Three licensed markets have published revenue data in the last seven weeks and all three show the same shape, with the sports betting line weaker than the casino line sitting next to it. The sports betting revenue decline is sharpest in the United States, where the American Gaming Association put August sports betting revenue at $1.00 billion against iGaming’s $1.03 billion. What the three markets do not share is the cause, and the cause is what decides whether an operator’s own mix is about to move the same way.
Key Takeaways
- The sports betting revenue decline is now visible in three licensed markets at the same time. US sports betting revenue fell 15.6 per cent year on year in August 2026 to $1.00 billion, Dutch online sports betting fell 30.2 per cent across 2025, and British online real event betting grew 1 per cent in the quarter to March 2026 on 8 per cent fewer bets.
- Online casinos are the strongest leg in each of the three. US iGaming revenue rose 12.3 per cent in August 2026 to $1.03 billion, which is more than the whole US sports betting sector earned that month, and British online slots produced £4.8 billion of the £8.3 billion remote market in the year to March 2026.
- Three regulators and trade bodies give three different causes. The American Gaming Association points to prediction markets and a later college football season; the Kansspelautoriteit points to Dutch net deposit limits in force since 1 October 2024 and a gambling tax that reached 37.8 per cent on 1 January 2026; and the Gambling Commission’s own figures show online slots yield rising 12 per cent four quarters after a £5 stake cap.
- Britain’s quarterly operator dataset was discontinued in May 2026, so the last public British figures on product mix and session behaviour cover January to March 2026 and the next annual release is not due until Autumn 2027.
What does the sports betting revenue decline look like in each market?
It looks like a hole in one line of the profit and loss, while the lines on either side of it hold. The American Gaming Association’s Commercial Gaming Revenue Tracker for August 2026, published on 21 October, puts sports betting revenue at $1.00 billion, down 15.6 per cent year on year, on handle of $10.89 billion, which was itself down 0.7 per cent, with hold falling to 9.2 per cent from 10.8 per cent in August 2025. In the same month, traditional casino gaming grew 0.9 per cent to $4.44 billion, slots alone took $3.25 billion, and iGaming grew 12.3 per cent to $1.03 billion. (1)
That $1.03 billion is the figure to hold on to, because iGaming out-earned the entire US sports betting sector, retail and online together, in a single month. Across the first eight months of 2026, the same divergence shows at a different scale, with sports betting revenue up 4.0 per cent to $10.45 billion against iGaming up 17.4 per cent to $8.11 billion. (2)
Britain is harder to read because the measure changed mid-story. The Gambling Commission’s Industry Statistics annual report of 17 September 2026 puts total British gross gambling yield at £17.5 billion for the year to March 2026, up 4.4 per cent, with the remote casino, betting and bingo sector at £8.3 billion, up 6.9 per cent. Inside that, online casino games took £5.7 billion and slots alone took £4.8 billion, while remote betting took £2.4 billion, led by football at £1.2 billion and horse racing at £769.3 million. Non-remote betting fell 3.3 per cent to £2.4 billion, and funds held in customer accounts fell 13.9 per cent to £886.6 million. (3)
That release gives no year-on-year movement for remote betting or for online casino, so the only British numbers showing the two pulling apart are the quarterly ones, and they stop in March 2026. In that final quarter online real event betting yield rose 1 per cent to £600 million on 8 per cent fewer bets and 5 per cent fewer average monthly active accounts, while slot yield rose 12 per cent to £773 million on 7 per cent more spins and 6 per cent more active accounts. (4)
The Netherlands is the cleanest of the three, since the Kansspelautoriteit reports the whole market on one measure. Its Marktscan kansspelen over 2025, published on 29 October 2026, puts the licensed Dutch market at €4.1 billion in 2025 against €4.5 billion in 2024 on an inflation-adjusted basis, with the online part down 21.0 per cent from €1.52 billion to €1.20 billion. Online sports betting took the deeper percentage cut, down 30.2 per cent and €110 million lower than 2024, while online casino fell 18.2 per cent, which in money was €210 million. Land-based betting went the other way and rose 8.5 per cent. (5)
How do the US, British and Dutch figures compare?
