Illinois Sports Betting Data: Handle, Revenue, Taxes and Operators, 2020–2026
Illinois legalized sports betting in June 2019 and took its first bet in March 2020. Six years later it is one of the largest sports betting markets in the country: $15.40B wagered and $1.48B lost in the year to June 2026, almost all of it on phones. This page turns the Illinois Gaming Board's monthly sports wagering reports into one reference — how much is bet, how much is lost, who takes the bets, and what the numbers mean — and is maintained by Chris Beerman, LCSW, CADC, a gambling addiction therapist in Chicago. Video gaming terminals, casinos and the lottery are covered on the companion page, Illinois Video Gambling Data.
- Compiled by
- Chris Beerman, MSW, LCSW, CADC
- Primary source
- Illinois Gaming Board monthly reports
- Current through
- June 2026
- Last reviewed
- September 12, 2026
- Update schedule
- Quarterly
Handle = total amount wagered. AGR = adjusted gross receipts: handle minus winnings paid out, less promotional deductions — the amount bettors lost. Fiscal years run July–June. Illinois dollars only: bets placed from Illinois with licensed operators.
How sports betting in Illinois has grown
Illinois launched with retail sportsbooks in March 2020, a week before COVID shut down both the casinos and the sports. Online betting began in June 2020, and for its first two years a bettor had to register in person at a casino before using an app — a requirement that lapsed for good in March 2022. The market has grown every year since, and the shape of each year is the same: a climb from September, a peak in November or December, a second peak in March around the college basketball tournament, and a trough in the summer.
Two things in these charts matter clinically. The first is that the betting year has a shape: September through January is the season of highest exposure, and the summer trough is when people who bet heavily on football tend to under-estimate their own betting. The second is that revenue has grown faster than handle. That is the hold.
Hold: what the sportsbooks keep
Hold is revenue as a share of handle — what the books keep from every dollar wagered. In a market of single straight bets at standard odds, hold runs around 5%. Illinois sportsbooks held 7.5% in 2021 and 9.5% in 2025. The difference is the product mix: parlays and same-game parlays carry a hold several times that of a straight bet, and they are what the apps promote.
What hold means for a bettor. At a 5% hold, someone wagering $500 a week loses about $1,300 a year on average. At 9.5%, the same betting loses about $2,500. Nothing about the bettor changed; the product did. When a client says the losses "don't add up" for the size of bets they place, this is usually the arithmetic they are missing.
Bets, not dollars: how people actually bet
The IGB reports the number of wagers as well as the dollars, which allows a view of behavior that revenue alone hides. Illinois bettors placed 355 million bets in 2025 — about 35 per adult in the state, or, more realistically, several hundred per person among the minority who bet. The average bet is small: $48 in the year to June 2026.
Illinois law splits wagers into two tiers. A Tier 1 bet is placed before the event and decided by the final result. A Tier 2 bet is everything else: in-play wagers placed after the start, player props, and parlays. Tier 2 is where the hold comes from and where clinicians look first, because in-play and prop betting remove the natural pause between one decision and the next. In 2020, Tier 2 was 48% of Illinois handle; in 2025, 64%.
Online share is the other structural number: 97.9% of Illinois handle in the year to June 2026 was placed online. Retail sportsbooks — including the one at Wrigley Field — are a rounding error. Sports betting in Illinois is a phone activity, which is why the access controls that matter are app-level deposit limits, operator self-exclusion and blocking software rather than anything that happens at a casino door.
Who takes the bets
Illinois licenses sportsbooks through its casinos and racetracks, so each app operates under a "master licensee" — a casino or track — and the IGB reports revenue by licensee, not by brand. Mapped to the brands bettors know, the market is a duopoly with a long tail.
Twelve months to June 2026, online only.
| Brand | Master licensee | AGR | Share | Handle |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FanDuel | Fairmount Park | $523.9M | 36.0% | $4.41B |
| DraftKings | Casino Queen | $504.1M | 34.7% | $5.51B |
| Fanatics | Hawthorne, then Argosy Alton (Jan 2026) | $116.5M | 8.0% | $1.35B |
| BetRivers | Rivers Des Plaines | $68.7M | 4.7% | $0.76B |
| BetMGM | Par-A-Dice, East Peoria | $68.2M | 4.7% | $0.87B |
| bet365 | Walker's Bluff | $65.7M | 4.5% | $0.73B |
| Caesars | Grand Victoria, Elgin | $45.9M | 3.2% | $0.63B |
| theScore Bet | Hollywood Aurora (ESPN Bet to Dec 2025) | $30.4M | 2.1% | $0.43B |
| Hard Rock Bet | Hard Rock Rockford | $29.4M | 2.0% | $0.27B |
| Circa Sports | American Place, Waukegan | $0.9M | 0.1% | $0.12B |
Brand attribution from IGB licensee names and public reporting; see methodology. Penn Entertainment rebranded ESPN Bet as theScore Bet in December 2025. Fanatics moved from Hawthorne Race Course to Argosy Casino Alton after Hawthorne's racing licence was suspended in January 2026. Bally Bet launched in June 2026.
