PASPA Repeal (2018)

New Jersey brought the case after voters approved sports betting in 2011 and the state spent years losing in lower courts to the sports leagues. The Supreme Court's ruling was broader than many expected: rather than carving out an exception, it removed the federal ban entirely. New Jersey took its first legal bets within weeks. Delaware moved even faster. By the end of 2018 eight states had launched, and within five years more than 35 states plus Washington DC had legalised sports betting in some form, most of them online.

The state-by-state structure produced a patchwork: different tax rates, different rules on in-play betting and college sports, different licensing paths for operators and suppliers, and geolocation requirements to keep each state's bets inside its borders.

For operators, the repeal opened the largest untapped betting market in the world and set off a land-grab measured in billions of dollars of marketing spend. For suppliers it created a US demand for everything at once: sportsbook platforms, odds and data feeds, geolocation, KYC, payments and responsible-gambling tools, each needing state-level licensing or registration.

It also changed the industry's centre of gravity. European suppliers that had built for regulated markets found their compliance experience suddenly valuable, and US sports leagues went from suing over betting to signing data and sponsorship deals with operators.

A European sportsbook platform provider with no US business in 2017 has, by 2022, licences or registrations in a dozen states, a US data centre, a geolocation partner and a compliance team dealing with a dozen regulators. Each state took months to open and required its own certification of the platform.

• Geo-location & Geo-fencing — how state borders are enforced online.
• Turnover / Handle — the metric US regulators publish monthly by state.
• Hold Percentage — the sportsbook health figure analysts watch.
• UIGEA (2006) — the payment law that still shapes what is lawful.

Compare providers in the Sportsbook Providers category and see state rules on the Licenses pages.