Which countries can use Polymarket?

Two different things get called a block

Almost every page that answers this question flattens the picture into one number, usually 33 countries, and one verb, blocked. The reality has two axes, and keeping them apart is what makes the answer useful.

The first axis is who imposes the restriction. Most of it is platform geoblocking: Polymarket itself declines to serve certain jurisdictions, and publishes the list in its API reference. The second kind is a state-ordered block, where a government instructs internet providers to make the site unreachable. These produce a similar experience for a reader and have almost nothing else in common. A platform geoblock is a business decision Polymarket can reverse; an ISP-level block is a legal order it does not control.

The second axis is severity. Polymarket does not apply one uniform restriction. Its documentation separates a complete block, where no new orders are accepted and existing positions cannot even be closed, from close-only status, where a position already held can be exited but no new one can be opened. The countries most readers ask about, the United Kingdom and the United States among them, sit in the close-only tier, not the complete-block tier.

The four tiers, side by side

The table below sets out what each tier permits. Rows marked as of 2026 describe arrangements that change as regulators act and as Polymarket responds, so the live list in the official API reference is always the authority over any summary, including this one.

Who is on the restricted list

The complete-block tier tracks the OFAC sanctions regime rather than gambling law: Iran, Syria, Cuba, North Korea, and the Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions of Ukraine. This is the tier where an existing position cannot be closed, which follows from what a sanctions restriction is meant to do.

The close-only tier is much longer and much more varied. As of 2026 it covers the United States and the US Minor Outlying Islands, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Poland, Slovakia, Australia, Brazil, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Russia, Belarus, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Myanmar, and a set of countries under broader sanctions or conflict-related measures including Burundi, the Central African Republic, Congo-Kinshasa, Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Yemen, and Zimbabwe. Canada is handled province by province, with Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec listed rather than the country as a whole.

A third, narrower tier applies close-only on the website while leaving API access unrestricted. Japan, the Netherlands, and Malta for sports markets only sit here as of 2026.

Everything else, and that is the large majority of the world, carries no listed restriction. The framing that Polymarket is a heavily restricted platform gets the emphasis backwards. It is available by default and restricted by exception, and the exceptions cluster in two groups: sanctions regimes, and wealthy countries with an established gambling regulator that has taken a view on event contracts.

Where the published numbers disagree

Polymarket's help center describes a list of countries it blocks and puts the count at 33. Its API reference, which exists so that developers can predict exactly what a request will do, describes the same jurisdictions across the tiers above and reaches a slightly different total once regional entries such as the Canadian provinces are counted separately. Neither is wrong so much as written for a different reader.

The practical consequence is that a great deal of third-party writing on this topic reports the help-center count alongside the word blocked, and so tells readers in the United Kingdom or Germany that their existing positions are frozen when the documentation says those positions can be closed. When two official sources differ in precision, the one written for machines is usually the one to trust. That preference for the primary, machine-readable source is the same principle behind our methodology, and the endpoints involved are catalogued in does Polymarket have an API.

The United States is a special case

The United States appears on the geoblock list, and yet Americans can lawfully access a product called Polymarket. Both statements are true because there are two products. The original on-chain market, which settles in USDC on the Polygon blockchain through a self-custody wallet, has been geoblocked for US persons since a 2022 CFTC enforcement action. Polymarket US, a separate CFTC-regulated venue built on a licensed derivatives exchange the company acquired, launched on December 2, 2025, and uses identity verification rather than an anonymous wallet.

They share a brand and very little else, including their access rules, and state-level limits apply on top. The full account is in is Polymarket legal in the US. It is worth noting that the data on this site comes from the original on-chain market, because that is the venue whose activity is public.

Argentina, and blocks Polymarket did not choose

In March 2026 a Buenos Aires court ordered ENACOM, the Argentine telecoms regulator, to have internet providers block Polymarket nationwide, and directed Google and Apple to restrict the application on their app stores. The court invoked Article 301 bis of the Argentine penal code, which covers unlicensed gambling operations, and prosecutors argued the site operated as a concealed online betting system that verified neither identity nor age. The order followed public controversy over trading on the country's monthly inflation release.

Argentina illustrates the first axis cleanly. It does not appear on Polymarket's own geoblock list, because Polymarket did not impose the restriction. Anyone reconciling the platform's documentation with news reports of countries blocking Polymarket is comparing two registers that were never the same list. As more governments take a position on event contracts, the count of places where the site is unreachable and the count of places Polymarket declines to serve will keep drifting apart.

On VPNs, and what the terms of service say

A large share of the search results for this question are pages about circumventing the restrictions. This is not one of them. Polymarket's documentation states plainly that it prohibits VPNs and similar tools used to bypass geographic restrictions, and treats their use as a breach of its terms of service. Enforcement keys on location rather than stated residency, which is why a traveller sees behaviour follow the network they are on.

Cent Signals describes how these systems work. It does not describe how to get around them, and a reader in a restricted jurisdiction is looking at a question of local law that no explainer can settle for them.

Reading the market is not restricted anywhere

Trading access and data access are two separate questions, and only the first is geoblocked. Because the original Polymarket settles through smart contracts on a public blockchain, prices, volume, liquidity, wallet positions, and trade history are public facts served by unauthenticated endpoints. No country sits on a list that prevents reading them.

That asymmetry is the entire reason an independent desk can cover this market from anywhere. A reader in the United Kingdom cannot open a position, and can still see every market worth a second look, every large transaction on the whale trades feed, and every wallet on the traders leaderboard. What those figures mean, and how much weight a price in cents deserves, is unpacked in how to read implied probability on Polymarket. A restriction on transacting says nothing about the quality of the information the market produces.

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