Gallup Poll Shows Fewer Americans Gambling — But Prediction Markets Muddy the Numbers
A new Gallup survey finds gambling participation down sharply since 2016, but researchers say phone polling may be missing sports betting and prediction-market activity.
This article was produced with AI assistance and edited by the ON360 newsroom.
A new Gallup telephone survey shows self-reported gambling participation among American adults has fallen sharply over the past decade, even as the legal sports betting and prediction-market industries have grown into multi-billion-dollar sectors. According to Gambling Insider, 45 percent of U.S. adults told Gallup they had gambled in the previous 12 months in 2026, down from 64 percent in 2016 and 66 percent in 2003.
The decline is driven largely by falling participation in traditional gambling formats. State lottery participation dropped from 49 percent to 31 percent over the decade, while in-person casino visits fell from 26 percent to 14 percent, Gallup found.
Sports betting numbers don’t match industry growth
Just 7 percent of respondents said they had bet on a professional sporting event in the past year — down from 10 percent in 2016 and matching Gallup’s 2007 reading, despite the U.S. market’s expansion since the 2018 Supreme Court decision that opened the door to widespread legal sports wagering.
Other polls tell a very different story. An April Siena Research Institute survey found 27 percent of Americans held an active online sportsbook account, rising to 52 percent among men aged 18 to 49. Gallup itself flagged the apparent disconnect between falling self-reported participation and rising gambling revenue, suggesting fewer people may be gambling but wagering more often or spending more when they do.
Methodology appears to matter significantly. Gallup’s historical trend relies on telephone interviews, but a parallel online survey it conducted this year found 53 percent had gambled in the past 12 months — eight points higher than the phone result. The gap was starkest for sports betting, at 15 percent by phone versus 21 percent online. A separate Pew Research Center online survey found 22 percent participation. Gallup said respondents may simply be less willing to disclose gambling activity to a live interviewer than in a private online form.
Prediction markets add a new wrinkle
For the first time, Gallup asked whether respondents had placed a bet on a non-athletic future event through an online prediction market. Only 2 percent said yes — but that question specifically excluded sports events, even though sports account for the vast majority of prediction-market trading volume. Data cited by Gambling Insider shows sports made up 83 percent of Kalshi’s $41.2 billion in July trading volume, and roughly 97.7 percent of trading on Polymarket’s regulated U.S. platform.
That narrow framing may explain why Gallup’s figure is far lower than other recent estimates. The Siena survey found 15 percent of respondents had bet on sports through prediction markets, rising to 42 percent among the most avid sports fans and 33 percent among men aged 18 to 34. An April Navigator Research survey found 14 percent of registered voters said they use prediction markets at least sometimes, climbing to 29 percent among Gen Z respondents and 39 percent among young men.
Whether users of sports-linked prediction contracts consider that activity “betting” remains legally and semantically contested — operators frame the contracts as federally regulated derivatives, while several state gaming regulators argue they amount to gambling. Web analytics firm Similarweb estimates roughly 71 percent of Kalshi’s website visitors are male, with the 25-to-34 age bracket the largest single group, though this reflects site traffic rather than confirmed trader demographics.
Why it matters for Canadian readers
The U.S. survey gap underscores a broader challenge facing regulators and researchers everywhere: measuring gambling behaviour is getting harder as products diversify across sportsbooks, casual fantasy contests and prediction-market platforms that dispute being gambling at all. Ontario’s regulated iGaming market, overseen by the AGCO and iGaming Ontario, requires licensed operators to offer tools such as deposit limits and self-exclusion, but the U.S. findings suggest that as new betting-adjacent products emerge, traditional survey tools may struggle to capture the full picture of who is wagering and how much.
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