They do not compare cleanly, and that is worth saying before the table rather than after it. No two of the three are measured on the same basis, over the same period, or against the same tax rate. The United States reports monthly gross gaming revenue by vertical, Britain reports an annual regulatory-return figure for a financial year ending in March, and the Netherlands reports a calendar-year brutospelresultaat covering online and land-based together and adjusted for inflation. Read across the three for direction, not for a measurement.
| Market | Latest published data | Sports betting line | Casino line | Cause named in the data |
| United States | AGA Commercial Gaming Revenue Tracker, August 2026, published 21 October 2026 | $1.00bn, down 15.6 per cent; handle $10.89bn, down 0.7 per cent; hold 9.2 per cent against 10.8 per cent | iGaming $1.03bn, up 12.3 per cent; traditional casino $4.44bn, up 0.9 per cent | Sports betting is offered through prediction markets, plus a later college football start. |
| Great Britain | Industry Statistics annual report, year to March 2026, published 17 September 2026 | Remote betting: £2.4bn of an £8.3bn remote market; non-remote betting: £2.4bn, down 3.3 per cent | Online casino £5.7bn, of which slots £4.8bn; remote sector up 6.9 per cent | None stated; the £5 online slots stake cap of 9 April 2025 is the only structural change in the period. |
| Netherlands | Marktscan kansspelen over 2025, published 29 October 2026 | Online sports betting is down 30.2 per cent, €110m lower than 2024. | Online casino down 18.2 per cent, €210m lower; land-based betting up 8.5 per cent. | Net deposit limits from 1 October 2024 and gambling tax at 37.8 per cent from 1 January 2026 |
Why is online casino the stronger leg in all three markets?
Because in each market the money has moved toward whichever product or channel carries the lightest regulatory friction, and in none of the three is that sports betting. The sports betting revenue decline is the same arithmetic in three different regulatory shapes.
In the United States the lighter channel sits outside gambling regulation altogether. The AGA attributes the August handle fall to sports betting being available through prediction markets and to a later start to the college football season, and it puts the first of those at more than $1.56 billion in potential state gaming taxes forgone since the start of 2025. State sports betting tax revenue fell 14.0 per cent in August against revenue down 15.6 per cent, so the tax base is tracking the revenue almost exactly, which is what turns this into a state budget argument rather than only a commercial one. (1)
In the Netherlands the lighter channel is a counter rather than an app. Land-based betting grew 8.5 per cent in a year when online casino fell 18.2 per cent and online sports betting fell 30.2 per cent, and the Marktscan names the likely reason itself, which is that land-based betting is not covered by the CRUKS exclusion register and carries less strict duty-of-care rules than its online equivalent. (5) Dutch spend did not leave the licensed market so much as move to the part of it with fewer controls attached.
Britain is the market where the friction landed on the product and the product absorbed it. The £5 online slots stake cap took effect on 9 April 2025, with a £2 cap for 18 to 24-year-olds from 21 May 2025, and four quarters later, slot yields were up 12 per cent. Yield per session had fallen from £4.01 to £3.82 and spins per session from 136 to 124, while total sessions rose 18 per cent to 202 million. (4) So the stakes got smaller, the sessions got shorter, there were a great many more of them, and the number at the end of it got bigger.
What happens when a control works and the exposure does not?
Two of the three markets now have a measured example of a control hitting its own target, while the money it was written for went somewhere else. That is a separate problem from the sports betting revenue decline, and it is running alongside it.
