2024 US Online Casino Market Projected To Reach $7.8 Billion

This year, regulated US online casino and poker sites will earn a combined $7.8 billion, I estimate. This represents an annual increase of 19% over 2023. The big three states — Pennsylvania, Michigan and New Jersey — should easily exceed $2 billion apiece.

Coming into 2023, I had projected $6.5 billion in total revenue for that calendar year, which has proven to be correct. (I did benefit from rounding, however. The actual total came in at 1.1% above my forecast, but I had been rounding up from slightly less than $6.5 billion and the final total rounds down to the same amount.)

Full-year growth for 2023 was 22.7%, rather than the 21.4% I forecast. Either way, that’s a big drop from 35% the year before. I expect there will be a much smaller one in 2024.

That’s because the decline in growth rate has been slowing as state markets mature. The annual growth rate by quarter dropped just three percentage points through the year, starting from 23.6% in Q1 2023 to what will likely be about 20.7% for Q4. I expect the trend in 2024 to be similar, starting with around 20% growth in Q1 and tapering off to around 17% by the end of the year.

In a moment, we’ll take a look at the state-level picture. First, though, I want to call attention to a fun upcoming milestone I noticed while working on these numbers.

All-time US online wagers to exceed $1 trillion in H1

Typically, I only work with iGaming figures and look mostly at revenue. Handle — that is, the total wagers placed by bettors — is an important metric for sports betting analysts, but less so in the casino space.

Most regulators don’t even report wagers for online casino sites. However, in the states that do, the house win rate is pretty reliably around 3.5%, so we can estimate wagers using gross revenue.

What I noticed when looking at the numbers is that online casinos have now taken more than $500 billion in player wagers since launch. Given the pace of growth, they’re likely to hit $1 trillion before the end of 2025.

But what if we include online sports betting handle? I asked my friend and colleague Eric Ramsey of Legal Sports Report for some help with those numbers.

Putting our data together, we came up with the estimate that combined wagers from online sportsbooks and casinos will cross that milestone sometime around the end of May or the beginning of June. We’ll pin the date down more closely as it approaches.

Pennsylvania to remain the largest market

The US market is dominated by three states that were, at one time, remarkably similar in terms of iGaming revenue.

Pennsylvania has begun to pull ahead and will likely continue to do so. Finishing with $2.11 billion for the year, it will be the first state to have crossed the $2 billion annual milestone. December also made it the first to hit $200 million in a single month, with a total of $204.2 million.

New Jersey and Michigan both came in around $1.9 billion for the full year. In 2024, I expect that gap to widen. The Pennsylvania market might be about 20% larger than New Jersey’s and 15% larger than Michigan’s by the end of the year.

By then, Michigan may also have established itself more firmly as the number-two state. That’s a title it was trading back and forth with New Jersey in 2022.

That order was to be expected in the long run, due to the states’ respective populations. New Jersey once held the lead due to having enjoyed a six-year head start on Pennsylvania and eight years on Michigan. Pennsylvania also took longer to get up to speed because of its high tax rate and awkward initial roll-out in 2019.

However, in the long run, it stands to reason that each state’s ceiling is going to be in proportion to its population: about 13 million people in Pennsylvania, 10 million in Michigan, and 9 million in New Jersey.

Pennsylvania online casino forecast

- 2023 full year revenue: $2.11B
- 2024 projection: $2.55B (21% growth)

Slowest Month (2023 and 2024): July. $5.07M/day (2023), $6.28M/day (2024, projected)
Biggest Month (2023 and 2024): December. $6.59M/day (2023), $7.69M/day (2024, projected)
Fun Stat: Having become the first state to surpass $200M in monthly revenue, Pennsylvania is projected to remain above that threshold throughout 2024, except in July.

