How Australia Became One of the World’s Biggest Gambling Markets

Australia is one of the world’s biggest gambling markets per adult, and the reason is pokies in pubs and clubs, not online casinos. In 2024-25 Australians lost A$32,999.0 million on legal gambling, or A$1,527.9 for every adult, and gaming machines in hotels and clubs took A$17,444.0 million of that, about 53%. Licensed wagering on racing and sport added A$8,453.5 million, while online casino games are not legal to offer to Australians at all under the Interactive Gambling Act 2001 (IGA).

G’day, Bros. The old version of this post said Australia had become a giant of the online casino world. That was wrong, and we have binned it. The real story is stranger and more Australian: a country where the pokies sit next to the meat raffle at the local RSL, where the bookie is an app on your phone, and where the biggest online casinos you can reach are, legally speaking, not supposed to be talking to you. Below we lay out the numbers from the official national dataset, how the market got this big, why pokies dominate, what the law says about online casinos, and what changes from 2027. Facts stay sober from here on.

Australian gambling in 10 numbers (2024-25)

All figures below come from the Queensland Government Statistician’s Office (QGSO), Australian Gambling Statistics, 41st edition, released 11 August 2026, which collects data from every state and territory gaming authority. “Expenditure” means the net amount lost by players (bets minus winnings), which is the same as the gross profit of the operators. “Per adult” means per resident aged 18 and over, which is how QGSO calculates its per capita tables.

• A$32,999.0 million lost on legal gambling across Australia, up 2.7% on 2023-24.
• A$1,527.9 lost per adult on average.
• A$17,444.0 million lost on gaming machines in hotels and clubs (casino machines are counted separately), up 7.1% in a year.
• A$807.7 per adult lost on pub and club pokies alone.
• 186,643 gaming machines operating at 30 June 2025, 89,430 of them in New South Wales.
• A$8,453.5 million lost on racing and sports betting (wagering).
• A$3,370.5 million lost at casinos, A$3,193.9 million on lotteries and A$482.8 million on keno.
• A$0 from licensed “interactive gaming”, because no online casino is licensed to serve Australians.
• A$283,550 million in total turnover (money bet, including re-bet winnings).
• A$9,856.8 million collected by state and territory governments in gambling taxes and levies.

Two points before going further. First, QGSO marks the national total as incomplete for some series, because not every jurisdiction can report every product in the same way, so treat the figures as the best official count rather than a perfect one. Second, nothing in these tables measures offshore online casino play. Money lost at unlicensed sites does not show up in any state’s returns, which means the true national loss is higher than A$33 billion by an amount nobody can measure precisely.

Where the money goes: losses by product

The table shows how the A$33 billion splits across products. The share column is our calculation from the QGSO totals.

Read the table and one thing jumps out: more than half of every gambling dollar lost in Australia goes into a pokie in a pub or club. Add the machines inside casinos (which QGSO folds into the casino line) and the electronic gaming machine share is higher still. Wagering is the clear number two and the fastest-moving part of the market in how people bet, if not in how much they lose. Lotteries fell sharply in 2024-25, down 8.1%, the only major product to shrink by that much.

The growth pattern matters too. Pokie losses rose 7.1% in a single year while lotteries dropped, so the market is becoming more concentrated in the product that gambling researchers associate most strongly with harm. If you want the mechanics behind that, our guide to real money pokies explains return to player, volatility and why a machine that pays back 90% still empties a wallet over a long session.

Turnover vs losses: why the headline numbers differ so much

News stories sometimes quote “Australians bet A$280 billion a year” and sometimes “Australians lose A$33 billion”. Both can be right, because they measure different things.

• Turnover is the total amount bet. On pokies it counts every spin, including spins paid for with credits you just won. QGSO’s 2024-25 national turnover figure is A$283,550 million, of which A$219,662 million was on hotel and club gaming machines.
• Expenditure is turnover minus winnings paid out, the money players actually lose. That is the A$32,999.0 million figure.
• Government revenue is the slice of expenditure the states take through gaming taxes, licence fees and levies: A$9,856.8 million in 2024-25.

