In February 2026, the American Gaming Association reported that Americans legally wagered $166.94 billion on sports in 2025, an 11% jump from the year before, while regulated sportsbooks kept a record $16.96 billion in revenue and paid $3.71 billion in taxes [source: American Gaming Association, 2026]. Almost the same week those figures landed, federal prosecutors were pressing gambling-related cases against professional athletes, a college regulator was reporting that more than a third of Division I men's basketball players had been harassed by bettors, and a new class of "prediction markets" was quietly moving billions in sports contracts outside the state betting system entirely.
That collision — record money on one side, mounting questions about integrity and harm on the other — is why sports betting is suddenly everywhere in the news. Less than a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for states to legalize it, betting has become a normal feature of how many people watch sports. This piece tries to separate what is measured from what is marketed, and what is correlated from what is proven.
What's in this article
- How big the boom really is — and what the headline numbers do and don't mean
- The new fight over prediction markets
- Integrity: scandals, player props, and harassment
- The harder question of gambling harm
- What regulation can and can't yet show
- What to watch next
How big the boom really is
Start with the money, because the money is what drives everything else. The $166.94 billion figure is the handle — the total amount wagered, not what bettors lost. The number that actually flows to operators is revenue: $16.96 billion in 2025, up nearly 23% year over year [source: American Gaming Association, 2026]. That gap matters. Handle is a headline; revenue is roughly what bettors collectively lost after winnings were paid back.
Sports betting sits inside a larger commercial gaming market that reached a record $78.72 billion in 2025 and generated $18.09 billion in state and local gaming taxes [source: American Gaming Association, 2026]. Online casino gaming (iGaming), a separate category, grew even faster at 27.6%.
A note on where these numbers come from is worth making. Handle and tax figures are compiled from state regulators, so they are relatively hard data. But the framing — "record year," "growth" — comes from the American Gaming Association, the industry's trade group. Both things can be true at once: the totals are real, and the messenger has an interest in emphasizing growth. Throughout this topic, it helps to ask who is counting and who benefits from the count.
The new fight over prediction markets
The newest wrinkle is not a sportsbook at all. Prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket let users trade "event contracts" — essentially yes/no positions on whether something will happen. Since January 2025, some of these platforms have offered contracts on sporting events, and sports has become their dominant business: more than 85% of trading volume on Kalshi has reportedly come from sports event contracts [source: CNBC, 2026]. By April 2026, combined monthly volume across prediction markets was roughly $24 billion, compared with about $14 billion a month wagered at legal U.S. sportsbooks in 2025 [source: CNBC, 2026].
The dispute is jurisdictional. Sportsbooks are licensed and taxed state by state. Prediction markets argue they are regulated federally, as commodity-derivatives exchanges under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and therefore need no state betting license. That distinction has real fiscal stakes. The American Gaming Association estimates that sports event contracts diverted more than $500 million in potential sports-betting tax revenue away from state channels over the past year [source: American Gaming Association, 2026] — though this is the industry's own estimate, and the industry has an obvious interest in bringing rivals under the same state rules it operates within.
Regulators are still sorting it out. The CFTC dropped its appeal in the Kalshi litigation in 2025 and, for a time, took no action against sports contracts. In June 2026 it proposed new rules that could bar certain sports-related contracts, such as those tied to player injuries or officiating decisions [source: ESPN, 2026]. Meanwhile, states have pushed back: Massachusetts sued Kalshi with support from other state attorneys general, and Minnesota enacted the first state-level ban on prediction markets [source: Congressional Research Service, 2026]. The core question courts are wrestling with — federal derivative or state gambling? — remains unresolved.
Integrity: scandals, props, and harassment
If 2025 had a theme in sports, it was the gambling scandal. In October, federal prosecutors announced indictments naming NBA figures including Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups. Prosecutors alleged, among other things, that Rozier tipped off associates that he would exit a game early so they could bet on his under-performing statistics [source: Britannica, 2025]. Rozier and Billups pleaded not guilty; a third defendant, former player Damon Jones, pleaded guilty. In November, two Cleveland Guardians pitchers, Luis Ortiz and Emmanuel Clase, were indicted for allegedly manipulating individual pitches so associates could win prop bets; prosecutors said the bets netted at least $450,000 [source: Front Office Sports, 2025]. These are allegations; defendants who have pleaded not guilty are presumed innocent.
One thread runs through nearly every case: the player prop, a bet on an individual's performance rather than the game's outcome. Leagues have singled out props as uniquely risky because a single athlete — through a fake injury or a deliberately bad pitch — can move a bet without changing who wins. That makes inside information extremely valuable and the point of corruption very small. The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee opened its own inquiry into the NBA scandal in October 2025 [source: U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, 2025].