Britain’s safer gambling indicators for the quarter to March 2026 all moved the right way. Slots sessions lasting more than an hour fell 12 per cent to 8.9 million, the share of all sessions running over an hour fell from 5.9 per cent to 4.4 per cent, and average session length fell by two minutes to 15. Customer interactions rose 32 per cent to 5.2 million, although direct interactions by operators fell 9 per cent, and the Commission notes that several operators refined their markers of harm algorithms during the year and others their session-length methodology, both of which affect the comparison. (4) Set all of that against slots yield up 12 per cent and slots active accounts up 6 per cent to 4.8 million, and the honest reading is that the stake cap changed the shape of play without reducing what play produced.
The Dutch case is blunter because the regulator says it out loud. The Ksa’s monitoring report for the first half of 2026 puts online gambling accounts at 1.48 million against 1.38 million six months earlier, while around 490,000 people gamble online in a given month and about 820,000 did so at least once in the half year. It offers two explanations for the rise: the men’s World Cup in June 2026 and players opening several accounts to get around a deposit limit that is written per account. (6) The Dutch net deposit ceiling of €700 a month for players aged 24 and over, and €300 for younger players binds the account rather than the person, and the account count is the number that went up.
Where the money goes after that is the part both regulators are still measuring, and the two sets of evidence point the same way. Dutch channelisation by money is estimated to have risen from 54 per cent in the second half of 2025 to 59 per cent in the first half of 2026, while roughly 94 per cent of Dutch people who gamble do so only with licensed operators, so the distance between those two percentages is the clearest available statement that unlicensed play is concentrated rather than widespread.(6) The Gambling Commission’s open banking analysis of 28 October 2026 found 3,426 transactions with unlicensed operators from 179 individuals, against 4.8 million licensed non-lottery gambling transactions in the same consented panel, with 91 per cent of repeat unlicensed users still using licensed operators too and 45 per cent of them scoring 8 or more on the PGSI against 6 per cent of licensed non-lottery gamblers. Its own conclusion is that the data does not show a substantial shift away from the licensed market.(7) Its Phase 3 push-factor research of 20 October 2026 names the two strongest predictors of unlicensed use as looking for sites not blocked by GAMSTOP and looking for sites that will not ask for much personal data. (8)
Why can nobody benchmark Britain after March 2026?
The dataset that carried the British product mix has been discontinued. Market overview, operator data to March 2026, published on 21 May 2026, states on its own page that this will be the final publication of that data set.(4) Collected monthly from the largest online operators since March 2020, it was the only public quarterly source holding British online yield by vertical alongside spins, bets, session counts, sessions over an hour and customer interaction volumes.
What remains is not a like-for-like replacement. The annual Industry Statistics release is built from regulatory returns on the harmonised quarterly periods introduced in July 2024, it covers every licensed operator rather than only the largest, and the Commission expressly warns against comparing it with the operator dataset, which may include free bets and bonuses. It carries no year-on-year movement for remote betting or online casino, and the next annual edition is planned for Autumn 2027, covering April 2026 to March 2027. The Commission says it will also publish a quarterly version of the core industry statistics, with no date attached.(3)
For a board that benchmarks against Britain, every external British comparison between now and whenever that quarterly release arrives is an annual figure published in September 2026, on a different basis from the monthly internal number it is being set against. Any product-mix comparison a British board makes in this planning round is being made against data that stopped in March.
What should boards do before the 2027 plan is signed?
Five things, and each of them is a column on a sheet rather than a project. None of them need a view on how long the sports betting revenue decline lasts, since the plan has to survive either answer.
1. Restate the revenue plan by product and channel, not by market. A market-level growth number hides the only movement that matters here, which is that the sports betting line and the casino line are now diverging inside the same licence. Most commercial teams already run something monthly that turns market observation into a decision, so start from TGB’s Market Trends Tracking Template, which is the right monthly container for this, and add the product and channel split and the friction column below into it rather than keeping them on a separate sheet nobody opens.
2. Put a friction column beside every revenue line. Name the specific instrument that constrains that line and the date it took effect, and name the competing product that carries no equivalent. US prediction markets paying no state gaming tax, Dutch land-based betting sitting outside CRUKS, and the £5 and £2 online slots stake caps are three worked entries to start from.