Here is a worked example. Put A$100 into a pokie set to return 90% and play it through at A$1 a spin. You may well spin A$1,000 or more before the A$100 is gone, because wins are fed back in. Turnover records the A$1,000; expenditure records the A$100. That ratio is why pub and club turnover (A$219.7 billion) is roughly 12.6 times pokie expenditure (A$17.4 billion). QGSO’s notes add that in most jurisdictions machines must return at least 85% of wagers to players over the machine’s lifetime.

For casinos, turnover is even rougher: QGSO says casino turnover is measured as “handle”, the cash exchanged for chips, because nobody can count every re-bet at a table. Use expenditure when you compare products or states. It is the most honest measure of what gambling costs players.

State by state: New South Wales is the engine

Gambling is regulated by each state and territory, and the differences between them are big. This table uses QGSO’s 2024-25 expenditure figures and its count of machines operating at 30 June 2025.

New South Wales alone accounts for about 41.6% of national gambling losses and about 52% of national pub and club pokie losses. Its adults lose A$2,035 each per year on average, A$1,344 of it on hotel and club machines. No other state comes close on pokies per adult; Queensland is next at A$857, then the Northern Territory at A$798.

Western Australia is the outlier that proves the rule. It reports zero hotel and club pokie losses because WA has never allowed gaming machines in pubs and clubs; the state government restricts electronic gaming machines to the Crown Perth casino. WA’s per adult loss of A$879 is the lowest of any state and well under half the New South Wales figure, even though West Australians bet on racing and sport (A$890.3 million in wagering losses) about as keenly as anyone else. Wagering makes up 43% of WA’s gambling losses, against about 21% in New South Wales.

The Northern Territory is a different kind of outlier. Its per adult number of A$1,869 is inflated by casino spending (A$569 per adult) in a small population that receives many interstate and overseas visitors, which QGSO warns can distort per capita figures for small jurisdictions.

How Australia got here: a timeline

Australia’s gambling market was not built in one go. It grew in layers: clubs first, casinos second, statewide pokie networks third, then phone and internet betting, and finally a long run of Commonwealth rules to rein in the online side.

The club era (1956 to the 1980s)

New South Wales was the pioneer. When it legalised poker machines in registered clubs in 1956, the money went to community clubs: RSLs, leagues clubs, bowling clubs and workers’ clubs. Machine revenue paid for subsidised meals, sports facilities and cheap drinks, and the clubs became social hubs. That is the root of the “pokies are part of the furniture” culture people mean when they call Australia a gambling nation. Other states held out for decades, partly because they watched NSW clubs grow rich and partly because of opposition from churches and community groups.

The casino era (1973 onwards)

Tasmania broke the casino taboo with Wrest Point in 1973. It was a hotel-casino on the Derwent River, sold as a tourism draw. Over the following decades, every state and territory licensed at least one casino, usually a single large venue with exclusive rights in its city. Today the big names are Crown Melbourne, Crown Perth, Crown Sydney, The Star Sydney, The Star Gold Coast and The Star Brisbane, alongside smaller casinos in places such as Hobart, Launceston, Darwin, Adelaide and Canberra. Casinos are glamorous but, by the numbers, they are only about a tenth of the market.

The statewide pokie era (1990s)

The decisive change came in the early 1990s, when cash-strapped state governments saw what NSW was earning and moved machines out of casinos and into suburban pubs and clubs. Queensland’s first legal club and hotel machines arrived in February 1992, Victoria’s in 1992, and South Australia’s in 1994. Tasmania and the territories built networks of their own. Western Australia alone kept machines confined to its casino. That decade is when Australia’s per adult losses jumped into world-leading territory, because pokies became available within a short drive of almost every home outside WA.

The phone and online betting era (2000s to now)

Betting on horse racing is older than Federation, but how Australians bet has changed completely. State TABs were joined by corporate bookmakers, many of them licensed in the Northern Territory, and by the 2010s betting had moved onto smartphones. Sports betting became a fixture of football broadcasts, which is a big reason advertising sits at the centre of the reform debate. The ANU’s 2025 survey found that 88.5% of Australians who bet on sport did at least some of it online, as did 76.9% of race bettors.

