Is Sports Betting Legal in North Carolina? Yes (2026)

✓ Last verified: 2026-08-01

Yes. Sports betting is legal in North Carolina, both online and in person, for anyone 21 or older who is physically inside the state. Statewide mobile betting went live on March 11, 2024, and today seven apps compete under the North Carolina State Lottery Commission. In-person betting is older: tribal casinos in the western mountains have taken bets since 2021.

Two things make North Carolina distinctive. First, the betting tax is earmarked in large part for college athletics, sending money to more than a dozen university athletic departments. Second, in a state that lives and breathes college basketball, North Carolina is one of the few that still lets you bet college player props, with Duke, UNC, and NC State players included.

This guide covers the law, the operators, the tax and its college-athletics earmark, the college rules, and where the state stands on prediction markets like Kalshi. For how it compares with other states, see our state-by-state hub.

Quick facts

Item	Detail
Online betting since	March 11, 2024
Retail since	March 18, 2021 (tribal casinos)
Minimum age	21
Tax rate	23% of gross wagering revenue (raised from 18% in July 2026)
Where the tax goes	College athletics, problem gambling, youth sports, and the General Fund
Live sportsbook apps	7 (FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM, Caesars, bet365, Fanatics, theScore Bet)
College team betting	✅ Allowed, including Duke, UNC, NC State, and Wake Forest
College player props	✅ Allowed (no ban, unlike Ohio or Louisiana)
Prediction markets (Kalshi)	⚠️ Operating; NC recognized and taxed them rather than suing
Regulator	North Carolina State Lottery Commission

How North Carolina got here

North Carolina legalized statewide online sports betting through House Bill 347 (Session Law 2023-42), titled “Sports Wagering/Horse Racing Wagering.” Governor Roy Cooper signed it on June 14, 2023, at a ceremony held at the Spectrum Center in Charlotte. The law handed regulation to the North Carolina State Lottery Commission, the same body that runs the North Carolina Education Lottery, and authorized up to 12 online operator licenses.

The mobile launch itself came almost nine months later. Sportsbooks went live at noon Eastern on March 11, 2024, with eight licensed operators flipping the switch at once. The timing was deliberate: it landed in the middle of ACC Tournament week and just ahead of March Madness, the busiest stretch of the year for a college-basketball state. (You will sometimes see January 8, 2024 cited as the start date. That was only the outer deadline HB 347 set for launch, not the day betting actually began.)

Retail betting is older, and it came from a separate law. Back in 2019, Senate Bill 154 authorized wagering on tribal lands under the federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, naming the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. North Carolina’s first legal sportsbook, “The Book,” opened on March 18, 2021 at Harrah’s Cherokee Casino Resort, run in partnership with Caesars. A second tribe, the Catawba Indian Nation, later added an in-person sportsbook at its Two Kings Casino in Kings Mountain in September 2022. So the state ran a small tribal-retail market for three years before the statewide apps arrived.

Who you can bet with

North Carolina has seven live online sportsbooks as of mid-2026:

FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM, Caesars, bet365, Fanatics, and theScore Bet.

That is down from the eight that launched in March 2024, and the churn is worth understanding because affiliate lists are slow to update it. ESPN BET became theScore Bet on December 1, 2025. And Underdog shut its North Carolina sportsbook on December 16, 2025, pivoting to prediction markets and daily fantasy. North Carolina was the only state where Underdog ever ran a full sportsbook, so its exit was the market’s first operator loss since launch. If a list still shows ESPN BET or “Underdog Sports” as live, or counts eight apps, it is out of date.

FanDuel and DraftKings lead here as they do nearly everywhere, with BetMGM usually next. You must be 21 or older and physically located in North Carolina, confirmed by geolocation, to place a bet. For practical purposes this is an online-only market: with no open retail books outside the tribal casinos, the apps are where essentially all the volume goes.

The scale grew fast. North Carolinians wagered more than $7 billion in calendar 2025, generating over $132 million in taxes at the old 18% rate. The single-month record so far was October 2025, at $811.4 million wagered. In March 2026, bettors put down $726.2 million, producing $75.9 million in operator revenue and about $13.7 million in tax. More than $15 billion has been wagered since launch.

The tax, and where it goes

North Carolina taxes sportsbooks at 23% of gross wagering revenue. That rate is new. The state launched at 18%, and lawmakers raised it to 23% in the state budget (Senate Bill 257) that Governor Josh Stein signed in July 2026, the first hike since the market opened. It was a compromise: during 2025 budget talks the state Senate had pushed to double the tax to 36%, but the House opposed it, and the two chambers settled at 23% a year later. At 23%, North Carolina now sits above competitive markets like Massachusetts and Ohio (both 20%) and New Jersey (about 19.75%), though still far below New York’s 51%.

