charge for quoting a question this hard.

287 nominees, 43 names, 12 in common

The Norwegian Nobel Committee received 287 nominations for the 2026 prize, 208 individuals and 79 organisations, and it keeps the list sealed for fifty years. Between them the two exchanges have opened contracts on 43 distinct names — 15% of the field, if the committee’s count is the field. Only twelve of the 43 appear on both books, so the exchanges cannot even agree on which fifteenth of the pool is worth pricing.

The top-left entry of that table is the one to sit with. Kalshi’s outright favourite, Doctors Without Borders at 13¢, has no Polymarket contract at all. A trader reading only Polymarket cannot back the name the other exchange thinks is likeliest, and a trader reading only Kalshi cannot back Chow Hang-tung, the Hong Kong vigil organiser Polymarket has at 2.55¢. Neither book is a survey of the field. Each is a survey of what its own listing desk thought to write down.

Four contracts opened high and bled out

Polymarket added four names on 11 September, and all four are among the seven longest prices in the book. They are also the four biggest losers in it. Pulling the CLOB history for each shows the same shape: a high opening print, then nine days of steady decline.

A new contract opens at whatever the first taker pays, and on a market this thin that first print is closer to an opinion than a price. The correction since is the market working: Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms has given back a third of its opening level and still leads the book, which tells you how little separates the top of this field from the middle of it. Note also that the four newcomers falling 31 points between them is most of why the Polymarket book now sums to 68.55¢ rather than something closer to 90¢ — the underround is recent, and it grew as the market thought harder.

What happened to the Trump trade

No contract in this market has attracted more money and less conviction. Polymarket’s Trump line opened at 12¢ on 17 October 2025, peaked at 28¢ on 1 November 2025, and trades at 2.40¢ in this snapshot — a fall of 25.6 points over ten and a half months. It has still taken $4.91m of lifetime volume, the most of any contract in the book by a factor of two, and $22,956 of the event’s $29,816 of 24-hour volume on the day we froze this. Kalshi tells the same story in its own units: 814,460 contracts traded and 394,409 of open interest against a 2¢ last price.

That is the signature of a name people trade rather than a name people expect. Three-quarters of today’s turnover is going through a contract the market prices at one chance in forty, while the contract it actually rates highest did $1,343. If you want a single reason to distrust volume as a proxy for probability on this market, that is it — and it is the opposite of what we found on the Russian Duma markets, where the deepest book was also the most confident one.

Six years the market did not have the winner

The case for taking that 31.45¢ field seriously is not theoretical. Here is the recent record of the Peace Prize against whoever the betting and prediction markets had installed beforehand.

Five consecutive years in which the prize went to a name the market did not have at the top, and in several cases did not have at all. Nihon Hidankyo in 2024 was described as a surprise by essentially everyone, including organisations that follow the committee professionally. The Norwegian committee is a five-member body appointed by the Norwegian parliament, it deliberates in private, and it has shown a persistent taste for awarding causes and institutions rather than the names in that year’s headlines. A market that puts 31¢ on “none of the above” is not being cowardly. On this record it may still be low.

The night that broke the 2025 market

There is one recent year in which the market did hold the winner, and it is the reason the Nobel committee now has an information-security problem. On the night before the 10 October 2025 announcement, María Corina Machado’s price moved from 3.75% to 72.8% on roughly $2.2m of bets, hours before the Norwegian Nobel Committee named her laureate. She had not been a leading candidate at any point beforehand.

The Norwegian Nobel Institute investigated and concluded on 30 January 2026 that digital hacking was the likeliest explanation, with its secretary saying the institute had not been able to determine exactly what happened or who was behind the breach but still regarded the digital domain as the main suspect. Machado remains a live subject on this site for an unrelated reason — her return to Caracas is its own market, as is who leads Venezuela at the end of 2026.

Two things follow for reading this year’s prices. First, the 2025 result should not be counted as evidence that prediction markets forecast the Peace Prize well; on the committee’s own finding it is evidence that information escaped. Second, and more practically, the useful signal in this market has historically arrived in the final hours, not in September. A price that barely moves for three weeks and then jumps 50 points overnight is the pattern to expect, and it is the one the committee is now actively trying to prevent.

How to read a book that does not add to 100

The temptation with a 68.55¢ book is to divide everything by 0.6855 and publish the result as a probability. Do that and Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms becomes a 21.15% favourite, Save the Children 15.03%, and the story becomes “two humanitarian organisations lead the Nobel Peace Prize odds”. It is the wrong answer, because normalising assumes the missing 31.45¢ belongs to the listed names in proportion — and the entire point of that gap is that it belongs to somebody else.

Look at the width of that middle column against the right-hand one. The same contract reads 21.15% or 10.64% depending only on which book’s total you divide by, and neither number was traded by anybody. The raw price is the only figure in the table a real person paid. Our advice is the same one we gave on the midterm seat ladders: check what the book sums to before you quote any single row, and when it is 30 points short, quote the raw price and say what the gap is rather than distributing it silently.

What to watch before 11:00 CEST on 9 October

The prize is announced on Friday 9 October at 11:00 CEST, which is 05:00 Eastern — early enough that the decisive move, if there is one, will happen while most of the US is asleep. Three things are worth watching between now and then, in this order.

The book sum, not the leader. If Polymarket’s total climbs from 68.55¢ towards 90¢ without a new name being listed, the market is becoming convinced the winner is already on the board. If it stays where it is, nothing has been learned. That single number carries more information than any individual price on the page.

New listings. Forty empty slots exist to be filled, and a name appearing in one is the clearest signal this event can emit. The four added on 11 September went straight to the top of the book. Daily moves across every market land on our 24-hour movers page.

The overnight tape on 8–9 October. On the committee’s own account of last year, that is when the information, legitimate or otherwise, has historically arrived. A sudden move on a name that has been flat for a month is the thing to notice — and, on the 2025 precedent, the thing to be suspicious of.

Related on GeoOdds

• Nobel Peace Prize Winner 2026 — live odds on all 71 contracts, refreshed every 10 minutes
• María Corina Machado enters Venezuela — live odds on the 2025 laureate's return
• Venezuela leader at the end of 2026 — live probability board
• Russia–Ukraine ceasefire agreement — the market behind several Nobel candidacies
• Foreign intervention in Gaza — live odds and resolution criteria
• Polymarket vs Kalshi: Venezuela leader odds — the same cross-exchange method
• 2026 midterms odds — why a book that does not sum to 100 has to be normalised first

Sources: the Polymarket Gamma and CLOB public APIs (event 60182) and the Kalshi public markets API (series KXNOBELPEACE, event KXNOBELPEACE-26), both read at 20 September 2026, 16:10 UTC; the Norwegian Nobel Institute on the 287 nominations for 2026; NobelPrize.org on the 9 October announcement and the 2024 award to Nihon Hidankyo; and the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize record for the pre-announcement price move and the institute’s 30 January 2026 finding. Prices captured 20 September 2026, 16:10 UTC and not updated since. Nothing here is investment advice — see our disclaimer.