The regulation era (2017 to 2027)

From 2017 the Commonwealth moved from writing rules to enforcing them: the 2017 amendments, ACMA website blocking from November 2019, BetStop in 2023, the credit card ban in 2024 and the 2026 reform bill. States have run their own reviews and reforms in parallel, including inquiries into casino operators. The direction of travel is clear: legal products are being fenced in more tightly, and illegal offshore products are being pushed harder.

Why pokies dominate Australian gambling

Lots of countries have slot machines. Few have them in ordinary pubs and community clubs at Australian density. Five factors explain why gaming machines take more than half of all losses.

1. Availability in everyday venues

QGSO counted 186,643 gaming machines operating in Australia at 30 June 2025, outside WA’s casino-only model mostly spread across thousands of pubs and clubs. New South Wales has 89,430 of them for an adult population of about 6.7 million, roughly one machine for every 75 adults. A pokie in a casino is a destination; a pokie at the local is a habit. Our guide to Australian gambling slang shows how deeply “the pokies”, “the TAB” and “having a slap” sit in everyday speech.

2. The club funding model

Clubs in NSW and Queensland are not-for-profit organisations that use machine revenue to run facilities and support sports and community groups. That gives pokies a political constituency: any proposal to cut machine numbers or limit bets is met by warnings about club closures and job losses. The 2024-25 figures show the scale: NSW clubs and hotels together kept A$9,059.1 million of player losses before tax.

3. State tax dependence

Gaming machines produced A$5,804.8 million of state government revenue in 2024-25, about 59% of the A$9,856.8 million that states raised from all gambling. New South Wales alone took A$2,531.2 million from machines. That revenue funds hospitals, schools and roads, which makes treasuries cautious about reforms that would shrink it. Researchers and parliamentary committees have pointed to this dependence for years as one reason pokie reform moves slowly.

4. Product design

Modern machines allow fast spins, many lines per bet and feature rounds that make losses feel like near-misses. Each state sets maximum bets, spin speeds, cash load-up limits and minimum returns, and the rules differ. The common thread is a fast, repeatable product available for long hours. If you want to understand the pieces, our explainer on casino games in Australia links through to how each game type works, and the pokies guide covers RTP and volatility in detail.

5. Growth after COVID

Venue closures in 2020 cut pokie losses hard, to A$10,198.2 million in 2019-20. Once venues reopened, losses climbed past their old levels: A$16,293.1 million in 2023-24 and A$17,444.0 million in 2024-25. As a share of household disposable income, pub and club pokie losses rose from 0.78% in 2019-20 to 1.02% in 2024-25.

Wagering: racing, sport and the move to apps

Wagering is the second pillar of the market: A$8,453.5 million in player losses in 2024-25, or A$391.41 per adult, and 25.6% of all gambling losses. That share has grown over time. In 1999-00 wagering was 13.3% of national losses; by 2024-25 it was 25.6%, although QGSO warns that the shift to point of consumption taxes breaks the series around 2019-20, so the two numbers are not perfectly comparable.

Three features define Australian wagering today:

• It is legal online. Unlike casino games, racing and sports betting can be offered online by Australian-licensed providers. That is why the betting apps advertised during the footy are legal and the online casinos are not.
• It is taxed where the punter lives. QGSO notes that every state and territory except the Northern Territory now charges a point of consumption tax on wagering, so the tax follows the customer rather than the bookmaker’s licence.
• It is mostly digital. In the ANU’s January 2025 survey, 12.6% of adults bet on races and 7.0% bet on sport in the past year, and most of that betting was done online.

Licensed wagering also carries most of the new consumer protections. Since 11 June 2024, licensed online bookmakers cannot accept credit cards or digital currency. Since 21 August 2023, a single BetStop registration blocks a person from every licensed online and phone wagering provider for the period they choose. Neither of those protections reaches offshore casinos, a point we come back to below.

