Is Sports Betting Legal in Illinois? Yes, With a Per-Bet Fee (2026)

✓ Last verified: 2026-08-01

Yes. Sports betting is legal in Illinois, both online and in person, for anyone 21 or older who is physically inside the state. Retail sportsbooks opened in March 2020, statewide mobile betting followed that June, and Illinois quickly grew into the second-largest legal betting market in the country, regulated by the Illinois Gaming Board (IGB).

The reason Illinois dominates the national conversation, though, is not whether you can bet. It is the price. Illinois has become the highest-profile tax story in American sports betting: it stacked a graduated 20% to 40% revenue tax (2024) on top of a first-in-nation per-bet fee charged to operators (2025), and the biggest books responded by charging Illinois bettors a per-wager surcharge that exists nowhere else.

So if you bet here, you may be paying a fee no bettor in any other state pays. Here is the full picture, tax and all.

Quick facts

	Illinois status (July 2026)
Online betting since	✅ June 18, 2020
Retail since	✅ March 9, 2020 (Rivers Casino Des Plaines)
Minimum age	21+
Tax rate	Graduated 20%–40% of revenue (was a flat 15%); Cook County adds 2%
Per-bet surcharge	⚠️ Yes: FanDuel +$0.50/bet, DraftKings tiered $0.25–$0.50, bet365/Caesars/Fanatics +$0.25 (since Sept 1, 2025)
Live sportsbook apps	10: FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM, Caesars, bet365, BetRivers, Fanatics, theScore Bet, Hard Rock Bet, Circa
College team betting	❌ Banned on Illinois teams (Illini, Northwestern), online and retail
College player props	⚠️ Allowed on out-of-state athletes only; no bets at all on Illinois teams
Prediction markets (Kalshi)	⚠️ Contested; IGB cease-and-desist plus dueling federal lawsuits
Regulator	Illinois Gaming Board (IGB)

How Illinois got here

Illinois legalized sports betting through the Sports Wagering Act (230 ILCS 45), part of the omnibus Rebuild Illinois package that Governor J.B. Pritzker signed on June 28, 2019. The betting law rode alongside a roughly $45 billion capital plan, and the wagering revenue was pitched as one way to help pay for it.

Retail first: Rivers Casino in Des Plaines took the state’s first legal bet on March 9, 2020, under the BetRivers brand.
Online next: BetRivers also launched the first mobile sportsbook on June 18, 2020, enabled by a COVID executive order that waived the sign-up rules while casinos were closed.

Then came the saga Illinois is remembered for: in-person registration. The Act originally forced first-time online bettors to register in person at a casino before they could bet from a phone, a rule the sportsbooks hated. It whipsawed for two years. Pritzker suspended it during COVID (Executive Order 2020-41), let it lapse, reinstated remote sign-up, then let it lapse again around April 4, 2021, putting the in-person requirement back in force. It was permanently killed on March 5, 2022, when HB 3136’s deadline hit and BetMGM launched on a mobile-only license.

Two other design quirks are worth knowing. The law created three online-only master licenses at $20 million each, but wrapped them in an 18-month “penalty box,” a waiting period widely read as aimed at DraftKings and FanDuel. Those licenses were never successfully issued: two bidding rounds each drew a single qualified applicant that then withdrew, and DraftKings and FanDuel simply entered earlier through casino partnerships at roughly half the cost. The Act also lets up to seven large sports venues (over 17,000 seats, over 10,000 in Chicago) run a sportsbook inside the building or within a five-block radius, for a $10 million license. That is the provision behind the Wrigley Field and United Center books.

The tax story

This is the section that put Illinois on the map, and it comes in three layers.

Layer one: the original flat rate. When betting launched in 2020, Illinois taxed sportsbook revenue at a flat 15% of adjusted gross receipts. Ordinary. What came next was not.

