Americans Wagered $166 Billion on Sports in 2025—More Than Movies, Music and Museums Combined

Americans placed roughly $166 billion in sports bets in 2025—more than double what they spent on movies, recorded music, live music, books, and museums combined, according to a Fortune analysis of industry revenue data.

The comparison is stark. The entertainment sectors that defined American leisure for a century together generated about $70 billion last year:

• North American box office: $8.87 billion (still 22% below pre-pandemic levels)
• Recorded music: a record $11.5 billion
• Live music: $18.51 billion
• Book publishing: $14.6 billion
• Museums: an estimated $16.4 billion

And the $166 billion figure almost certainly understates the market. It excludes wagering through tribal casinos in states such as Florida, Washington, and Wisconsin, which do not publicly disclose their handle. Holy Cross economist Victor Matheson, who studies sports gambling, said Florida alone accounts for between $5 billion and $10 billion.

"The $165 [billion] or $170 billion number is low," he told Fortune.

How big is the real number?

Bigger still. The reported handle excludes sports wagering flowing through prediction market platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket, which have expanded rapidly into sports contracts since gaining federal regulatory clearance. Matheson estimated that activity could represent another $50 billion to $100 billion in handle.

Put together—legal sportsbooks, prediction markets, and unreported tribal handle—the true volume of American sports wagering in 2025 could approach $300 billion. That works out to roughly $1,000 in legal bets per American adult.

Handle is gross throughput, not consumer expenditure. More than 90% of what is wagered returns to bettors as winnings, so the $1,000 in bets translates to roughly $100 in average losses per adult. That trajectory matches what Matheson saw tracking the U.K. market, where betting has been legal for decades.

"The UK is betting about $1,000 per adult per year," he said. "The states that went all in. New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Colorado, Arizona. They're all at over $1,000 per person per year in handle."

The growth has been vertiginous since the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban in 2018: from $6.6 billion wagered that first year to $166 billion seven years later.

Who actually loses the money?

Not the average bettor. Roughly 95% of total losses are absorbed by just 5% of bettors—a small cohort of heavy users whose spending looks nothing like a casual fan's $20 Sunday parlay.

"That is a problem," Matheson said. "That overall doesn't really seem to be a crisis," he added of the aggregate numbers, but argued the real crisis is the distribution of losses.

Martin "Marty" Conway, an adjunct lecturer in Georgetown University's Sports Industry Management program and a former senior executive at Major League Baseball, the Baltimore Orioles, the Texas Rangers, and AOL, said the platforms are engineered to identify and retain exactly those heavy users.

"They're able to recognize, 'Hey, this person hasn't really participated in two weeks. I need to spike them an offer,'" he said. "They're very good about back-end information about when people are dropping off."

Free-bet promotions—ubiquitous in sports advertising and, per Conway, a descendant of the old illegal bookmaking practice of extending credit to keep bettors wagering after a loss—are designed to pull those users back.

"The best word in marketing in the history of business has been 'free,'" he said, "and in this case they make it appear as though it's free, even though we know it's really not."

Why did the market shift to young men?

The legal market uncovered a demographic traditional gambling never captured: young, college-educated men who had largely avoided casinos and lotteries. Matheson said this cohort suffers from an illusion of control.

"You say, 'If I just knew a little bit more and studied a little bit harder, I really could make money here,' because this isn't craps, where the odds are what they are and I can't throw the dice in some special way," he said.

The markets are priced to neutralize whatever edge bettors believe they have. "All of that knowledge is built into these bets in the first place," Matheson said. "These lines are not being made by uneducated people."

Whether betting is displacing spending on movies, concerts, or video games remains an open empirical question. "It's hard to believe that $100 of entertainment spending per person, because that's what sports betting is actually costing people on average, is going to make it so that people aren't playing video games or going to Marvel movies anymore," Matheson said. The clearest displacement he could point to is internal: convenience-store lottery sales have begun declining in states where online sports betting has taken hold.

Warning signs are accumulating elsewhere. A New York Fed study found credit card delinquencies among millennials and Gen Z have risen in states where sports betting is legal—evidence, researchers said, that some bettors finance the habit with debt. One-quarter of sports bettors now say they worry they cannot control their gambling, according to a U.S. News and World Report survey.

What does the legal fight over prediction markets decide?

The next battleground is who regulates the money. Fortune reported that 35% of bettors say they use traditional sportsbooks less because prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket have changed how they bet—billions of dollars moving through a channel invisible to state regulators because prediction markets are not classified as gambling.

Kalshi faces cease-and-desist orders or lawsuits in at least six states. In March, Arizona became the first state to file criminal charges against the company, accusing it of running an illegal gambling business. Federal courts have split: judges in Nevada and New Jersey initially sided with Kalshi's argument that federal commodities law overrides state gambling law, while a federal judge in Maryland ruled the opposite, finding "Kalshi characterizes its sports-related event contracts in various ways, but at bottom, they are sports wagers."

Those cases are now on appeal, and the outcome could reshape who taxes and regulates sports wagering nationwide—settling whether a market approaching $300 billion answers to state gambling regulators or to no one at all.

"With addictive products," Matheson said, "the question is whether you kind of kill off your hosts—or whether you can string them along."