US Sportsbooks Barreling Toward Record-Setting Super Bowl 59


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Super Bowl betting

key takeaways

  • Total Super Bowl betting handle across regulated US markets will grow more than 15% to surpass a record $1.5 billion.
  • Nevada is the historical epicenter for Super Bowl betting, but New York might have enough inertia to take the top spot for the first time this year.
  • The emergence of prop-based fantasy products and event contract trading could have a profound effect on the total amount of financial exposure to the game among American sports speculators.

Regulated sportsbooks in the US are once again gearing up for the biggest event on the calendar: Super Bowl Sunday.

The NFL season peaks on Feb. 9 with a powerhouse Super Bowl 59 matchup between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs that will generate more than $1.5 billion in legal wagers nationwide. Record-setting handle for the game creates nine figures of revenue potential for sports betting operators, though how much customers win or lose hinges on the result.

Almost 225 million Americans across 40 states and territories have access to legal Super Bowl betting in their local market this year.

NV vs. NY for 2025 Super Bowl betting crown

Although Nevada has taken a tumble down the year-long leaderboard, its role as the nation’s Super Bowl betting capital has so far gone unchallenged. Last year’s $186 million was an all-time record for single-game handle in any market, inflated by hosting the game at Allegiant Stadium. There is no place quite like Las Vegas on a Super Bowl Sunday, with seat reservations at some of the most sought-after sportsbooks running into the thousands of dollars.

New York really should overtake Nevada for first place this time around. Applying its growth over the past 12 months to last year’s Super Bowl numbers creates around $192 million in expected handle this year, up 18.3% from $162 million in 2024. Nevada would have to shake off a small annual decline and top its own record to approach that number.

Our model likes New York to finally claim the top spot at $183 million, with Nevada and New Jersey filling out the podium in that order.

While there is no public data to help us measure sports betting in Florida, it also figures to be among the top five US markets. Tribal sportbooks will be filled to capacity for the game, and Hard Rock Bet should grade roughly $100 million in wagers for Florida’s second Super Bowl with regulated betting — on par with major competitive markets like Ohio and Illinois.

Super Bowl betting soars as US map expands

Total Super Bowl betting handle in the US has increased every year since 2018, a growth streak that will continue in 2025.

Eight states contributed to the first post-PASPA Super Bowl report in 2019, surpassing $200 million in combined handle. Volume first crossed $500 million in 2021 with 21 markets reporting, leaping past $1 billion from 35 markets in 2023. Estimates for last year’s Super Bowl betting handle top out at around $1.3 billion.

This year, 38 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico will join to make the Super Bowl the biggest legal betting event in US history once again. For a sense of scale, this one game typically represents between 0.75% and 1.25% of the trailing 12 months of handle for a given state, or about three to four average days of volume. The projected increase from 2024 largely reflects the underlying growth over the past year.

This trip to Louisiana marks the third time the Super Bowl will take place in a state with legal betting, three in a row following Arizona (2023) and Nevada (2024). That extra visitation around the Caesars Superdome should produce a nice boost to the local betting output during the week that leads up to the game.

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An ideal matchup for Super Bowl betting?

Participation from the Eagles is good news for Pennsylvania sportsbooks, which drew record handle the last time it happened in 2023. Local bettors wagered $84.3 million on that matchup with the Chiefs, and this year’s encore should beat that number given the two years of additional growth.

The total effect of a given matchup on Super Bowl betting, however, mostly mirrors the overall interest in the game rather than the inclusion of any one specific market. In other words, the broader popularity of the teams and players involved seems to have a bigger impact on the total betting interest than any localized increase from their respective home markets (albeit from a very small set of sample data).

The Chiefs and the Eagles happen to be two of the most polarizing teams in the country, with rosters full of the league’s most popular players — Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, and Saquon Barkley among them. The addition of Taylor Swift to the list of Super Bowl celebrities also increases attention on the Chiefs despite their home state of Missouri remaining on the short list of states without legal sports betting.

The Chiefs opened as -1.5 favorites with a game total of 48.5.

Most popular Super Bowl bets

It is too soon to know for sure which Super Bowl markets will drive the most action, but a wealth of contextual data from sportsbook operators makes for some easy guesses.

Player props — specifically touchdown markets — are the most popular wager for casual NFL bettors over the course of a season, and the Super Bowl only magnifies that preference. The Kelce anytime touchdown market was the overall top pick for US bettors in Super Bowl 58, and Barkley figures to attract similar attention this year as an MVP candidate and one of the trendiest picks throughout the regular season.

