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Christopher Boan writes for BetOhio.com and has been covering sports and sports betting for more than seven years, with experience at ArizonaSports.com, the Tucson Weekly and the Green Valley News.
Ohio Sports Betting Projections: How Much Will Football Boost Numbers?
Betting analysts at BetOhio.com put together projected handle, revenue, and tax profit ahead of the 2025 football season.
As part of our Ohio sports betting analysis, we aimed to estimate how much bettors in Ohio will wager this season (from September through December).
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How Much Will Ohio Locals Bet This Football Season?
Projected Handle | Projected Revenue | Projected Taxes |
$4.5 billion | $406.9 million | $82.2 million |
What To Expect At Ohio Sportsbooks For 2025 Football Season
The 2025 football season will be the third once since legal Ohio sports betting apps have been operating in the Buckeye State. Based on the past two years, we can assess that the fall will be kind to operators in Ohio, thanks to surges across the board in wagering handle, revenue and taxes between September and December.
In total, the category with the largest year-over-year surge in 2024, compared to 2023, was the state’s wagering handle. The amount wagered grew by 19.8% year-over-year, from $3,135,975,790 in 2023 to $3,757,340,078 a year ago. Ohio’s wagering tax revenue soared by 13.7% (from $63,627,773 to $72,350,852) and wagering revenue grew by 13.3% (from $316,936,460 to $359,165,161) in a year-over-year comparison of 2023 versus 2024.
Using those growth percentages, we project that operators offering Ohio sportsbook promotions will accept about $4.5 billion in total wagers during this football season.
Predicting revenue and taxes is trickier because those figures depend on the hold percentage (in other words, how much money sportsbooks have after paying out winning bets). But based on the previous two years, we predict that statewide revenue will improve to just over $406.9 million and taxes will finish up at around $82.2 million during the four-month span that ends the year.
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Factors Boosting Wagering Interest This Football Season
One boost for the Buckeye State’s football wagering numbers this fall is ever-present interest in Ohio State. At bet365 Ohio Sportsbook, OSU has +500 odds to win the 2025 College Football Playoff as of July 25. That’s second on the board behind Texas (+450), the team that the Buckeyes defeated in the semifinals on the way to the national title last season in the inaugural year of the 12-team CFP format.
And the Cincinnati Bengals are an intriguing futures prop as well, even after the franchise went 9-8 and missed the playoffs each of the past two seasons. The Bengals are tied with the Los Angeles Rams for the seventh-best Super Bowl odds, at +2000, with BetMGM Ohio Sportsbook.
We’ll know more about how successful Ohio sports betting is once the year wraps up. But for now, we can pencil in a hefty return for sportsbook operators and state tax coffers alike in the Buckeye State in late 2025.
USA Today photo by Scott Galvin
Ohio Betting Projections Q&A
To generate a baseline for calculating the 2025 football season in Ohio, BetOhio.com added up the state’s total handle, revenue and taxes generated from September to December of each year from 2022 to 2024. We then averaged out the increases year-over-year to come up with an aggregate figure to base our projections for the final four months of 2025. From there, we multiplied the 2024 football season totals for each by that figure and used that to determine our totals for the upcoming football season in Ohio.
The NFL and college football seasons are crucial to the Ohio sports betting market. The profits that the state coffers earn from football wagering are vital for the public services, K-12 education, healthcare, state infrastructure, problem gambling support and more.
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