Where the money goes: taxes
Illinois taxed sportsbook revenue at a flat 15% until June 2024. From July 2024 the rate is progressive — 20% on the first $30 million of an operator's annual revenue, rising in steps to 40% above $200 million — which falls almost entirely on FanDuel and DraftKings. From July 2025 the state added a per-wager tax: 25 cents on each of an operator's first 20 million bets a year and 50 cents on every bet after that. Cook County levies a further 2% on revenue.
The operators' response is visible in the data above. FanDuel and DraftKings added a 50-cent fee to every Illinois bet; BetMGM and Hard Rock Bet set minimum bets of $2.50 and $2. The number of bets per month fell year-on-year in every month of the 2025 football season while handle held up or rose — fewer, larger bets — and the average bet, flat at about $36 for four years, jumped to $44 in 2025 and $50 in the first half of 2026. In FY2026 the per-wager tax raised $127M on top of $476M in revenue tax.
Sports betting per adult
Spread across every adult in Illinois, sports betting losses came to the equivalent of about $146 per adult resident in FY2026, up from $131 in FY2025. Video gaming terminals, the state's largest gambling product, took about $315 per adult resident in 2025. Both are population-normalized measures of market size, not estimates of what the average resident lost: most adults bet little or nothing, and the losses are concentrated among those who do. The two products reach different people: terminal players skew older and the machines are concentrated in specific suburbs and downstate towns; sports bettors skew young and male and the app is everywhere. In the practice, the sports bettor is typically the client who arrives with the most debt for the least time spent gambling.
What these numbers leave out
Prediction markets. Since 2025 a growing volume of sports betting has taken place as event contracts on Kalshi, Polymarket, Robinhood and Crypto.com. None of it appears on this page, and the omission is not a choice: prediction markets are regulated federally by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, not by the Illinois Gaming Board, and no exchange publishes Illinois volume. The figures that circulate nationally — tens of billions of dollars in "volume" — are notional contract value, in which a $1 contract traded ten times counts ten dollars; they are not money wagered and not money lost, and cannot be compared with the handle and revenue figures above. Illinois regulators have treated sports event contracts as unlicensed sports wagering; the CFTC sued Illinois officials in April 2026 to assert exclusive federal jurisdiction; and the state enacted a transaction tax on prediction-market trades effective July 2026 (current as of September 2026). If that tax produces a published series, it will be the first Illinois-specific number for prediction markets and will be added here. Until then, the true amount Illinoisans lose betting on sports is larger than this page shows, by an amount nobody can currently measure. For what these contracts are and why they carry an unusual risk profile, see Are Prediction Markets Gambling?
Also missing: daily fantasy sports (regulated separately, no revenue reporting); bets placed with offshore sportsbooks and bookmakers, which persist alongside the legal market; and bets placed by Illinois residents while in other states.
Illinois sports betting timeline
- June 2019 — Sports Wagering Act signed as part of the gaming expansion law (Public Act 101-0031). Casinos, racetracks and large sports venues may hold master licences; 15% tax on revenue; in-person registration required for online accounts.
- March 9, 2020 — First legal bet, at Rivers Casino Des Plaines. Casinos close for COVID on March 16.
- June 2020 — BetRivers launches the first online sportsbook, with the in-person registration rule suspended by executive order. DraftKings and FanDuel follow in August.
- March 5, 2022 — In-person registration requirement ends permanently. Handle passes $1 billion in a month for the first time in October 2022.
- July 1, 2024 — Progressive tax replaces the flat 15%: 20% to 40% by operator revenue.
- July 1, 2025 — Per-wager tax of 25 or 50 cents. FanDuel and DraftKings add a 50-cent fee to each Illinois bet; other operators set minimum bets.
- 2025–2026 — Prediction markets offer sports event contracts nationally; Illinois and the CFTC litigate jurisdiction; Illinois prediction-market transaction tax takes effect July 2026.
- July 2026 — Gambling disorder codified as an addiction under the Substance Use Disorder Act (SB 2749).
What the numbers mean — and what they don't
Clinical context. Handle and revenue measure activity, not harm. Most people who bet on sports do not develop a gambling problem, and nothing on this page counts the people who do. What the data does show is the direction of the product: a rising hold, a rising share of in-play, prop and parlay bets, hundreds of millions of small bets a year, and a market delivered almost entirely through a phone. Each of those reflects a design choice that increases the number of decisions a bettor makes per hour, and frequency of decision is where gambling problems are made.
