Sports Betting Has Been Legalised Everywhere and the Research Shows Every Dollar Bet Is a Dollar Not Invested
Americans wagered $165.2 billion on sports in 2025, up from $4.6 billion in 2018. The average bettor lost $430 for the year. Peer-reviewed research across 230,000 households found that every dollar deposited into a sports betting app produces approximately a dollar reduction in savings and investment. The effects concentrate in the households that can least afford it.
Who has this problem
State gaming commissions and consumer-finance regulators
Not a clean startup customer — the closest commercial angle would be a spending-guardrail fintech feature aimed at frequent bettors specifically.
Frequent sports bettors displacing their own savings
The households NBER's study found cutting brokerage deposits by up to $221/quarter — the population most exposed, and least likely to self-identify the pattern.
Financial advisors and planners
Advisors who see clients' savings displaced, as the NBER research found.
Gen Z investors
In a 2026 Betterment survey, 52% of Gen Z respondents had diverted investing funds into betting.
Signal timeline
Epic Research, analyzing over 197 million US patient records, finds diagnosed gambling-disorder rates rose 61% in states that legalized sports betting between Q1 2018 and Q1 2026 (3.0 to 4.8 per 100,000), while falling 29% in states that never legalized it over the same period; rates among 18-29 year-olds more than doubled.
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