Where the money goes is the distinctive part, and it aims squarely at college sports. HB 347 sends:

$2 million a year to the Department of Health and Human Services for gambling-addiction treatment and education.
$1 million to North Carolina Amateur Sports and another $1 million to the North Carolina Youth Outdoor Engagement Commission, two separate grants that expand youth access to sports.
$300,000 a year each to 13 UNC-system universities, the Division I and II schools that do not already pull in large media and athletics money. Those same 13 schools also split 20% of the remaining net proceeds.

The list of 13 is notable for who is left off it: NC State and UNC-Chapel Hill were deliberately excluded from the athletics money, on the logic that the two flagships already have big athletic budgets. The schools that do benefit are Appalachian State, East Carolina, Elizabeth City State, Fayetteville State, North Carolina A&T, North Carolina Central, UNC Asheville, UNC Charlotte, UNC Greensboro, UNC Pembroke, UNC Wilmington, Western Carolina, and Winston-Salem State. Whatever is left after these fixed allocations flows to the state General Fund.

That is changing. The 2026 budget rewrites the formula so that UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State become eligible for the first time, starting July 1, 2027, under a new tier for the state’s biggest football schools. Reporting suggests the FBS pool (the two flagships plus Appalachian State, Charlotte, and East Carolina) could draw up to roughly $5.8 million a year combined, though the exact per-school caps vary between sources and are not final figures. The same budget also lets bettors deduct gambling losses against winnings on their state taxes, retroactive to January 1, 2025.

Earmarking betting money for a cause is not unique to North Carolina, but the college-athletics angle is unusual. Compare it with Colorado, where the betting tax funds the state water plan instead.

Retail betting: tribal casinos and sports venues

In-person betting in North Carolina lives almost entirely at tribal casinos. Three offer it:

Harrah’s Cherokee Casino Resort (Cherokee) and Harrah’s Cherokee Valley River (Murphy), both run by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians with Caesars, live since 2021.
Catawba Two Kings Casino (Kings Mountain, about 35 miles west of Charlotte), the Catawba Indian Nation’s book, open since 2022.

HB 347 also authorized retail sportsbooks at eight of the state’s marquee sports venues: Charlotte Motor Speedway, PNC Arena, Bank of America Stadium, WakeMed Soccer Park, Sedgefield Country Club, Quail Hollow Club, the Spectrum Center, and North Wilkesboro Speedway. Those licenses are tied to the operators (BetMGM to the Speedway, FanDuel to the Panthers, and so on). As of mid-2026, though, none of these venue sportsbooks had actually opened. For now, if you want to bet in person in North Carolina, the mountain casinos are the only option, and the apps handle everything else.

The college rule

Here is where North Carolina surprises people, especially given how many states have gone the other way. North Carolina does not ban college player props. You can bet an individual college athlete’s points, rebounds, passing yards, or other stats, and you can bet on in-state teams with no restrictions at all. Duke, UNC, NC State, and Wake Forest are all fair game, with no in-state carve-out of the kind New Jersey uses.

That puts North Carolina in a shrinking group. As of 2025 it was one of roughly ten states that still allowed unrestricted college prop betting, unlike Ohio, Maryland, Louisiana, and Vermont, which banned wagers on individual college players. The mechanism varies, and it matters for how durable each ban is: Maryland’s, for instance, is not in its regulations at all. The regulator simply pulled those markets from its approved catalog in March 2024, and a 2026 bill to write the ban into statute passed the Maryland House unanimously before dying in the Senate. The legal basis is HB 347 itself, which expressly authorizes “proposition wagers” and wagers on the “individual performance statistics of athletes,” and permits wagering on college sports. Its only real prohibitions cover youth sports, injuries, penalties, the outcome of disciplinary proceedings, and participants betting on their own events.

Lawmakers have tried twice to add a college-prop ban and come up short both times. House Bill 967 in 2024 would have prohibited college player props but died when the session ended. House Bill 828 in 2025, titled “Prohibit Prop Bets on College/Amateur Sports,” was filed in April 2025 and referred to the House Rules Committee, but it never advanced. So the props remain legal for now. It is worth saying plainly, because several affiliate and AI-written pages wrongly claim HB 347 bans college props: it does not. That said, this is a current status, not a permanent guarantee. A future session could revive the idea, and in a college-basketball state the pressure to do so is real.

Daily fantasy and what is restricted

Daily fantasy sports is legal in North Carolina, protected by the same 2023 law that legalized sports betting. HB 347 treats skill-based, peer-to-peer fantasy contests (players competing against each other rather than the house) separately from regulated sports wagering, so DFS sits in a lighter-touch grey area rather than under the full sportsbook rulebook. No North Carolina cease-and-desist against house-banked “pick’em” products has been reported, though the Lottery Commission floated and then dropped a pick’em restriction during rulemaking, so the format is not guaranteed to stay untouched.

What is not legal is online casino gaming. North Carolina authorized sports betting only. There are no legal online slots or table games, and offshore sites that offer them are unregulated: no state agency can help if a payout stalls.

Prediction markets

The live national question in 2026 is prediction markets: platforms like Kalshi that let people trade contracts on game outcomes under federal (CFTC) oversight, effectively offering sports wagers without a state license or the state tax. North Carolina’s response has been unusual, and it runs opposite to most of the country.

