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The fiscal year for Illinois is finished and they are on to 2025 — even though the calendar hasn’t flipped for us regular folks. Closing yearly has given us insight into how the state fared betting-wise during 2024.
The big takeaway? Illinois might just have one of the best betting markets around — not that far off of Nevada betting. The thing is, most bettors don’t seem to realize this. However, we’re here to educate y’all on just how booming things are getting out in Illinois.
2024 By The Numbers In Illinois
These numbers are coming straight from the Commission on Government Forecasting, not some rinky dink report, so it’s official as can be. According to them, the entire gambling sector in the state — this includes casino, lottery, sports betting, etc. — combined to create a $2.08 billion windfall in tax money. Taxes that Illinois gets to keep, might we add.
It’s important to level-set these numbers, and there’s no better way to do that than year-over-year numbers. The $2.08 billion number is up 4.8 percent from 2023, when the industry generated $1.99 billion. Illinois has had betting so this isn’t a new market — lottery started in the ‘70s and riverboat casinos were a thing in the ‘90s. Despite the industry’s maturity, it’s still growing at a respectable pace in 2024.
What’s driving the growth, you ask? Well, the report says directly that it’s “largely driven by the steady expansion of video gaming, elevated lottery sales and rapid growth in sports wagering.”
The report has numbers to back the quote. Get this, $886 million in taxes came from the lottery and another $848 million was courtesy of slots. Those two combine for around 75 percent of the entire state’s success — not sports betting in Illinois like you might’ve guessed. If that’s surprising to you, let us explain.
Slots Are On The Up And Up
The story of slots route machines in Illinois really is something. These things were legalized back in 2012. That first year, there was only 61 video gaming terminals spread across the state. Want to know what the number is today? A whopping 48,176! Holy smokes!
As mentioned earlier, it’s a near $900 tax incentive for the state. Here again, the growth from the early years is staggering. In 2014 — 10 years ago — slots were responsible for $145.6 million.
The success of these slot machines, which are located in smaller establishments, has possibly take some steam of of Illinois’ casino industry. This is an actual quote from the report saying as much as so:
“It appears that Illinois gamblers chose the convenience and smaller crowds of the video gaming parlors over the larger and more public casinos,” the report reads. “Video gaming locations have been perceived as a “safer” option to gamble, which has aided in elevating these video gaming figures.”
When you look at Illinois’ casino figures, the theory starts to make sense. We’ll get into it in the next section.
Casinos Struggle Despite New Physical Casinos
The one gambling sector that’s lagging in state is, without question, casinos. In 2025, it generated $158 million in taxes. That’s nearly identical to the year before when it was at $157 million.
“Most casinos, however, recorded flat or slightly decreased AGR totals relative to FY2023,” the report said. “This includes the highest generator of adjusted gross receipts in Illinois, Des Plaines’ Rivers Casino, which saw its AGR total slide from $557.6 million in FY2023 to $526.7 million in FY2024.”
Things have fallen hard for the sector, especially when you consider casinos were the top tax producers from 2003 to 2007. The state thought things would improve in 2019 when it authorized the creation of six physical casinos and three racinos — rather than traditional riverboat gambling.
The Hard Rock Casino in Rockford just opened in August, though, that’ll count toward fiscal year 2025. Many other new casinos have been created from scratch in the past few years, but all have underperformed. The appetite for them just doesn’t appear to be there, unlike this next thing.
Sports Betting Picks Up The Slack
It was the year 2020 when legal sports betting launched in Illinois at the height of the pandemic. It’s been consistent growth for the sector ever since, cumulating with $190 million in revenue this year — that money includes taxes and licensing fees to operators.
Like elsewhere in the country, sports betting has swept through the state thanks to having 13 licensed operators — who all spend big on ads to normalize the practice. The arrow is clearing point up here and it’s almost a lock for Illinois to earn $250 million off this next (and that’s probably conservative).
The number is going to go up not only because there will be more bettors, but the state itself will score more in taxes. This summer, Illinois approved a new tax rate, ditching the old 15-percent rate. Illinois now taxes operators on a sliding scale or 20 to 40 percent based off their revenues. The new rule took effect on day 1 of fiscal year 2025. Let the money pile up in Illinois now!
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