Less Americans May Be Gambling — But Are Polls Telling The Full Story?

While a new Gallup survey suggests that Americans are now much less likely to participate in gambling-related behaviors than they were a decade ago, some adults may still be falling victim to harmful gambling practices.

Gallup’s latest poll shows that the estimated percentage of adults in the U.S. who report doing any type of gambling over the past year is 45%, marking a drop from 64% in 2016. However, one analyst told the Daily Caller News Foundation that “predatory gambling” is currently a major problem in the nation.

Of those surveyed, 31% said they had purchased a state lottery ticket, compared to 49% a decade ago. Meanwhile, just 14% of U.S. adults reported having gambled in person at a casino, compared to 26% in 2016, the poll shows.

The new data comes just a few months after a separate Gallup survey released in June suggested that just 57% of Americans believe that gambling is “morally acceptable,” down from 67% who said the same in 2016.

“There is no debate that a growing national backlash to the institution of predatory gambling is underway and long overdue,” Stop Predatory Gambling National Director Les Bernal told the DCNF on Monday. “Millions of Americans are broke and engaging in predatory gambling takes them far away from achieving financial peace.”

“The biggest reason for the growing backlash [to predatory gambling] is it’s becoming clearer to reasonable people of all political stripes that predatory gambling has been an epic policy failure by every measure,” Bernal added. “It’s led to higher taxes for most Americans, serious family dysfunction, increased criminal incarceration, and it’s produced an epidemic of gambling addiction among young adults and teens across the country, so much so that nearly everyone of us now [knows] someone who has suffered life-changing harm because of predatory gambling.”

Predatory gambling refers to “when corporate gambling interests partner with government to cheat and exploit citizens,” according to Stop Predatory Gambling.

Sports betting in the U.S. has also surged in recent years. The sports betting sector climbed to a record-high revenue figure of $16.96 billion in 2025, ESPN reported in February, citing data from the American Gaming Association.

Moreover, a July 2025 survey from the National Council on Problem Gambling found that almost 20 million U.S. adults reported having undergone at least one “problematic” gambling behavior “many times” since the prior year, compared to 27.5 million in 2021.

Moreover, a recent study suggests that a higher share of Generation Z members than any other age group are embracing gambling in an effort to reach their financial goals, such as saving up for retirement, the DCNF previously reported.

“Our youngest citizens are those who are being relentlessly targeted by predatory gambling operators right now,” Bernal told the DCNF. “That’s [because] the nation is seeing an epidemic of gambling addiction among young adults and teens. In the short term, this generation is going to suffer massive harm but they’re also going need to be the ones at the front of the fight to make major gambling reform happen. And we’re starting to see that now with a large number of young people getting involved in this fight.”

Bernal went on to say that Gallup’s latest poll numbers “reflect a growing momentum to repeal some of the most extreme forms of predatory gambling happening in the public square.”

Many gambling addiction experts have called for increased regulations on the industry in recent years, NBC News reported.

The Gallup poll’s results are based on telephone interviews conducted by ReconMR June 1-July 19, among a random sample of 2,201 U.S. adults. For results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.