Michigan online casino forecast

- 2023 full year revenue: $1.92B
- 2024 projection: $2.24B (16% growth)

Slowest Month (2023): May. $4.86M/day
Slowest Month (2024): June. $5.77M/day projected
Biggest Month December (2023 and 2024): $5.85M/day (2023), $673M/day (2024, projected)
Fun Stat: Michigan will likely follow Pennsylvania into the $200M month club exactly one year later, in December 2024.

New Jersey online casino forecast

- 2023 full year revenue*: $1.92B
- 2024 projection: $2.18B (13% growth)

Slowest Month (2023): February. $4.92M/day
Slowest Month (2024): August. $5.65M/day projected
Biggest Month: December (2023 and 2024). $5.81M/day (2023), $6.42M/day (2024, projected)
Fun Stat: New Jersey’s average monthly revenue in 2024 ($181M projected) will be approximately equal to what it made in its first year-and-a-half ($180M for the 18 months from Nov. 2013 to Apr. 2015).

Connecticut shines in 2023, can it continue in 2024?

Connecticut’s performance was the biggest surprise of 2023 when it comes to revenue statistics. It began the year with an annual growth rate of around 35%, but rather than slowing down, it accelerated, hitting a peak of 57% in May.

Although it has fluctuated since then, the growth rate has consistently remained higher than it was to start the year. That’s especially surprising because DraftKings, the leader among the state’s two operators, slashed its promotional spending by 84% in February and has kept it there ever since.

West Virginia has also continued to grow at a fast, though declining rate. Both states still underperform the PA-MI-NJ trifecta in per capita revenue, but that gap is narrowing due to these high growth rates. One interesting thing to watch going forward is whether small states underperform large ones in the long term, or merely take longer to reach maturity.

Either way, the likely cause is lower interest and effort by operators in light of these states’ limited market size. Rhode Island, when it comes online, will be the smallest iGaming market other than Delaware. However, Bally’s, one of the smaller operators in other states, will be looking to make the most of its monopoly there.

(As for Delaware, I have omitted it from most of the analysis for two reasons: Firstly, the replacement of 888 with Rush Street Interactive as the operator may or may not change the market significantly. Secondly, if it remains similar to 2023 and earlier, the revenue will be too low to move the needle for the US total market.)

Connecticut online casino forecast

- 2023 full year revenue: $406M
- 2024 projection: $554M (36% growth)

Slowest Month (2023 and 2024): July. $0.91M/day (2023), $1.34M/day (2024, projected)
Biggest Month: December. $1.43M/day (2023), $1.82M/day (2024, projected)
Fun Stat: Connecticut is projected to attain a $50M month by the end of 2024, something New Jersey — with two-and-a-half times Connecticut’s population — did not achieve until January 2020, more than six years after the market opened.

West Virginia online casino forecast

- 2023 full year revenue: $157M
- 2024 projection: $200M (27% growth)
Slowest Month (2023): July. $0.37M/day
Slowest Month (2024): January. $0.49M/day projected
Biggest Month (2023): October. $0.51M/day
Biggest Month (2024): December. $0.61M/day (projected)
Fun Stat: The fall rebound exhibited by other state markets has tended to be particularly strong and unusually late in the year for West Virginia. Revenue spiked 37% from September to October 2021, and 25% in 2023. In 2024, October and December revenue projections are close enough that either could be the biggest month.

Update—Jan 30, 2024

This article has been updated to reflect official December 2023 revenue data that was unavailable at the time of publication. 2023 revenue statistics are now final, and small changes to the 2024 projections have been made based on the new information.

For NJ, PA, and MI, the only changes are sub-1% tweaks to the final digits after decimal points. However, Connecticut’s anticipated growth rate has been adjusted upward by 2 percentage points—from 34% to 36%—and West Virginia’s by a single point—from 26% to 27%

Update—Feb 21, 2024

December 2023 revenue numbers have been updated to reflect actual reporting rather than projections.

Correction of a data entry error for historical revenue in Michigan has resulted in small changes to the month-by-month forecast. The full-year forecast remains unchanged.