Justice Alito Retirement Odds: Timing Market, Not A Whodunit

Most political markets ask you to pick a winner. The Justice Alito retirement odds on Kalshi ask something closer to a DFS question: not whether an aging veteran hangs it up, but which slate he does it on. This ladder is not pricing a decade-long horizon; it is pricing whether Samuel Alito, 76 and in his 21st year on the Supreme Court, leaves before the Court's next term ends. As of August 11, the market has compressed that argument into a single meaningful window: an exit effective before July 1, 2027, most plausibly at the end of the term next June. Everything else on the ladder is priced like a punt play nobody rosters. There is also a clause buried in the contract rules that it pays to read closely, because it decides how every one of these contracts settles. We will get to it.

The Quick Answer

Kalshi's "When will Justice Alito retire?" market (ticker KXALITOOUT) prices a retirement effective before September 1, 2026 at under 1%, and before January 1, 2027 at roughly 5-6%. The only rung with a real argument left is "before July 1, 2027," where the tradeable quotes run 30 cents bid to 49 cents asked in a thin book, implying roughly 30% to 49%, while the last price anyone actually paid is 22 cents, now below the bid. The market is saying: he stays for the term he just promised, and the real decision lands next June. The full ladder, the effective-date math from the last five voluntary exits, and the settlement fine print that separates an announcement from an actual exit are all below.

The Ladder At A Glance

This event trades as a ladder of cumulative "before" dates, the same way a season-long points market stacks thresholds. Just over a million contracts have traded across the four rungs, per the exchange API's contract-volume count. Here is the live board as of August 11, 2026:

(Kalshi quotes contracts under 10 cents in tenth-of-a-cent steps, which is why the September rung reads 0.1 and 0.4.) The row worth staring at is the last one. The July 2027 contract has traded about 35,000 contracts against 267,000 to 464,000 on the earlier rungs, its resting quotes sit 19 cents apart, and the bid moved from 25 to 30 cents across three API pulls on August 11 alone. In DFS terms, this is the low-ownership late-swap spot: the rung where the actual decision lives is also the rung with the least liquidity, so the price is more of a band than a number, and the 22-cent last trade is the only number in the band anyone has actually paid. The first rung is settled, the next two are priced like long shots, and the July 2027 rung is where the live debate sits.

What "I'm Here For Another Term" Repriced

The reason the front of the ladder is dead is that Alito killed it himself. In a Wall Street Journal interview published Friday, August 7, he told columnist James Taranto, "Obviously I'm here for another term," confirming he will be on the bench when the Court's new term opens in October. He notably did not rule out leaving once that term ends, which is precisely the shape the ladder now holds: under 1% for a fall exit, single digits for anything effective before New Year's, and a contested price on June 2027.

That interview capped a chaotic stretch this market had already been forced to trade through. On June 30, the final trading day of the "Before Jul 1, 2026" contract, NPR erroneously reported Alito was retiring. The report, based on information from veteran Court correspondent Nina Totenberg, also aired on NPR's own airwaves before being retracted within minutes, with an apology from the network's leadership to follow. The contract resolved No on schedule the next morning. Anyone who bought Yes on a headline instead of a filing learned the difference between news flow and settlement criteria, a distinction we will formalize two sections down. Our sister site ran the succession question through a full price-blind AI panel in the Next Supreme Court Justice model verdict; this page is the timing companion to that board, built on the Stokastic side of the house where we treat probability curves the way we treat projections and ownership in the DataHub: as a forecast to be interrogated, not a fact to be repeated.

The Actuarial Read: Five Exits, Three Cleared July 1

Strip the names off and price the position the way you would price any aging asset with a voluntary exit clause. Modern justices who retire on their own terms go effective at the end of a Court term, with a friendly president and Senate in place, but they announce whenever they like, often months earlier. Here are the last five voluntary exits, run against the cutoff this contract actually pays on:

Three of five cleared. The announcements scatter from January to July, but the effective dates cluster hard at the term's final week, and that cluster is the base rate doing the work in this market. The pattern also says a justice waits for alignment: a president of his own side, plus a Senate that can confirm.