3. Re-measure every player protection control on exposure rather than on its own metric. A deposit limit written per account is tested by deposits per person across every account the same customer holds, not by the share of accounts carrying a limit. A stake cap is tested by yield per active account, not by the count of sessions over an hour. Both British and Dutch data now show the control metric improving while the revenue it was aimed at did not fall.
4. Write down the basis of every external benchmark the plan leans on. One line per comparison, holding the dataset, the measure, the period, the publication date and the next release date. The British entry currently reads annual, year to March 2026, published 17 September 2026, next release Autumn 2027, and anyone who has not written that down is likely to discover it in a board meeting.
5. Price the untaxed competitor rather than the regulated one. The AGA’s $1.56 billion estimate of forgone state gaming taxes since the start of 2025 is the scale of the gap on the public side. The commercial equivalent is what a licensed sportsbook’s margin has to be to survive against a venue paying no gaming tax, running no exclusion register check and holding no affordability duty, and that number belongs in the plan rather than in a risk register.
Boardroom Questions
- How much of our forecast depends on the sports betting revenue decline reversing, and what happens to the 2027 number if it does not?
- In every market where we hold a licence, what share of our revenue sits on a product or channel that a competitor can offer without a gambling licence or a gaming tax?
- Does our deposit limit bind the person or the account, and what is our measured deposit per person across every account one customer holds?
- Which external dataset does each market comparison in our 2027 plan rest on, when was it published, and when is it next updated?
- If British product-mix data stays annual until Autumn 2027, what are we using instead, and who signed that substitute off?
Sources
(1) American Gaming Association, Commercial Gaming Revenue Tracker, August 2026 edition, published 21 October 2026. https://www.americangaming.org/resources/commercial-gaming-revenue-tracker/
(2) Year-to-date 2026 figures from the same AGA tracker, as reported by RG.org, AGA August 2026 Commercial Gaming Revenue, 23 October 2026, updated 30 October 2026. https://rg.org/news/gambling-industry/aga-august-2026-commercial-gaming-revenue-sports-betting-prediction-markets
(3) Gambling Commission, Industry Statistics, Annual report, Financial year April 2025 to March 2026, Official statistics, published 17 September 2026. https://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/statistics-and-research/publication/industry-statistics-annual-report-financial-year-april-2025-to-march-2026-official-statistics
(4) Gambling Commission, Market overview, operator data to March 2026, published 21 May 2026, covering Quarter 4 of financial year 2025 to 2026, including the statement that this is the final publication of the data set. https://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/statistics-and-research/publication/market-overview-operator-data-to-march-2026-published-may-2026
(5) Kansspelautoriteit, Marktscan kansspelen over 2025, published 29 October 2026, including the online and land-based segment movements, the net deposit limits of EUR 700 and EUR 300 a month in force from 1 October 2024, the gambling tax steps to 34.2 per cent on 1 January 2025 and 37.8 per cent on 1 January 2026, and the CRUKS and duty-of-care note on land-based betting. https://kansspelautoriteit.nl/sites/default/files/2026-10/20261028%20Marktscan.pdf
(6) Kansspelautoriteit, Stand van zaken Nederlandse gokmarkt 2025 – 2026, 29 October 2026, reporting the Monitoringsrapportage over voorjaar 2026 on channelisation, account numbers and monthly online players. https://kansspelautoriteit.nl/stand-van-zaken-nederlandse-gokmarkt-2025-2026
(7) Gambling Commission, Illegal gambling, Findings from an open banking data analysis, 28 October 2026. https://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/report/illegal-gambling-findings-from-an-open-banking-data-analysis
(8) Gambling Commission, Illegal online gambling, Phase 3, Understanding push factors for consumer engagement with illegal gambling websites, 20 October 2026. https://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/report/illegal-online-gambling-phase-3-understanding-push-factors-for-consumer-engagement-with-illegal-gambling-websites