Layer two: the 2024 graduated tax. Effective July 1, 2024, HB 4951 (Public Act 103-0592) replaced the flat 15% with the nation’s first progressive sports betting tax, a sliding scale keyed to each operator’s annual revenue:

20% on the first $30 million
25% from $30 million to $50 million
30% from $50 million to $100 million
35% from $100 million to $200 million
40% above $200 million

Only the very biggest books (FanDuel, DraftKings) reach that 40% top rate, and it is the highest marginal rate in the country outside New York’s flat 51%. Marginal is the key word: 40% applies only to revenue above $200 million, so even FanDuel and DraftKings pay a blended rate of roughly 36% across all their Illinois revenue, and the smaller books never get near 40%. That puts most Illinois operators just under Pennsylvania’s flat 36%, which every book there pays from the first dollar. Cook County levies a separate 2% wager tax on top.

Layer three: the 2025 per-bet fee (the headline). Then Illinois did something no state had ever done. Effective July 1, 2025, as part of the FY2026 budget Pritzker signed on June 16, 2025, the state added a per-wager excise tax charged to operators: $0.25 on each of an operator’s first 20 million bets in a fiscal year, then $0.50 on every bet after that. It is the first per-bet tax on sports gambling in American history, and it sits on top of the graduated revenue tax, not in place of it.

What a bettor actually pays now. Here is the part that reached ordinary wallets. The big operators refused to eat the per-bet fee and passed it straight through as a customer surcharge, another national first. Starting September 1, 2025:

FanDuel added a flat $0.50 surcharge to every Illinois bet.
DraftKings added a tiered surcharge that mirrors the state fee ($0.25, rising to $0.50 after 20 million wagers), but waives it on parlays with a $10-plus stake, straight bets of $50 or more, bonus bets, and Silver-tier-or-higher loyalty members.
bet365, Caesars, and Fanatics added $0.25 (bet365 only on wagers under $10).
Several books instead set minimum bet sizes to blunt the fee on tiny wagers: theScore Bet at $1, Hard Rock Bet at $2, BetMGM at $2.50, BetRivers at $5 (raised from $1 in January 2026, after Chicago’s city tax landed and its Illinois bet volume fell sharply), and Circa at a steep $10.

Two things to keep straight, because they are easy to garble. The July 1, 2025 date is when the state began taxing operators per bet; the September 1, 2025 date is when FanDuel and DraftKings began charging you. And the surcharges are not identical: FanDuel’s is a flat 50 cents on everything, while DraftKings’ is tiered with real exemptions. If you bet small singles on FanDuel in Illinois, you are paying a fee that literally does not exist for the same bettor in Colorado, where the tax is a flat 10% and no operator surcharge exists.

Who you can bet with

Ten online sportsbooks are live in Illinois as of mid-2026: FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM, Caesars, bet365, BetRivers, Fanatics, theScore Bet, Hard Rock Bet, and Circa Sports. bet365 was the most recent brand to launch, in March 2025.

Be careful with the count. The IGB’s authorized-operator list shows more license rows than that, but it overstates the live roster: Fanatics holds two master licenses (so it appears twice), and Bally Bet is licensed with a retail book in the Quad Cities but has not launched its Illinois mobile app. Two more traps that affiliate lists fall into: ESPN BET is gone, rebranded to theScore Bet on December 1, 2025, and PointsBet was absorbed into Fanatics. If a page still lists Bally Bet as a live app, or ESPN BET or PointsBet as separate books, it is out of date.

Illinois is a heavyweight by size. Bettors wagered about $15.5 billion in 2025, roughly 9.5% of all US betting, which made Illinois the second-largest legal market in the country behind New York and ahead of New Jersey. It passed New Jersey for the number-two spot in 2024, and in 2025 became the third state ever to cross $50 billion in cumulative all-time bets.

Now the exit question, because the taxes made operators loud. The Sports Betting Alliance (DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, Fanatics, and PENN) publicly threatened to cut investment or leave over the fees. As of mid-2026, no major online sportsbook has actually pulled its app out of Illinois. The pushback has come as surcharges, minimum-bet floors, and lobbying, not exits. FanDuel even temporarily waived its 50-cent surcharge for a promotional window that it said would run from April 9 to June 19, 2026, and it has said it would drop the surcharge for good only if the state repeals the per-wager tax.