Beyond that, the Super Bowl allows operators to offer an overwhelming number of other prop and novelty markets, allowing customers to bet on every conceivable facet of the festivities. Millions of dollars will change hands even during otherwise trivial events like the national anthem, the coin toss, and the postgame Gatorade shower.

Sportsbooks typically provide updated betting splits during the lead-up to the game, so expect to see more detailed data as the big day approaches once again.

Super Bowl 59 betting forecast: partly cloudy

This forecast is as close to a firm guess as one can get, but the LSR model includes some pretty big error bars. Unlike most aspects of this industry, forecasting the Super Bowl is arguably getting more difficult as the US market matures.

Nevada was the lone state with legal betting prior to 2018, and it has reliably published handle and revenue following each year’s game. We have a clear picture of the timeline and the trends there. But not everyone is so forthcoming.

The number of states that report Super Bowl data changes from year to year without any discernable pattern, as do the names of the states that do the reporting. New York, for example, only reported numbers for 2023 and 2024, while Illinois stopped reporting after 2022. Some of the country’s biggest markets have never reported Super Bowl numbers at all, including Michigan, Arizona, and Ohio.

In fact, more states published itemized Super Bowl betting data in 2020 (11) than in 2024 (9), even as the number of active markets almost tripled from 14 to 40. LSR’s Super Bowl betting revenue tracker includes a mix of reported and estimated data points that serve as the foundation for this year’s outlook.

A shift toward secondary markets

The preferences of the modern bettor also muddy the waters a bit. There are near-endless things to bet on during the Super Bowl, including a number of markets for non-game events like the coin toss. These secondary markets are perfect fodder for another of the recreational bettor’s favorite formats: parlays.

Limited granular data suggests that at least 25% of Super Bowl handle will be rolled up in parlays, and roughly another 10% represents the outstanding futures bets placed throughout the season. There is also in-play betting during the course of the game, a small but growing piece of the pie.

All this is to say that there is some fuzziness in identifying which bets to include in the total, and some lingering uncertainty about which bets actually are included in the known historical numbers. Maine, to underscore the point, only counted bets for 10 days leading up to the game in 2024.

A Super Bowl bet by any other name

Further clouding the picture this year is the growing semantic uncertainty about what even constitutes a bet. More to the point: Are things like DFS 2.0 and derivatives trading on event contracts a form of betting for the purpose of measuring handle and revenue?

Sweepstakes sportsbooks and operators with prop-like offerings such as PrizePicks and Underdog work especially hard to detach themselves from the dictionary definition of betting, either by positioning their platforms as freemium products or by navigating loopholes in the laws related to fantasy sports and gambling.

These brands aren’t part of our calculation of Super Bowl betting, but their customers will make a significant contribution to the total amount of money staked on the game — particularly in states without legalized sports betting in the prevailing sense.

The vanishing line between speculating and gambling

Event contracts put another new wrinkle in the bedsheet. There is more nuance involved than this small section can contain, but a new category of what amounts to Super Bowl pseudo-betting is now legally available in all 50 states in the form of contract trading. It is basically futures betting in a snazzy sport coat.

Firms like Crypto.com and Kalshi now offer this peer-to-peer form of sports speculation that purportedly falls under the jurisdiction of financial regulators rather than gaming regulators, making it legal nationwide. This most notably encompasses the two sleeping giants, California and Texas, both of which still have laws in place that prohibit sports betting by definition.

These trading sites will likewise siphon some of the reported Super Bowl volume away from the likes of FanDuel and DraftKings in regulated markets while increasing — perhaps vastly increasing — Americans’ total financial exposure to the game. For this year, but possibly for the last time, such products are also excluded from our forecast beyond a very small negative adjustment to projected state-reported totals.

Revenue is reality for sportsbooks

Revenue is what counts for sportsbook operators, and it is by far the harder of the two metrics to predict.

How much of the total wagering pool ends up back in the hands of winning bettors hinges not only on the result of the game, but also the countless prop markets that have become so popular. A single point or a single yard could swing the outcome by eight figures for operators and customers.

Super Bowl hold in Nevada over the past decade has ranged between 0.7% (2018) and 12.1% (2020), having never produced an overall loss for the books. Given the specifics of Nevada’s market as it exists today, operators there tend to work on tighter margins than their counterparts elsewhere in the country.

Total Super Bowl betting revenue nationwide could therefore surpass $100 million this year, presuming a combined hold of at least 6.5%.

Photo by Jae C. Hong / Associated Press