Kalshi Hits $2.4B Daily Volume but Trails FanDuel on NFL Moneyline Pricing

Kalshi is cheaper than DraftKings on NFL over/under bets. But FanDuel still wins on moneylines — and that gap matters more than it looks.

Jordan Bender and Isabelle Slavin at Citizens JMP Securities ran the numbers on pre-game pricing for NFL Week 1, stacking Kalshi against FanDuel and DraftKings across bet types. On over/under markets, Kalshi came out ahead. Its implied vigorish sat at 4.50%, below DraftKings’ 4.71% and FanDuel’s 4.80%. Factor in all bet types and Kalshi’s overall implied vigorish drops to 4.32%, which is pretty much where the exchange wants to be — lean and competitive on totals, where it seems to have built its strongest edge so far.

Moneylines are a different story.

FanDuel Still Wins on Moneyline Pricing

FanDuel’s moneyline vigorish came in at 4.08% for Week 1. Kalshi was at 4.14%, DraftKings at 4.31%. Not a massive gap, but FanDuel’s edge is real, and bettors who focus on moneylines will probably notice. Kalshi has improved — its implied vigorish was 5.31% in Week 1 of 2025, so the exchange has cut roughly 99 basis points off that number heading into this season. That’s a meaningful move. But “improved” and “cheapest” aren’t the same thing, and on moneylines, Kalshi still isn’t winning the pricing war.

The exchange also structures its fees differently from traditional sportsbooks. Rather than baking a margin into the price directly, Kalshi charges a transaction fee — averaging 1.62% per 100 contracts. On paper, that sounds clean. In practice, once you layer that fee in, Kalshi can end up more expensive than its competitors, not less. Bettors who don’t read the fine print might think they’re getting a better deal than they actually are.

Combo bets make it worse. Kalshi’s vigorish on parlays hit 23.8%, compared to 22.0% for both FanDuel and DraftKings. All three platforms have trimmed their combo rates from last season, but Kalshi is still the priciest of the three on that front. And Kalshi introduced a new combo market-making fee in August — one that, as of the Citizens JMP report, wasn’t even listed in Kalshi’s published fee schedule. That’s a real uncertainty. It’s unclear yet how that fee gets implemented or what it does to spreads going forward.

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Record Volume, but Is the Threat to Sportsbooks Real?

None of that stopped Kalshi from posting back-to-back daily trading records over the weekend. Volumes hit $2.426 billion one day, then $2.433 billion the next. The exchange pulled in more than $32 million in fees across that stretch, with parlays accounting for more than half the total. So even with higher combo vigorish, bettors are piling into those markets. That’s worth noting.

Citizens JMP isn’t panicking about what any of this means for DraftKings or MGM — both of which the firm rates favorably. The analysts basically don’t see Kalshi as a serious threat to traditional sportsbook profitability, at least not yet. Their read is that Kalshi pulls from a different pool of bettors: people who might otherwise be placing wagers on offshore platforms, not players who would have gone to FanDuel or DraftKings instead. If that’s right, it’s not cannibalization — it’s expansion. Kalshi is bringing in a cohort that the regulated market wasn’t really capturing before.

The American Gaming Association has flagged concerns about prediction markets and their potential drag on NFL betting volumes for regulated operators. But the Citizens JMP analysis kind of pushes back on that framing. The cannibalization story, per Bender and Slavin, isn’t getting worse. Bettors seem to be splitting action across platforms rather than wholesale abandoning sportsbooks for exchanges. That’s probably good news for DraftKings and FanDuel in the short term.

Still, the competitive picture is shifting. Kalshi’s over/under pricing is genuinely attractive. The exchange’s full-season implied vigorish last year was 4.84% — it’s now tracking well below that for Week 1. Citizens JMP thinks higher trading volume and more market participation could tighten spreads further, which would make Kalshi even more competitive over time. Whether the new combo market-making fee disrupts that trajectory is the open question nobody has a clean answer to right now.

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What the Fee Structure Actually Means for Bettors

Here’s the practical reality: Kalshi’s pricing looks good on totals, shaky on moneylines, and expensive on parlays once fees are counted. The 1.62% average transaction fee per 100 contracts is the number bettors need to run against whatever vigorish advantage they think they’re getting. Sometimes the math works out in Kalshi’s favor. Sometimes it doesn’t.

And the combo market-making fee — introduced in August, not yet published — adds another layer of uncertainty. Kalshi set consecutive daily volume records at $2.426 billion and $2.433 billion, and generated over $32 million in fees in a single weekend, with parlays making up more than half of that revenue.