Online casinos and the law: what “illegal” actually means

This is where the old post went most wrong, so here is the position in plain terms. Under the Interactive Gambling Act 2001, offering online casino games (including online pokies, roulette, blackjack, baccarat and online poker) to people in Australia is an offence for the operator, not the player. No online casino is licensed to serve Australians. Every site that offers casino games to Australian players is offshore and operating outside Australian law.

QGSO’s own glossary says the same thing from a statistics angle: interactive gambling services provided to Australian residents by an internet casino are banned under the IGA, which came into effect in August 2001. That is why its “interactive gaming” line reads zero for 2024-25. The Northern Territory once licensed online casinos that served only overseas customers, which explains the small figures in earlier years of the series.

What the IGA covers and what it does not

How the ACMA enforces it

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) investigates complaints about illegal offshore gambling and, since November 2019, has asked internet service providers to block illegal sites. As of 24 September 2026, 1,822 illegal gambling websites had been blocked. Operators often respond by launching mirror domains, so blocking is a running battle rather than a one-off fix. ACMA also refers breaches to payment providers and publishes the list of blocked sites so players can check.

Do Australians still play online casinos?

Yes, and the ANU data shows it is growing. In January 2025, 3.1% of Australian adults reported playing casino table games in the past year, and 11.8% of that group played at least some of it online, up from 4.8% a year earlier. Among the 14.6% who played electronic gaming machines, the online share rose from 6.5% to 12.0%. The ANU authors note that online engagement in machines and casino table games grew “despite legal restrictions”.

For players, the practical risks are the important part:

• No Australian complaint route. If an offshore casino refuses to pay, no Australian regulator can order it to.
• No BetStop coverage. Self-exclusion on BetStop does not reach offshore casinos.
• Slow or capped withdrawals. Weekly and monthly withdrawal caps are common, and withdrawals can take days.
• Payment friction. Many Australian banks block gambling card payments on their own initiative, which pushes players towards crypto and vouchers with fewer protections.

We cover what to check before using any offshore site, including how to look up a domain on ACMA’s blocked list, in our safety checklist for Australian players, and our Australian casino reviews state plainly which sites hold no Australian licence. The honest summary is that the legal, protected parts of the Australian market are pokies at venues, licensed betting, lotteries and keno.

Land-based casinos: glamorous, but a tenth of the market

Casinos lost players A$3,370.5 million in 2024-25, 10.2% of the national total and 2.7% less than in 2023-24. That figure includes casino gaming machines as well as table games. Victoria (A$957.8 million) and New South Wales (A$722.2 million) are the largest casino markets, followed closely by Queensland (A$717.7 million) and WA (A$551.7 million).

The biggest names are Crown Melbourne, Crown Perth and Crown Sydney, plus The Star Sydney, The Star Gold Coast and The Star Brisbane, which opened at Queen’s Wharf on 29 August 2024 and replaced Treasury Brisbane. These resorts run table games such as baccarat, blackjack and roulette alongside machines. The period since 2021 has brought several state inquiries into casino operators and tighter supervision, which is one reason casino numbers have been flat while pub and club pokies have grown.

If you are curious how the table games themselves work, the maths does not change between a casino floor and anywhere else. Our keno guide shows why keno carries one of the highest house edges of any common game, and the games hub covers blackjack, roulette and baccarat odds.

Lotteries and keno: the quiet, steady part

Lotteries (lotto, pools while they lasted, and instant scratchies) lost players A$3,193.9 million in 2024-25, 8.1% less than the year before. Every jurisdiction recorded a fall. Lotteries are still the most widely played form of gambling: in the ANU’s 2025 survey, 41.3% of adults had bought a lottery ticket in the past year, far more than any other product, and 19.4% had bought scratch tickets.

Keno is small by comparison, A$482.8 million in losses, but it is everywhere in pubs and clubs on screens above the bar. QGSO defines it as a game where players bet that their numbers match some of 20 numbers drawn from 80. Keno losses are concentrated in New South Wales (A$184.6 million) and Queensland (A$149.7 million); WA reports none.

