The tech industry spent 2025 pretending the bloodletting was over. Kalshi bettors spent $31.4 million saying it was not. The market on whether 2026 will see more tech layoffs than 2025 is sitting at 90.7 cents YES, which means the crowd is pricing a near-certainty. Not a lean. Not a tilt. A near-certainty. Twenty-four hours of trading moved the needle exactly one-tenth of a point on $453 in volume, which tells you everything about where sentiment is: locked, settled, and not waiting for anyone to change its mind.
What $31 Million Looks Like When It's Done Arguing
Total volume on this market is $31,424,247. That's a market that attracted real capital, fought out the question, and landed somewhere. The fight is over. The number is 90.7 cents.
Open interest sits at $163,822 — the money still in play, still waiting on the 2027 resolution date, still exposed to being wrong. The ratio of open interest to total volume is roughly 0.5 percent. A tiny sliver of the original action remains live. Everyone else already cashed out their conviction.
The market resolves March 1, 2027. The question is whether 2026 total tech layoffs will exceed 2025's count. The benchmark year matters enormously here, and bettors are not treating 2025 as a high bar to clear.
The 2025 Baseline Bettors Are Betting Against
To understand why 90.7 cents is where this market lives, you have to understand what bettors think of 2025's layoff count. Publicly tracked tech layoff data from sources like Layoffs.fyi has logged tens of thousands of tech cuts in 2025 across companies ranging from mid-size startups to publicly traded giants. The numbers are not catastrophic by the standards of the 2022–2023 correction, but they haven't been quiet either.
Bettors at 90.7 cents are not saying 2025 was mild. They're saying 2026 will be worse. At 90.7 cents, the crowd is not hedging it.
The implied probability math: YES at 90.7 cents means the market assigns roughly a 9.3-cent probability to NO. The crowd thinks there's less than a one-in-ten chance the industry pulls back from its current trajectory before the end of next year. That's not a prediction made by people who believe the tech sector's HR departments are about to get busy in a good way.
Why the Volume Dried Up (And Why That's the Point)
$453 in 24-hour volume on a market with $31.4 million lifetime volume is essentially silence. This market is not attracting new money because there's nothing left to debate. When a Kalshi market goes quiet at 90-plus cents, it usually means one of two things: either the question became obviously impossible to win on the NO side and NO holders abandoned ship, or the question became so settled in the YES direction that new YES buyers see no edge at 90.7 cents.
Both appear to be true here.
Kalshi is CFTC-regulated and requires KYC verification on every account. The people making these bets are real, identified humans who passed identity checks. The public API doesn't expose who they are, but the price they've converged on is public. 90.7 cents. Collectively, across $31 million in activity, that's where identified adults with real money landed.
The Structural Case the Bettors Are Making
The bet is on continuation. The structural forces that drove tech layoffs through 2022, 2023, 2024, and into 2025 haven't reversed. They've evolved.
The AI transition is the central dynamic. Every major tech company that announced headcount reductions in 2025 cited some version of the same story: reorganization around AI capabilities, elimination of roles that AI tooling now covers, reallocation of engineering resources toward model infrastructure. That trend doesn't slow in 2026 — it accelerates, if the capital flowing into AI infrastructure is any guide.
The second structural force is valuation discipline. The era of growth-at-any-cost headcount is gone. Companies that massively over-hired in 2020 and 2021 spent 2022 through 2025 correcting, and the correction hasn't fully cleared. Midsize tech companies that burned through their 2021 funding rounds are still rationalizing. That math doesn't reset just because the calendar flips.
The third force is the macroeconomic backdrop. Rate cuts have helped equities, but private-market funding for startups has not returned to 2021 levels. Startups that can't raise their next round cut payroll. That pipeline of pressure doesn't empty quickly.
The bettors at 90.7 cents appear to be pricing all three — or something simpler: the trend is the trend, and nothing visible has broken it.
What the NO Side Needs to Happen
For NO to cash, 2026 tech layoffs would need to come in below 2025's total. That requires either a genuine hiring surge that overwhelms cuts or a real deceleration in announced workforce reductions across the sector.
The companies that would have to lead that deceleration are the same ones currently investing most aggressively in AI infrastructure. They're spending on compute, on data centers, on model development — not on headcount growth in the roles layoffs have been hitting: sales, marketing, middle management, support, non-AI engineering. The spending mix argues against a deceleration.
There's a scenario where 2025's numbers were elevated by a handful of large, concentrated events and 2026 doesn't replicate them. Tail risk on the NO side is real. The market is pricing it at 9.3 cents.
The Resolution Timeline
This market resolves March 1, 2027, giving it essentially all of 2026 plus a couple of months for final data to settle. The long runway is both a feature and a risk for YES holders. The cushion is that the bet doesn't require pinpoint timing — it requires that a full calendar year's layoff count exceeds another full calendar year's layoff count. A cumulative question, not a point-in-time one.
For YES holders sitting on 90.7-cent positions, the math on a winning bet is roughly 10 cents of upside per dollar risked. The people buying YES here are not looking for a score. They're looking for a near-certain return on a thesis they've already stress-tested. At $163,822 in open interest, real money is still waiting on that resolution. They appear comfortable waiting.
What the Volume Chart Says
When $31 million flows through a yes/no question and the final resting point is 90.7 cents, the debate happened. It was funded. People took the NO side at lower prices, got outbid, sold out, or lost. The price is a conclusion reached by people who argued about it with actual dollars.
The full Blind Trust Kalshi feed has more markets in this economics category, and the tech employment cluster is worth watching as 2025 data finalizes. If final 2025 counts come in higher than current trackers show, the YES thesis tightens. If lower, the spread widens and the dime-on-the-dollar NO bet starts looking less irrational.
Right now, 90.7 cents is where $31 million worth of opinion landed. The receipts are public. Make of them what you make of them.