How Much Money Do Americans Bet On Sports?

If you’re a sports bettor, chances are good that you want to know how big the US betting industry actually is. But when it comes to finding out how much money Americans bet on sports each year, you won’t really get a solid or accurate picture by doing a quick Internet search. After all, only legal land-based and domestic online sports wagering is actually tracked and tabulated. The vast majority of betting, of course, is handled by black market vendors and legal offshore sportsbooks (neither of whom are compelled to divulge their numbers). With the growing number of legal sports betting options for 2023 in the US, their reported numbers – while still below what many believe to be an accurate figure – are beginning to be truly representative of the true handle turned by US sports bettors each year.

Over 60% of US residents identify as sports fans, but not all of them wager on sports. The closest metric we have to go on about how many people bet on sports – and thus how much money Americans bet on sports – is to use as a baseline the only long-running sports wagering mecca: Las Vegas (or Nevada, more generally). With PASPA gone, of course, NV is merely the best baseline, not the only one. However, given its more mature commercial sports betting market, it’s the easiest state from which to divine out some workable figures (though we will also discuss other states’ sports wagering markets below).

Each year, the Nevada Gaming Control Board NGCB puts out its report of exactly how much handle and revenue sportsbooks in the state account for. If we take the total sports wagering handle in NV and divide it by the total NV casino traffic, that should give us – at the very least – a picture of how much money each gambler wagers on sports (or would wager on sports, given reasonable proximity to a sportsbook). This per capita method is an inexact exercise, and the margin of error is obviously going to be huge. But at least it gives us something to work off of.

Potential Sports Betting In California

With two separate sports betting initiatives on the ballot in California, there is a very real possibility that the most populated state in the US regulates sports betting. Comparing CA to other large states shows that there may be potential for hundreds of millions of dollars in annual tax revenue to be made. Of course, that number may eventually climb if a new initiative were to ever include a tax rate of greater than 15%, which is well below New York’s (the most populated state with legal sports betting) tax rate of 51%.

How Many Americans Are Betting On Sports?

Sports betting has ballooned in popularity in the years following the repeal of PASPA, the federal ban on states regulating sports betting. As more states create their own sports betting markets, more Americans wager on sports every year. Super Bowl 55 alone saw more than 33 million Americans wager on the single event according to the American Gaming Association. Those are just the betting numbers for the Super Bowl, the biggest sporting event in the US. Throughout the year, however, millions of Americans bet on major sporting events from March Madness to the NBA, MLB, and NHL seasons to tennis grand slam events and so forth. Sports betting has become synonymous with sports in the US and betting fans have grown in population each year. The trajectory shows that even more Americans will be betting on sports in the years to come.

Money Spent On Sports Betting By Americas Via Offshore Sportsbooks

If we extrapolate the above NV numbers and apply them to the entire country, they’re actually not that high. Given that 80% or so of US adults – or about 198,000,000 people – actively gamble (including playing lotteries, which complicates things less than one might think, given the ease of access to legal offshore sportsbooks), we can plug in the sports-betting-handle-per-person figure from before ($118.71), giving us $23.5 billion as a total.

But there’s a snag. Everyone – even the top Vegas bookmakers and casino CEOs – admit sports betting in Sin City is not particularly representative of sports betting in the rest of the country. Indeed, it costs quite a lot of money to get to Las Vegas to place your wagers in the first place, dramatically limiting the number of people who opt to place wagers this way. So that $23.5 billion number? If you’re really curious to find out how much money is spent on sports betting by Americans via offshore sportsbooks (and local underground means), the American Gaming Association says to multiply it by about 6.7.

That’s right: Las Vegas, even in processing astronomical handles like the above, only accounts for about 3% of the total US sports betting handle. Thus, we multiply Vegas’ yearly handle of $5 billion by 33, giving us $165 billion. Of course, there are reputable analysts that claim this figure, too, is too low, doubling or even tripling it when answering the question of how much money the US spends on sports wagering. It’s kind of a moot point, though, as it doesn’t really matter if the US spends $165 billion or $495 billion on sports betting. The only thing that matters from a social economics perspective is that most of that money is being sent underground or overseas, where it isn’t taxed as it would be in the legal sports betting states. By any measure, over the last 25 years or so (from PASPA’s advent to its ultimate demise), the federal and state governments have lost out on trillions of dollars in taxable expenditures. Trillions. With a “T”.

Money Spent By Americans On Unregulated Sports Betting

Though there is a negative connotation behind the term “black market sports betting”, it does not deter millions of Americans from betting on their favorite sports. The bottom line is that most of what the US gambling industry describes as unlawful is, in fact, 100% legal. There are no laws in any state against using offshore sportsbooks, and the sites are so big and so popular that most people already forego engaging with unlicensed local bookies and black-market sharks to use these trusted, legitimate sports betting sites.

Honestly, while analyzing how much money Americans bet on sports is interesting from a mathematical and observational standpoint, the real question is: How much money can you win at a legal online sportsbook? And the answer… a lot!