Retail betting: casinos and the Chicago venues

Illinois has roughly 14 retail sportsbooks operating at its casinos and racetracks, from Rivers Des Plaines (BetRivers) to Grand Victoria in Elgin (Caesars), American Place in Waukegan (Circa), Hollywood Aurora (theScore Bet), and Hard Rock Rockford. A couple of Harrah’s locations are listed as not operational.

The Chicago sports-venue books are the more famous story, and it is a cautionary one. DraftKings opened a sportsbook at Wrigley Field as part of a ten-year, roughly $100 million Cubs partnership, then shut it down: the last in-person bets were taken May 31, 2026 (winning tickets cashable through June 30), with DraftKings explicitly blaming Illinois’s tax structure. It is the single most concrete pullback the taxes have produced. FanDuel’s two-story venue at the United Center (home of the Bulls and Blackhawks) opened as a non-wagering lounge and, as last confirmed, was still awaiting IGB approval to take in-person bets. Treat it as a lounge, not a sportsbook, until that changes.

The college rule

Illinois used to have a nuance here, and it is now gone, which trips up a lot of out-of-date pages.

You cannot bet on any Illinois college team, period, online or in person. Since July 1, 2024, wagers on games involving an Illinois collegiate team (the Illinois Fighting Illini, Northwestern Wildcats, Loyola Chicago, DePaul, Bradley, and the rest) have been banned across every channel. The statute (230 ILCS 45/25-25(d)) always barred them online. A narrow carve-out, subsection (d-5), had allowed in-person “Tier 1” bets (moneyline, spread, total, nothing tied to an individual athlete) on Illinois teams, but that carve-out carried a July 1, 2024 sunset and the legislature let it expire. So the “you can still bet the Illini in person” advice you may see is simply stale.

Out-of-state college teams are fully bettable, including player props on out-of-state athletes. Illinois does not have a blanket statewide college player-prop ban; its restriction is team-based, keyed to whether an Illinois school is playing rather than to the venue (unlike New Jersey’s rule). A repeal bill, HB4063, would put Illinois teams back on the board, but it has sat in the House Rules Committee since May 2025 and has not passed.

Daily fantasy and what is restricted

Daily fantasy sports has a settled legal footing in Illinois. The Illinois Supreme Court held in Dew-Becker v. Wu (2020) that head-to-head DFS contests are predominantly games of skill, not illegal gambling. (An older 2015 opinion from then-Attorney General Lisa Madigan had called DFS illegal, but operators largely stayed and the 2020 ruling superseded that worry.)

The 2025 flashpoint was pick’em. Illinois regulators pressured against-the-house “pick’em” fantasy products that blur into sports betting, and PrizePicks shifted to a peer-to-peer model in the state. Then the law swung the other way: SB 3019, effective July 1, 2026, created Illinois’s first formal fantasy-sports licensing framework and, notably, expressly permits pick’em-style contests, with a 15% tax on fantasy revenue from Illinois users and a 21-and-up minimum age.

Prediction markets

The live 2026 fight is over prediction markets. Platforms like Kalshi let people trade contracts on sporting outcomes under federal (CFTC) oversight, which effectively offers a sports wager without a state license, without Illinois’s taxes, and outside the IGB’s rules. Illinois has pushed back harder than most states, and the result is a tangle of dueling lawsuits.

The sequence matters. First the state acted: IGB Administrator Marcus Fruchter issued cease-and-desist letters to Kalshi, Robinhood, and Crypto.com on April 1, 2025, and to Polymarket on January 27, 2026, calling their sports contracts unlicensed sports wagering. Then the federal government sued the state: on April 2, 2026, the CFTC (joined by the Department of Justice) sued Illinois in the Northern District of Illinois, alongside parallel suits against Arizona and Connecticut, arguing that federally regulated event contracts preempt state gambling law. Illinois answered by regulating and taxing the markets anyway: SB 3019 added a prediction-market wagering tax (1.75% on the first 5 million wagers a fiscal year, 3.5% after) plus a state license, effective July 1, 2026. The CFTC then amended its suit to target that tax, and Kalshi filed its own suit against Illinois on June 23, 2026, seeking to block the new rules before they took effect. On July 15 that case was reassigned to Judge Martha Pacold, who already had the federal government’s suit and a separate challenge brought by Coinbase back in December 2025, so all three now sit with one judge. Briefing on the federal government’s injunction request closed on July 24, 2026. No court had ruled as of July 31, 2026, and a status hearing is set for August 11.

