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Legal sports betting in the United States has entered one of the busiest stretches in its history as the 2026 FIFA World Cup gets underway.
The tournament kicked off June 11 across the US, Mexico, and Canada, and gaming research firm Eilers & Krejcik projects licensed US sportsbooks will handle between $2.82 billion and $4.3 billion across the tournament — enough to make it the largest soccer betting event in US history, with the top end exceeding the legal handle of any single Super Bowl to date.
104 matches and better time zones means bigger bets
Several structural factors explain the record projections.
Legal mobile sports betting is now available in 39 states, up from roughly 30 during the last World Cup cycle. The expanded 48-team field pushes the match count to 104 over five weeks, and group games are scheduled for midday through early evening on the East Coast — peak hours for sportsbook traffic.
That’s a sharp turnaround from the 2022 Qatar tournament, when most kickoffs fell between 5 a.m. and 11 a.m. Eastern and suppressed engagement despite strong fan interest.
USMNT’s opening win fuels early betting surge
The opening days have already given operators reason for optimism. The US men’s national team beat Paraguay 4-1 on June 12 in Inglewood, California — analysts had flagged sustained US interest as key to reaching the top end of the handle range.
Prediction markets moved fast, too. Bernstein tracked World Cup volume on Kalshi and Polymarket surging from $2.2 billion on June 11 to $4.8 billion the following day, surpassing Super Bowl prediction-market volume within 48 hours.
Kalshi reported a record weekly trading volume of nearly $7 billion across all its markets, a 13% jump driven largely by the tournament.
Favorites, props, and parlays: Inside World Cup odds
All major operators — DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, Caesars, bet365, and Fanatics — are running full tournament slates covering outright-winner futures, group-winner odds, Golden Boot and Golden Glove props, and lines on all 104 matches.
France and Spain lead outright betting, each priced near +450, while Brazil trails near +850. Deutsche Bank puts FanDuel’s expected share at nearly $1.3 billion, with DraftKings close behind at $1.1 billion.
Soccer has historically returned sportsbooks just 5-7% of each dollar wagered — far below football. According to a post by Bright Side of News, H2 Gambling Capital projects a 12.5% hold this tournament, driven by bettors favoring same-game parlays and in-game props, which carry higher margins than straight match wagers.
New Jersey’s 10% World Cup betting tax bill loses steam
The tournament’s scale has drawn legislative attention in New Jersey, where Assemblyman Michael Venezia introduced Assembly Bill 4838 in May, co-sponsored by state Sen. Paul Sarlo. The bill proposes a 10% surcharge on World Cup betting revenue on top of the state’s existing 19.75% online sports betting tax, for an effective rate near 30% through July 20.
The goal is to offset the state’s hosting costs at MetLife Stadium — estimated above $300 million — but the bill has stalled in the Assembly Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee and faces an increasingly unlikely path to passage.
A market transformed since the last World Cup
The 2026 projections reflect how dramatically the regulated market has grown. American bettors placed an estimated $400 million in legal wagers on the 2022 Qatar tournament; even the midpoint of this year’s range, about $3.5 billion, would be roughly nine times that total.
The global picture is even larger — H2 Gambling Capital estimates worldwide regulated World Cup wagering will reach $60 billion.
US sportsbooks generated $3.82 billion in revenue in just the first quarter of 2026, putting the industry on pace for another record year before the tournament added its boost. With the final set for July 19 at MetLife Stadium, the next few weeks will serve as the clearest test yet of what a mature, widely legal American betting market can produce.