Who gambles: what the surveys say

Expenditure data tells you how much is lost. Surveys tell you how many people take part, and how many are at risk. The two main national sources disagree slightly because they ask different samples at different times, so we show both.

The headline finding is a split. Fewer Australians gamble than before COVID, but those who do are more likely to gamble at risky levels and more likely to do it online. The ANU study found that almost 1 in 5 adults gambled at risky levels in the year to January 2025, a rise of more than five percentage points in twelve months. It also found that about 5.9% of adults had been harmed by another person’s gambling.

The activities with the biggest participation in 2025 were lottery tickets (41.3% of adults), scratchies (19.4%), raffles (15.4%), electronic gaming machines (14.6%) and race betting (12.6%). Sports betting reached 7.0% of adults, and casino table games 3.1%.

Harm and the policy response

Australia’s large per adult losses have made gambling harm a mainstream policy issue. The responses fall into four groups.

The 2023 parliamentary inquiry

The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs tabled its report on online gambling harm, “You win some, you lose more”, on 26 June 2023. It made 31 recommendations. The best known was a phased ban on all forms of online gambling advertising over three years. Other recommendations covered a national regulator for online gambling, stronger consumer protections and funding for harm reduction. The government’s eventual 2026 package did not adopt a total advertising ban, which is why the debate continues.

Commonwealth consumer protections

• BetStop (from 21 August 2023): free national self-exclusion from licensed online and phone wagering, for three months up to a lifetime ban.
• Credit card ban (from 11 June 2024): licensed online wagering providers cannot accept credit cards or digital currency.
• Website blocking (from November 2019): 1,822 illegal gambling sites blocked as of 24 September 2026.

State action on pokies

Because pokies are state-regulated, the biggest lever on the biggest product sits with state governments. States set machine caps, venue entitlements, maximum bets, cash limits, opening hours and harm-minimisation rules, and several have run trials of card-based or cashless gaming. Progress varies by state, and the club and hotel lobbies remain influential.

Help services

Gambling Help Online offers free, confidential support 24 hours a day on 1800 858 858 and at gamblinghelponline.org.au, with counselling by phone, chat and email, plus links to face-to-face services in each state. You do not need to have a “problem” to call; worry about your own or someone else’s gambling is enough. Our responsible gambling page lists the tools available to Australians, including BetStop, bank gambling blocks and deposit limits.

How Australia compares

International rankings of gambling losses per adult usually place Australia at or near the top. Most of those rankings come from commercial data that sits behind a paywall, so we do not reproduce their numbers here. What we can show from official data is how Australia’s own position has moved and how its states compare with each other.

Australia against its own past

The table corrects a common misreading. In nominal dollars, losses have nearly tripled since 1999-00. Adjusted for inflation, the average adult actually lost less in 2024-25 (A$1,528) than in 1999-00 (about A$1,895 in today’s dollars), and gambling takes a smaller slice of household income (1.92% against 3.18%). Australia’s market became huge in the 1990s; since then it has stayed huge, dipped during COVID, and climbed back. The fastest structural change in the last 25 years has been the growth of wagering, which rose from 13% to about 26% of losses.

Australia against itself, state by state

The gap between New South Wales (A$2,035 per adult) and Western Australia (A$879 per adult) is the most useful comparison in the whole dataset. Both states have casinos, lotteries and legal online wagering. The main difference is that one has 89,430 pub and club machines and the other has none outside its casino. If you want to know why Australia ranks so high internationally, that single comparison is most of the answer. For a global view of participation and market sizes, see our worldwide gambling statistics roundup.

What changes from 2027

The Commonwealth’s Gambling Reform Bill passed Parliament on 19 August 2026, and most of its measures start on 1 January 2027. Based on the government and ACMA material published so far, the main changes are:

• Wagering advertising limits: caps on how many betting ads can run on broadcast TV during daytime and evening hours, and no betting ads during live sport broadcasts in those hours, with further restrictions on ads at sports venues and on uniforms.
• Online advertising rules: new conditions on where and to whom gambling ads can be shown online.
• Affiliate and staff commissions: ACMA says the reforms ban commissions to staff or affiliates based on customer activity.

