United States - Ohio

Ohio is a large, mature US sports market with a recurring habit of raising its own tax, and that pattern is the thing an operator most needs to internalise. The Ohio Casino Control Commission regulates a legal online sports betting market that launched in January 2023, but online casino is not legal, so this is a sports-only state. The market is sizeable and the launch was strong, but Ohio has shown that it will reach for the sports betting tax line whenever the budget needs it, which makes tax-risk the defining planning assumption.

The tax has already doubled once. Ohio launched with a 10% tax on sports betting gross gaming revenue, then doubled it to 20% effective July 2023, barely eighteen months after the market opened. That speed matters: it told operators that the rate was not a fixed parameter but a budget lever the state was willing to pull early and without much warning. An operator planning Ohio has to assume the rate can move again, because the precedent is set.

The 2025 doubling attempt was rejected, but the signal stands. In his 2025 budget the governor proposed doubling the rate again to 40%, and the legislature rejected it, holding the rate at 20% in the final agreement. That is a good outcome for operators in the near term, but the attempt itself is the point. Ohio is a recurring tax-risk jurisdiction where each budget cycle carries a credible probability of an increase, and a financial model that assumes 20% is permanent is underpricing that risk.

The economics today are workable. At 20% with a large, mature market, Ohio is comparatively operator-friendly after the 2025 budget held the line. Sportsbooks paid more than $200m in tax in 2025 and the state posted record monthly sports tax revenue into early 2026, implying a market generating well over a billion dollars in annual gross gaming revenue. The product is sports-only, so there is no online casino to cross-sell into, which caps the upside and makes the tax trajectory the central variable.

What winning looks like. Winning in Ohio looks like an efficient sports operation that models a future tax increase as a credible scenario rather than a tail risk, a brand strong enough to hold share in a mature market, and the discipline not to over-extend on the assumption that 20% is fixed. The operators who do well in repeat-tax-risk states build the increase into their planning. The sportsbook growth piece covers running a resilient book.

The regional play. Ohio sits in the US cluster alongside the iGaming states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, where online casino provides the margin a sports-only state cannot. For most operators Ohio is a sports market entered as part of a wider US footprint anchored by the iGaming states, as set out in the multi-market sequencing piece.

The biggest mistake. The biggest mistake is modelling Ohio on a permanent 20% tax when the state has already doubled the rate once and tried to double it again. The related mistake is treating a sports-only state as if it had the cross-sell economics of an iGaming market. Build in tax-increase scenarios, run efficiently, and treat Ohio as a market whose rate is a budget lever rather than a fixed cost.