If you are trying to stop or cut back, the practical sequence is on How to Stop Sports Betting; Illinois's state self-exclusion program, and what it does and does not cover, is explained in the self-exclusion guide. Therapy for sports betting is described on the sports betting therapy page, and a free screening is at the gambling addiction test.
Data tables
Calendar years
| Period | Months | Handle | Bets | AGR (losses) | Hold | Online share | State tax |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 10 | $1.87B | 52.2M | $125M | 6.7% | 95.6% | $19M |
| 2021 | 12 | $7.01B | 188.9M | $525M | 7.5% | 95.8% | $79M |
| 2022 | 12 | $9.74B | 270.7M | $795M | 8.2% | 96.1% | $119M |
| 2023 | 12 | $11.61B | 324.5M | $1,002M | 8.6% | 97.0% | $150M |
| 2024 | 12 | $14.01B | 375.4M | $1,233M | 8.8% | 97.3% | $267M |
| 2025 | 12 | $15.59B | 354.7M | $1,477M | 9.5% | 97.7% | $542M |
| 2026 | 6 | $7.44B | 149.6M | $716M | 9.6% | 98.1% | $317M |
Fiscal years (July–June)
| Period | Months | Handle | Bets | AGR (losses) | Hold | Online share | State tax |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY2020 | 4 | $0.01B | 0.2M | $0M | 5.0% | 89.1% | $0M |
| FY2021 | 12 | $5.11B | 146.9M | $380M | 7.4% | 96.0% | $57M |
| FY2022 | 12 | $8.51B | 221.7M | $611M | 7.2% | 95.9% | $92M |
| FY2023 | 12 | $10.41B | 304.7M | $949M | 9.1% | 96.5% | $142M |
| FY2024 | 12 | $12.80B | 336.0M | $1,132M | 8.8% | 97.1% | $170M |
| FY2025 | 12 | $15.04B | 388.7M | $1,321M | 8.8% | 97.6% | $428M |
| FY2026 | 12 | $15.40B | 317.7M | $1,479M | 9.6% | 97.9% | $603M |
2020 begins in March; FY2020 is March–June 2020. 2026 and FY2026 are complete through June 2026. State tax includes the per-wager tax from July 2025 and excludes the Cook County tax.
Methodology, sources and downloads
Source. All figures are computed from the Illinois Gaming Board's monthly sports wagering reports, using the accrual-basis "completed events" detail report (wagers, handle and payouts by licensee, location type and tier) and tax summary report (adjusted gross receipts and taxes by licensee), retrieved September 12, 2026. The latest month posted is June 2026. Fiscal-year AGR reconciles to the Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability's Wagering in Illinois: 2025 Update within 0.1%.
Definitions. Handle is the sum of Tier 1 and Tier 2 handle; bets is the sum of Tier 1 and Tier 2 wager counts; Tier 2 is as reported by the IGB (wagers other than pre-event bets on the final result); AGR is the state adjusted gross receipts figure in the tax summary; hold is AGR divided by handle; online share is handle reported under "Online Wagering". Per-adult figures divide by the U.S. Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 Illinois population estimate less the share under 18 (about 10.1 million adults). Operator figures are online AGR and handle by master licensee for the twelve months to June 2026, mapped to brands from public reporting: Fairmount Park (FanDuel), Casino Queen (DraftKings), Rivers Des Plaines (BetRivers), Par-A-Dice (BetMGM), Grand Victoria Elgin (Caesars), Hollywood Aurora (ESPN Bet, then theScore Bet), Hawthorne and Argosy Alton (Fanatics), Hard Rock Rockford (Hard Rock Bet), Walker's Bluff (bet365), American Place (Circa), Bally's Quad Cities (Bally Bet).
Known limitations. The IGB reports by licensee, so a brand that changes partners appears under two licensees; this page combines them where the change is documented. Accrual-basis figures can be revised in later months; small negative AGR figures occur when payouts exceed handle for a licensee. Nothing here measures the number of people betting or the number harmed.
Download the data
Compiled by Chicago Addiction Therapy from Illinois Gaming Board public records. Free to reuse with attribution: please cite the Illinois Gaming Board as the source of the underlying data and link to this page for the compilation and analysis. Suggested form: "Illinois Gaming Board data compiled by Chicago Addiction Therapy, September 2026." Questions or corrections: Chris@chicagoaddictiontherapy.com.
If gambling is a problem for you or someone you love: Illinois helpline 1-800-GAMBLER, or text GAMB to 833234. National: 1-800-MY-RESET. Crisis: call or text 988.