RALEIGH — Nearly two-thirds of North Carolina adults say they have not placed a legal sports wager since statewide online betting began in March 2024, according to a new SurveyUSA poll conducted for WRAL-TV and WSOC-TV.
The survey found 63% of respondents had not legally bet on sports since legalization. Another 5% said they had bet once, 13% said two to four times and 14% said five or more times. Four percent were unsure.
SurveyUSA collected responses online from 900 North Carolina adults between Oct. 7 and Oct. 11. The pollster said respondents were drawn from an online panel and the results were weighted to Census benchmarks for age, gender, race, education and home ownership, as well as North Carolina party registration. The poll reported a credibility interval of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Participation differed across demographic groups. SurveyUSA reported that men were more than twice as likely as women to say they had bet multiple times. Adults under 50 were more than three times as likely as those over 50 to report multiple bets, and nearly six times as likely as respondents 65 and older. Black and Latino respondents were more than one-and-a-half times as likely as white respondents to say they had placed multiple bets.
The participation results offer one measure of how broadly the state’s legal market has reached. They do not measure the amount wagered by each bettor. WRAL reported that operators accepted $15.7 billion in paid wagers from the March 2024 launch through August 2026, plus about $780 million in promotional wagers. WRAL also reported that monthly paid wagering had exceeded $500 million for 12 consecutive months.
The General Assembly recently raised the tax on sports-betting operators to 23%. The new poll gives lawmakers and regulators a current benchmark for evaluating participation as they consider the market’s revenue, oversight and public-health effects.
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Photo Credit: Ed Gregory / Stokpic via Wikimedia Commons, CC0 1.0. Casino gaming machines photographed Nov. 26, 2013; file/context image. Public-domain dedication.
Editor’s Note: This article was drafted with the assistance of artificial intelligence and was reviewed and fact-checked by a member of the NC Political News editorial team before publication.