None of this legalises online casinos. If anything, the 2027 package makes it harder for offshore casinos to advertise to Australians or pay anyone to promote them. Expect ACMA blocking numbers to keep rising and more payment providers to refuse gambling transactions with unlicensed sites.

For pokies, the next changes will come from the states rather than Canberra. Watch for decisions on card-based play, lower load-up limits and machine numbers in New South Wales and Victoria, because those two states account for most pub and club losses.

How to read Australian gambling statistics without getting caught out

Gambling numbers get quoted badly all the time, including on the old version of this page. Five tips will keep you straight:

1. Check whether a figure is turnover or losses. A$283.6 billion bet and A$33.0 billion lost are both true for 2024-25. Only the second is what players are down.
2. Check whether “per capita” means adults. QGSO divides by residents aged 18 and over. Figures per head of the whole population, children included, look about a fifth lower.
3. Check the year and edition. QGSO publishes each August, and revises earlier years. Always quote the edition, as we do here (41st edition, 2024-25 data).
4. Remember what is missing. Offshore online casino losses are not in the official figures at all. Neither are illegal machines or private games.
5. Be wary of round world shares. Claims like “Australia has X% of the world’s pokies” are widely repeated but rarely traced to a current primary source. We have left them out until we can source them properly.

If you are new to gambling and trying to understand where the money goes, our piece on the easiest games for Australian beginners explains house edge in plain English, which is the single most useful idea for reading any of the numbers above.

FAQ

Is Australia the biggest gambling market in the world?

Not in total dollars, since much larger countries such as the United States and China spend more overall. Per adult, Australia is one of the highest-loss countries in the world: A$1,527.9 per adult in 2024-25, according to QGSO’s Australian Gambling Statistics, 41st edition.

How much do Australians lose on gambling each year?

A$32,999.0 million in 2024-25, up 2.7% on 2023-24, across pokies, wagering, casinos, lotteries, keno and minor gaming. That excludes money lost at illegal offshore sites, which no official dataset measures.

Why do pokies make up most of Australia’s gambling losses?

Because every state and territory except Western Australia allows gaming machines in pubs and clubs, not just in casinos. There were 186,643 machines operating at 30 June 2025, and hotel and club machines took A$17,444.0 million, about 53% of all losses.

Are online casinos legal in Australia?

No online casino is licensed to offer casino games to people in Australia. Under the Interactive Gambling Act 2001, offering online pokies, roulette, blackjack, baccarat or online poker to Australians is an offence for the operator, not the player. Online sports and racing betting with Australian-licensed providers is legal.

Which state gambles the most?

New South Wales, by a long way: A$13,713.3 million in losses in 2024-25, or A$2,035.09 per adult, with A$9,059.1 million lost on pub and club pokies. Western Australia has the lowest per adult loss of the states at A$879.09, largely because it has no pokies outside the Crown Perth casino.

How many Australians gamble?

The ANU’s January 2025 survey found 58.8% of adults had gambled in the past 12 months, and 19.4% of adults gambled at risky levels. The AIFS National Gambling Trends Study found 73% in 2022, with 38% gambling at least weekly.

How much do state governments make from gambling?

A$9,856.8 million in 2024-25, of which A$5,804.8 million came from gaming machines. New South Wales collected A$3,625.5 million in total.

Where can I get help with gambling in Australia?

Call Gambling Help Online on 1800 858 858 or visit gamblinghelponline.org.au; it is free, confidential and open 24/7. You can also self-exclude from all licensed online and phone wagering through BetStop at betstop.gov.au.

Which country has the largest gambling industry?

Measured by total revenue, the United States is far larger than Australia: the American Gaming Association reports US$78.72 billion in commercial gaming revenue for 2025, and that figure leaves out tribal casinos and state lotteries. Australia’s A$33.0 billion of player losses in 2024-25 is much smaller in total, but per adult it is usually ranked at or near the top of the world. See our worldwide gambling statistics for other markets.