

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. 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.īut there’s a snag. If we extrapolate the above NV numbers and apply them to the entire country, they’re actually not that high. Money Spent On Sports Betting By Americas Via Offshore Sportsbooks But at least it gives us something to work off of. This per capita method is an inexact exercise, and the margin of error is obviously going to be huge. 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). 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).Įach year, the Nevada Gaming Control Board NGCB puts out its report of exactly how much handle and revenue sportsbooks in the state account for. With PASPA gone, of course, NV is merely the best baseline, not the only one. 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). Over 60% of US residents identify as sports fans, but not all of them wager on sports. 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. 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).

After all, only legal land-based and domestic online sports wagering is actually tracked and tabulated. 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. If you’re a sports bettor, chances are good that you want to know how big the US betting industry actually is. How Much Money Do Americans Bet On Sports?