The harassment problem
Integrity is not only about fixing games; it is also about what betting does to the people playing them. An NCAA survey published in November 2025 found that 36% of Division I men's basketball players reported social-media abuse tied to sports betting in the previous year, and 29% said a student on campus had told them about betting on their team [source: NCAA, 2025]. Among Football Bowl Subdivision players, 16% reported threatening messages. For women's-sports athletes the figures were far lower, around 1% [source: NCAA, 2025]. These are self-reported survey results, not counts of verified incidents, but the pattern — abuse aimed at athletes who "cost" someone a bet — is consistent enough that the NCAA has petitioned states to remove college player props and remains the only major U.S. sports body to ban sportsbook advertising and partnerships.
The harder question of gambling harm
Beyond fixing and harassment sits the largest question: what does mass, phone-based betting do to the people doing it? Here the evidence is real but must be read carefully.
Help-seeking is rising
The National Council on Problem Gambling reported that its national helpline fielded more than 31,000 contacts a month in 2025, with nearly half (49.48%) of contacts aged 18–34 [source: National Council on Problem Gambling, 2025]. Online and app-based gambling rose to 31% of reported problems, up from 23% a year earlier, and more than 73% of contacts cited financial trouble as their reason for reaching out [source: National Council on Problem Gambling, 2025].
A caution is essential here. Helpline contacts measure help-seeking, not how many people have a gambling problem. Rising contacts can reflect more awareness, more outreach, and easier texting and chat as much as rising harm; in some states, surges in calls tracked new advertising of the helpline itself. More people asking for help is not the same statistic as more people being harmed, even if the two often move together.
The financial research
Stronger evidence comes from economists who used the timing of legalization as a natural experiment, comparing states before and after online betting arrived. A working paper by Brett Hollenbeck and colleagues found that average credit scores fell modestly where betting was legalized — and by nearly three times as much (about 2.75 points) where online betting was available — with bankruptcy filings up roughly 10% and debt in collections up about 8%, effects that appeared around two years after legalization [source: UCLA Anderson, 2025]. A National Bureau of Economic Research paper found households in legal online states increased betting by about $1,100 a year and cut net investments, such as stocks, by 14%, with the harm concentrated among people with credit scores below 600 [source: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2024]. A New York Federal Reserve analysis reported in 2026 found rising credit-card delinquencies among younger adults linked to betting's spread [source: Fortune, 2026].
These studies are more rigorous than simple correlations because they exploit the staggered timing of legalization. But they are still observational, not randomized experiments, and researchers themselves stress that a full consensus has not been reached [source: NPR, 2026]. The honest summary is that multiple independent studies point the same direction — legal online betting is associated with measurable financial strain for a vulnerable minority — while stopping short of a clean causal verdict for any one household.
What regulation can and can't yet show
Governments are responding, though the evidence on what works is younger than the problem. The United Kingdom, a mature market, layered on new protections in 2025: a statutory levy on operators to fund research and treatment, financial-vulnerability checks triggered at £150 in net monthly deposits, tighter marketing opt-ins to reduce exposure for those under 25, and stake caps on online slots (£5 a spin, or £2 for 18–24-year-olds) [source: Clifford Chance, 2025]. These are real interventions, but they are recent enough that their effect on actual harm has not been established — introducing a rule is not the same as proving it reduces harm.
At the other end of the maturity curve, Brazil opened a regulated online market on January 1, 2025. In its first year roughly 25.2 million Brazilians — about 11.8% of the population — bet through 79 licensed operators, and the government collected billions in new taxes while planning to raise the tax rate over time [source: iGaming Brazil, 2026]. Brazil is now often described as the world's third-largest sports-betting market, behind the U.S. and U.K., a reminder that the boom is global, not American.
The common tools — self-exclusion programs, deposit limits, advertising restrictions, and player-prop bans — are widely adopted, but rigorous evidence on how much each one reduces harm remains thin. That is not an argument against them; it is a reason to measure them honestly rather than assume they work.
What to watch
Sports betting is no longer a novelty; it is infrastructure, woven into broadcasts, apps, and league economics. The numbers will almost certainly keep rising. The open questions are about everything around the numbers.
Watch whether the CFTC's proposed rules survive and how courts resolve the prediction-market jurisdiction fight, because that will decide whether a large and growing slice of sports wagering sits inside or outside the consumer protections states have built. Watch whether leagues succeed in narrowing player props, the single feature most implicated in both corruption and harassment. And watch the research: as more states cross the two-year mark after legalizing online betting, the financial-harm studies will either firm up into a consensus or fragment. The boom is settled. Its consequences are not.