Rather than fight, North Carolina chose to recognize and tax. It is not one of the nine states the CFTC has sued over prediction markets (those are Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, Kentucky, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin). It issued no cease-and-desist and filed no lawsuit against Kalshi. Instead, the same Senate Bill 257 budget that raised the sportsbook tax made North Carolina effectively the first state to acknowledge in statute that CFTC-registered prediction markets are lawful, while declining to impose its own licensing. It layered on a 6% tax on those operators’ net trading-fee revenue sourced to the state, effective January 1, 2027 (so not yet in force as of mid-2026). The contrast is stark: state-licensed sportsbooks pay 23% on gross revenue and answer to the Lottery Commission, while federally regulated prediction markets will pay 6% and answer to no state regulator.

Not everyone in state government agrees with that approach. Attorney General Jeff Jackson, a Democrat, has publicly opposed prediction markets, joining a multi-state coalition of attorneys general (around 41 states) that told the CFTC these markets are “contrary to the public interest.” So the legislature and the attorney general are pointing in different directions.

As for the courts, North Carolina sits in the Fourth Circuit and has no Kalshi case of its own. The regional test case is the one out of Maryland, usually called Kalshi v. Maryland although the state itself is not a named party: Judge Adam Abelson denied Kalshi’s preliminary-injunction motion on August 1, 2025, holding it had not shown it was likely to win its argument that federal commodities law overrides state gaming law. A Fourth Circuit panel heard the appeal on May 7, 2026. One judge sounded skeptical of Kalshi, remarking that if it quacks like a duck, “it’s gambling,” though that is one member of a three-judge panel rather than the court speaking. There was still no ruling as of July 31, 2026. Nationally the picture is less settled than it is usually described. The Third Circuit leaned toward Kalshi in a case out of New Jersey in April 2026, at the preliminary-injunction stage, and it remains the only federal appeals court to have ruled on the question. States have done better in the Sixth Circuit, which covers Ohio, but that court has so far acted only on emergency relief, and it heard argument in the consolidated Ohio and Tennessee appeals on July 30, 2026 without ruling since. A ruling there, or from the Fourth Circuit in the Maryland case above, would be what finally splits the appeals courts. North Carolina, having chosen to tax rather than sue, is watching all of it from the sidelines.

The honest 2026 outlook

North Carolina’s market is young, big, and mostly settled. For a bettor today the answer is simple: legal, seven apps, 21 and up, inside state lines, with unusually few restrictions (you can even bet college props). The open questions are about money and policy, not whether betting survives:

The 23% tax just took effect, and the thing to watch is whether operators trim promotions or thin their odds the way books have in other high-tax states.
January 1, 2027: the new 6% prediction-market tax kicks in.
July 1, 2027: the rewritten college-athletics formula starts sending money to UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State for the first time.
College props stay legal, but a ban bill could return in a future session, so the current freedom is not guaranteed.

For a wider view of how North Carolina’s rules stack up against other states, from tax rates to college policies, start at the state-by-state hub.

FAQ

Is FanDuel legal in North Carolina? Yes. FanDuel has been one of North Carolina’s licensed online sportsbooks since the March 11, 2024 launch, and it remains one of the seven live apps. You must be 21 or older and physically in the state to bet.

Can I bet on Duke or UNC? Yes. North Carolina allows betting on in-state college teams, including Duke, UNC, NC State, and Wake Forest, with no carve-out. It also still allows college player props, so you can bet an individual college player’s stats, something many states have banned.

What is the betting age in North Carolina? It is 21 for sports betting, online or in person. That is higher than the 18 some people assume, and it applies statewide.

Where does North Carolina sports betting tax money go? A large share is earmarked for college athletics. HB 347 sends $300,000 a year each to 13 UNC-system universities (the smaller Division I and II schools, not NC State or UNC-Chapel Hill, at least until July 2027) and lets them split 20% of remaining proceeds. The tax also funds $2 million a year for problem-gambling treatment, $2 million for youth sports, and the state General Fund.

How many sportsbooks are legal in North Carolina? Seven as of mid-2026: FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM, Caesars, bet365, Fanatics, and theScore Bet. It was eight at launch; Underdog closed its sportsbook in December 2025 and ESPN BET rebranded to theScore Bet the same month.

Is Kalshi legal in North Carolina? Kalshi operates in North Carolina as a federally regulated prediction market. Rather than trying to shut it down, the state moved to recognize and tax prediction markets, with a 6% levy starting January 1, 2027. The broader legal status of these markets is still being fought out in the federal courts.

Can I bet in person in North Carolina? Yes, but only at tribal casinos: Harrah’s Cherokee, Harrah’s Cherokee Valley River, and Catawba Two Kings. The eight sports-venue sportsbooks that HB 347 authorized (at places like Charlotte Motor Speedway and PNC Arena) had not opened as of mid-2026.