When it comes to collecting taxes on sports betting, New York is in a class by itself. Year-to-date, the Empire State has taken in nearly $654 million in sports betting tax receipts.

Second place? Pennsylvania, at $108.3 million. A few other notables: New Jersey, $92.7 million, good for fifth place, and Michigan, at $13.9 million, all the way down in 20th.

These numbers come courtesy of the X account of Alfonso Straffon, a former Deutsche Bank analyst who’s been covering the sports betting/gambling space for 14 years (and worked the markets in Costa Rica prior to that).

But the main thrust of Staffon’s tweets on the subject of taxes came in a second post, when he added iCasino taxes to the ledger.

New York still led, but not really, as Pennsylvania collected $631.8 million year-to-date when combining sports betting and iCasino, and that doesn’t include August’s numbers. They will pull ahead of New York.

Michigan jumped all the way to third, with $353 million collected in combined taxes — meaning, some 96% of Michigan’s online gambling taxes this year have come from iCasino.

New Jersey was fourth, at $325 million in total.

So yesterday's chart ranked states by how much they have collected in taxes, YTD, via sports betting. But this morning's chart, in the spirit of completeness, layers in the taxes derived from online casino across those states that offer it. Additionally, the two sub-charts allow… https://t.co/WIViGA7qg1 pic.twitter.com/UprAqRkIxx

— Alfonso Straffon (@astraffon) September 8, 2024

Other regulated iCasino states: Connecticut collected $18.9 million in sports betting taxes and another $45.7 million in online casino; West Virginia came in with $2.5 million in sports betting taxes and another $16.5 million in iCasino; Rhode Island was an outlier, with $11.5 million in sports betting tax collections but only $5.2 million in iCasino, though the latter didn’t launch until March 5; and Delaware brought in $4 million in sports betting taxes and another $12.2 million in online casino gaming.

New York, New York

The numbers above — especially when seen in the charts Straffon laid out — are eye-opening, even to those who follow the industry and already knew online casino has more revenue-generation potential than sports betting.

New York, with its 51% tax rate, is clearly head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd on sports betting — but a little back-of-the-envelope math shows what legalized iCasino in New York could mean to the state’s tax coffers.

For perspective, New Jersey’s online sports betting tax rate is 13%, its online casino tax rate is 15%, and the state collected nearly 72% of its online gambling tax from iCasino.

Transition these numbers to neighboring New York, and you start running out of calculator space. Imagine, for a moment, New York legalized and then taxed iCasino at that same 51% as sports betting, and let’s also say the state ended up collecting 72% of its online gambling taxes from that vertical.

Well, that $654 million year-to-date number would explode to over $2.3 billion.

Those are some serious numbers to chew on as New York state Sen. Joseph Addabbo Jr. prepares to make another push for iCasino legalization in 2025.

The post Sports Betting Taxes Don’t Compare With Online Casino Taxes appeared first on Casino Reports.