Where Illinois lands nationally depends on its court. Illinois sits in the Seventh Circuit, which has not ruled. Neither, despite how this fight is usually described, have the appeals courts split. The Third Circuit favored Kalshi in a case out of New Jersey in April 2026, at the preliminary-injunction stage, and it is still the only federal appeals court to have ruled on the question at all. States have fared better in the Sixth Circuit, which covers Ohio, but only on emergency relief; that court heard argument in the consolidated Ohio and Tennessee appeals on July 30, 2026 and has not ruled. So for now these markets operate here in openly contested territory.

The honest 2026 outlook

The most striking thing about Illinois in 2026 is that the tax gamble is, so far, working for the state and biting bettors at the same time.

The per-bet fee visibly shrank betting volume. Illinois online operators took about 25% fewer individual wagers in February 2026 than a year earlier, and roughly 26.6% fewer (about 10 million fewer bets) in March 2026. Yet March 2026 handle was $1.39 billion, down only 6.8% year over year, and the state still collected a record roughly $57 million in tax that month, up 64%. The pattern is bettors placing fewer but larger bets to dodge per-bet fees and minimums, which shrinks the bet count far more than the dollars. Over the first six months of FY2026, the per-wager fee alone raised about $60 million, above the state’s roughly $40 million estimate.

That fiscal success is exactly why relief looks unlikely soon. Representative Daniel Didech’s HB 5143, which would repeal the per-wager tax, drew bipartisan co-sponsors but never reached a floor vote before the General Assembly adjourned its spring session on June 1, 2026, so the fee and the surcharges remain. It is not dead (it could revive in a later session), but it did not move. Meanwhile the tax burden grew from another direction: effective January 1, 2026, the City of Chicago added its own 10.25% tax on sportsbook gaming revenue plus a city license, stacking on the state’s graduated tax, the per-bet fee, and Cook County’s 2% wager tax. The Sports Betting Alliance sued over the Chicago requirement and is pressing a constitutional challenge.

For a bettor, the bottom line is unusual. Illinois betting is legal, deep, competitive, and 21-and-up, with ten solid apps and a genuinely large market. It is also the one place in the country where you may pay an explicit per-bet surcharge, where the biggest books price Illinois worse than their other states, and where the tax fight (state, city, and prediction-market) is nowhere near settled. If the fees bother you, check them before every bet. For the wider map and how other states price the same wager, start at our state-by-state hub.

FAQ

Is FanDuel legal in Illinois? Yes. FanDuel is one of Illinois’s ten licensed online sportsbooks. The catch specific to Illinois: FanDuel adds a flat $0.50 surcharge to every bet you place in the state, so factor that in on small wagers.

Why am I being charged a fee on FanDuel in Illinois? Because of Illinois’s 2025 per-bet tax. The state charges operators a fee on every wager (25 cents, rising to 50 cents), and FanDuel and DraftKings pass it to Illinois customers as a per-bet surcharge that began September 1, 2025. No other state currently does this.

What is the betting age in Illinois? 21, for both online and retail sports betting. Daily fantasy under the new 2026 framework is also 21-and-up.

Can I bet on the Illini or Northwestern? No. Since July 1, 2024, Illinois bans all wagering on in-state college teams, online and in person. The old in-person exception expired and was not renewed. Out-of-state college teams are fine.

How many sportsbook apps are legal in Illinois? Ten as of mid-2026: FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM, Caesars, bet365, BetRivers, Fanatics, theScore Bet, Hard Rock Bet, and Circa. Bally Bet is licensed but has not launched its app, and ESPN BET became theScore Bet.

Did any sportsbooks leave Illinois over the taxes? No online app has fully exited as of mid-2026. The one concrete closure is DraftKings’ retail sportsbook at Wrigley Field, which took its last in-person bets on May 31, 2026, citing the tax structure.