New York City Weather Prediction Markets & Temperature Odds

Which stations settle a New York City contract

Two exchanges quote the New York City ladders on this page, and they do not read the same thermometer. Polymarket resolves its daily high and daily low on readings NOAA records at the La Guardia Airport station, which the National Weather Service lists as KLGA and places on the Queens waterfront; the rules read the highest and the lowest figures in the hourly temperature column for the observation day, to the whole degree Fahrenheit. Kalshi resolves its daily maximum and minimum contracts on the New York City figure as reported by The Weather Company, which its rules tie to CLINYC, the National Weather Service's daily climate report for Central Park in Manhattan. Rain is the one question both read in the same place: Polymarket's monthly ladder resolves on the Central Park total, station KNYC, taken from the National Weather Service New York office's monthly climate summary and measured to two decimal places of an inch, and Kalshi's monthly contracts settle on the Central Park total too.

The station is a property of the contract, not of the city, and on temperature the exchanges do not agree on it, so a warm afternoon can resolve one exchange's band and not the other's. Read the station name before the number: a contract naming LaGuardia settles on what LaGuardia recorded, whatever the park recorded that day.

How the daily ladders are built

Each observation day carries two rows, one for the high and one for the low, priced as separate questions about the same day. A row is a run of two-degree brackets with an open cell at each end, so a band reads as a pair of numbers in the middle of the range and as a floor or a ceiling at the tails. The two exchanges cut those brackets on different lines, Polymarket from an even number (64 to 65) and Kalshi from an odd one (65 to 66), so a row carrying both books overlaps rather than tiles. Every contract in the row pays in full or not at all, which is why the prices along a row behave like a distribution rather than like a shelf of unrelated contracts. A warm favorite on the high row implies nothing about the low row: a day can run hot in the afternoon and still bottom out where the cold end of the low ladder expects.

When a daily contract settles

A Polymarket daily contract settles at the first data point published for the day after the observation day, or at 11:59 pm Eastern on that following day, whichever comes first. Corrections to a reading are counted up to that moment and not afterwards, which is why the ladder can move on a revision late in the window, and the current rules add one exception: a reading that is clearly erroneous through a technical or operational error can hold the contract open for up to seven calendar days while a correction is awaited. If NOAA has published nothing by the deadline, the rules fall back to the Weather Underground daily observations table, and if there is still no reading for the day the contract resolves to the lowest bracket. That last step is a written rule rather than a judgment made after the fact, and it is the reason a station outage does not leave the ladder unresolved. Kalshi's rules work differently: the exchange can hold expiration if it judges the first non-preliminary figure materially wrong, and a contract with no data at the end of that period resolves to the last fair price the exchange determines.

The monthly rainfall ladder

Rain is asked as a month-long question. The ladder covers a calendar month end to end, settles on the finalized Central Park precipitation total in inches, and stays on the board for the whole month instead of closing and reopening each morning. Polymarket cuts its bands in inches, with an open cell under the dry end and over the wet end, and a total landing exactly on the line between two bands resolves to the higher of them. Kalshi asks the same month as a set of lines rather than bands, each paying if the Central Park total is strictly greater than its figure, such as more than 5, 6 or 7 inches for October 2026. Because the figure is a monthly summary, the last word arrives after the month has ended rather than during it.

What the board leaves out

Only open contracts are on the board. A ladder whose observation day has passed is a result rather than a forecast, so it leaves the page instead of sitting there settled, and a band an exchange has listed but not priced shows a dash where a number would be. A cell is a reading and not a doorway: no cell links out to an exchange. The exchange is named once, on the row it prices, and only when every band in that row comes from the same book; where a row mixes books it names none of them, and its prices are read as a mixture rather than as one venue's view. Other New York cities would appear on the weather section under the same rule, once an exchange lists ladders for them.