Alito has both today, which is exactly why the market once priced a 2026 exit as a live scenario. What changed is the calendar squeeze. The midterms land on November 3, 2026, and the Senate seated on January 3, 2027 could look very different; the Texas Senate race and the North Carolina Senate race both trade as tossup-class contests on the same exchange. A justice maximizing confirmation certainty would have moved this summer. Alito instead committed to the October term, so the market now has to price a harder question: does he still get a friendly confirmation window in June 2027? Subtract the ladder's rungs and the last print puts about a sixth of the probability on the specific window between January and July 2027, while the resting quotes stretch it into the low 40s. For scale, the September rung asks just 0.4%. It is the term-end base rate colliding with midterm uncertainty. But an announcement is not what settles this market, which is where the ladder gets interesting.

The Fine Print: Effective Dates Beat Announcements

Here is the clause I promised in the opening, and the one I keep coming back to when reading this board. Kalshi resolves these contracts on the effective date of the resignation, not the announcement. An announcement is a press release; an effective date is a vacancy. Breyer announced his retirement on January 27, 2022, but it took effect June 30. Under rules like these, a Breyer-style January announcement would still leave the "Before Jan 1" contract settling No.

The rulebook's own words: "The resolution is based on the effective date of the resignation." The cleanest precedent is the history of Alito's own seat. O'Connor announced in July 2005 but made her retirement contingent on her successor's confirmation, and she kept sitting until Alito was sworn in on January 31, 2006. Announcement to vacancy: seven months. Now run the table above against this contract. A Souter- or Stevens-style exit, effective June 29 as the term wraps, clears the cutoff with a day or two to spare, and Breyer's June 30 cleared it by one. A Kennedy-style exit, announced in June but effective July 31, settles No, and an O'Connor-style contingent exit settles No and might not vacate the seat until winter. So the effective-date clause is a real discount on the announcement odds, but a modest one, three of five, not a fatal one. The read of a 22-cent last print under a 49-cent ask is a market handicapping two things at once, whether he announces at all and whether the exit clears the cutoff, with the midterm Senate as the swing variable. These contracts also close and expire early the moment the seat is actually vacated, so the exit itself, not the news cycle around it, is the whole event. The rules also carry a morbid edge case: if a justice dies in office, contracts may resolve at the last fair price at the exchange's discretion rather than flipping to Yes. Every cent of the ladder above only makes sense once you price the gap between saying and vacating.

From Cents To Probability: A Worked Example

The mechanics, quickly, for anyone newer to these boards. A Kalshi contract pays $1 if Yes, $0 if No, so the price in cents is the market's implied probability: a 5-cent contract is a 5% market. Two frictions shift the effective number. First, fees: Kalshi's trading fee scales with price times one minus price, so it bites hardest near 50 cents, near where the July 2027 ask sits. Second, the spread. Say a trader's own model, built the way we build prediction-market expected value as DFS players, lands at 45% that Alito announces an exit next June. That is not the number this contract pays on. It has to be multiplied by a second probability, the chance the resignation is also effective before July 1, and the table above prices that clearance rate at three in five. Blend them: 45% times 0.6 is 27%, just under the 30-cent bid. Under those inputs neither side of this book is offering much, the 49-cent ask sits far above the blend and the bid sits nearly on top of it. In a book this thin, the spread costs you more than the fee does, and patience is a position. Treat it like bankroll management on a high-variance slate: the market can be interesting without any single price offering value, and a 19-cent spread is the market telling you it does not know either. None of this is a recommendation, it is a description of the math; this is a page about reading a curve, and the same discipline applies whether the instrument is a Supreme Court seat or a tournament lineup, which you can pressure-test yourself by running the Sims free.

The Bottom Line

The 2026 whodunit is over; Alito answered it in his own words. What remains is a pure timing market, a probability curve with one fat node at June 2027 and a thin, wide book pricing it. The way to read it is the way you would read any projection: respect the base rate (three of the last five voluntary exits went effective before a July 1 cutoff, all in the term's final week), respect the fine print (announcements do not settle anything; vacancies do), and respect what a 19-cent spread says about confidence. Blend the clearance history against the odds he announces at all and you land within a cent of where the book actually bids, which is the market quietly doing the same arithmetic. A vacancy, whenever it lands, would instantly become the biggest succession board in politics and feed directly into the 2028 Democratic nominee and Republican presidential nominee markets that already trade like season-long futures. Until then, this page tracks the curve. For the rest of the board, from politics to the sports markets we price against our own Sims, the Stokastic prediction markets hub is the front door. A full model-verdict read of this timing curve lands in a future refresh of this page, and like every call we publish it will be graded against settlement in our backtest record; today's read is the market's own math, checked against how this exact seat last turned over.

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