Robinhood Ends New Sports Contracts in Ohio in Exchange for a Pause in State Enforcement

Robinhood sports event contracts in Ohio closed to new positions on November 2, 2026, the date the brokerage agreed with the Ohio Casino Control Commission to stop offering them. In exchange, the commission agreed not to enforce Ohio's gaming laws against the company while the prediction-market appeals in the Sixth Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court are pending. Robinhood's own help page, as it read on November 3, 2026, says that "as of November 2, 2026," residents of Ohio "can't open new event contracts" in the sports category.

The terms come from Robinhood Markets' quarterly report for the period ended September 30, 2026, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on October 28. The filing says a Robinhood unit it calls RHD received a cease-and-desist letter from the commission on October 2, 2026 "demanding that RHD stop offering sports-related event contracts in Ohio." It then says that on October 26, 2026, "RHD agreed to cease offering new sports-related event contracts in Ohio by November 2, 2026 in exchange for the Commission's agreement to refrain from enforcing its state gaming laws during the pendency of RHD's and other prediction-market operators' appeals in the Sixth Circuit and the Supreme Court of the United States." For Ohio residents who trade on Robinhood, that sentence is the whole change: the sports category is shut to new trades, and the state has put its enforcement against the company on hold rather than given it up.

What the Ohio agreement covers, and what it leaves alone

The agreement as the filing describes it reaches one product line in one state. It covers "new sports-related event contracts in Ohio." Robinhood's help page lists Ohio's restriction the same way, under a heading for states where event contracts are not available: "Ohio: sports." The same list puts Utah under a wider restriction as of the same November 2 date, covering "sports, culture, elections, and politics." Ohio's entry names only sports.

That distinction matters on November 3, 2026, Election Day in Ohio. Election contracts are not on Robinhood's Ohio restriction list as the help page reads on that date, and nothing in the filing's Ohio passage mentions them. The commission's letter, as the filing describes it, was about "sports-related event contracts" and nothing else.

Three things the documents do not say are worth stating plainly. The passages that describe the change do not say what happens to sports positions an Ohio customer opened before November 2. They do not describe the agreement as an admission by Robinhood that its contracts are gambling under Ohio law. And they set no calendar end date: the commission's forbearance runs for "the pendency" of the appeals, so it ends when those appeals do, whenever that is.

Robinhood's help page also lists Maryland, Michigan and Nevada as states where residents "can't trade sports event contracts," and it sets the minimum age for event contracts on Robinhood at 18. Those lines carry no date on the page; the Ohio line is the one tied to November 2, 2026.

Why the Sixth Circuit case sets the clock

The appeals that the agreement ties itself to start with a case brought in Columbus. In KalshiEX LLC v. Schuler, Kalshi asked the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio (No. 2:25-cv-01165, Judge Sarah Daggett Morrison) to stop the Ohio Casino Control Commission, its members and the Ohio Attorney General from enforcing state gambling law against its sports event contracts. The district court denied a preliminary injunction, and Kalshi appealed.

On September 25, 2026, a Sixth Circuit panel of Judges Clay, Gibbons and Bloomekatz decided that appeal together with a Tennessee case, Nos. 26-3196/5235. The opinion holds that the Commodity Exchange Act "neither expressly nor impliedly preempts Ohio's or Tennessee's gambling laws." Its closing sentence reads: "For the reasons above, we affirm the Southern District of Ohio's denial of Kalshi's motion for a preliminary injunction, vacate the Middle District of Tennessee's grant of Kalshi's motion, and remand for further proceedings consistent with this opinion."

That ruling is about a preliminary injunction, not a final judgment, and it concerns Kalshi's sports contracts, not Robinhood's. Robinhood's letter from the commission is dated October 2, 2026, one week after it.

Kalshi did not let the panel ruling stand unchallenged. On October 9, 2026, it filed a petition for panel rehearing and rehearing en banc in No. 26-3196, according to Wolters Kluwer's VitalLaw, arguing that the panel split from other circuits and erred in holding that the Commodity Exchange Act does not preempt state gambling laws and that Kalshi's contracts are not swaps. That petition is one of the "appeals in the Sixth Circuit" the Robinhood filing could be describing; the filing does not name the cases it means. The case caption still names Dave Yost as Ohio Attorney General, as it did when the suit was filed. The office's own news releases identify Andy Wilson as Ohio Attorney General.

The other October 2 letters

Robinhood was not the only company the commission wrote to on October 2. Yogonet, a gaming trade outlet, reported on October 22 that cease-and-desist letters went out that day to Polymarket and nine other prediction market operators and brokers, ordering them to stop offering sports event contracts in Ohio without a state license and warning of administrative, civil and criminal penalties.

The responses split. According to the same report, QCX LLC, which operates as Polymarket US, filed a complaint on October 16 in the Southern District of Ohio, No. 2:26-cv-01502, against Attorney General Andy Wilson, the commission's interim executive director and seven commissioners, arguing that Ohio's licensing rules discriminate against interstate commerce and conflict with the Commodity Exchange Act. Every claim in that complaint is Polymarket's allegation; no court has ruled on it. The report said most recipients kept operating past the letters' deadline and that Plus500US agreed to discontinue its sports contracts.

Robinhood's path was a third one: a written agreement that trades the product in Ohio for a pause in enforcement, with a start date the company itself made public in its October 28 filing and on its help page.

Where the Ohio legislature stands

The state's statutes have not changed while the courts and the regulator have moved. Two bills from Sen. William P. DeMora, who represents Ohio Senate District 25, would write prediction markets into Ohio law directly.

Senate Bill 430, introduced April 27, 2026, would amend six sections of the Revised Code "to specify that using a prediction market to trade event contracts on sporting events constitutes sports gaming subject to regulation in this state." The legislature's status page shows it referred to the Senate Select Committee on Gaming on May 13, 2026, with no action recorded after that. Senate Bill 479, introduced October 13, 2026 with Sens. Nickie J. Antonio, Willis E. Blackshear, Jr. and Casey Weinstein as cosponsors, would amend section 2915.01 "to specify that betting on elections constitutes prohibited gambling." Its status page shows introduction and nothing since.

DeMora told SBC Americas in an interview published November 3, 2026 that the Sixth Circuit ruling should push the legislature to act. "The Sixth Circuit ruled that states can regulate predictive markets like sports gambling, which they are," he said. "It's time." He also said he would bring most of his bills back in 2027, and SBC Americas reported that legislation not passed in the current General Assembly will have to be reintroduced when the new two-year session begins in January 2027.

Neither bill is part of what Robinhood agreed to. As the filing describes it, the agreement rests on the commission's enforcement of existing gaming law and on the appeals, not on new legislation. What SB 430 would add is a statute that names prediction-market trades on sporting events as sports gaming, rather than leaving that classification to the commission's reading of existing law; whether federal law preempts such a statute would still be a question for the courts.

What happens next for Robinhood and Ohio

There is no fixed date on which the Robinhood agreement ends. It lasts while the appeals it names are pending, and the Sixth Circuit's decision on Kalshi's October 9 rehearing petition has no public date. Polymarket's case is at its first stage in the Southern District of Ohio.

The next date on Ohio's own calendar is the legislature's. The Ohio Senate's published schedule lists committee hearings on November 9, 2026 and its next floor session on November 10, 2026 at 1:30 p.m., followed by sessions on November 18, December 2 and December 16, with December 9 and December 17 marked "if needed." That is the window in which SB 430 or SB 479 would have to move to become law in this General Assembly. More on how prediction markets stand under Ohio law is on the Ohio legal status page and the Kalshi in Ohio page.