Illinois Sports Betting May 2026: 16.33% Hold, $54.4M Tax – rg.org

IL Revenue Insights

Illinois sportsbooks took $1,141,572,489 in wagers in May 2026 and kept an unusually large $186,458,740 of it, a 16.33% hold that stands out sharply in a summer of collapsing margins. Handle fell about 10% year over year, the ninth straight month above a billion dollars for the nation’s second-largest market, yet the state’s tax haul climbed 20% to $54,378,828. Two forces drove the month: a rare high-margin performance, and the most aggressive tax structure in American sports betting. What the numbers do not yet show is the World Cup, which opened June 11, after this reporting period closed. Illinois reports later than any major state, so its May figures arrive alongside everyone else’s World Cup-battered June, which is exactly what makes the contrast so stark. Figures come from the Illinois Gaming Board.

The Hold That Makes Illinois an Outlier

Set Illinois’s 16.33% next to the numbers making headlines from June and it looks like it came from a different sport. New York, taking a record handle during the World Cup, held 5.19%. Kansas held 3.90%. Maryland’s soccer betting held 3.6%. Across the country, a tournament full of favorites that kept winning turned a betting boom into a margin disaster.

Illinois sportsbooks avoided all of that, for a simple reason: its data predates the tournament. May was the last full month before the World Cup, powered by the NBA and NHL playoffs and a full slate of Major League Baseball, none of which carries the favorite-heavy parlay risk that soccer group stages do. The result was a clean, high-margin month, and Illinois has always run hot on hold, posting 15.26% and 15.05% in the two prior Mays. This is a structurally high-margin market having one of its best months, captured just before the storm reached it.

That timing is the whole story. The question is no longer whether Illinois can hold 16%. It is whether it can hold anything close to that when its June report, still weeks away, finally lands.

What Illinois Bet On in May

The sports that carried the month were the ones on the screen. The NBA and NHL playoffs ran deep into May, Major League Baseball filled every night, and parlays, as always in Illinois, dominated the ticket count and did the heavy lifting on margin. Multi-leg bets are the reason a market holds in the mid-teens rather than the high single digits, and Illinois bettors build them relentlessly.

Soccer, by contrast, was a rounding error. In the last month before a home-hosted World Cup, the sport that is about to reorganize every book in the country barely moved the needle. That is not a knock on Illinois. It is the calm before an unprecedented month, and it makes the state’s May soccer line the cleanest possible baseline for measuring what the tournament does next.

“Illinois in May is what a sportsbook month looks like with no soccer in it. Sixteen percent hold, parlays humming, playoffs everywhere. Then you look at what the World Cup did to New York and Kansas in June, and you realize Illinois is sitting on a number that almost certainly cannot survive contact with the tournament. This is the before picture. The after is coming, and it reports late.””

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Online vs Retail Handle

DraftKings Won the Volume. FanDuel Won the Money.

The operator race told its own story, and it split cleanly in two. DraftKings led the state in dollars wagered, taking $416.2 million in handle. FanDuel took $110 million less, at $306.2 million, and still out-earned everyone, because it held 14.5%, the best win rate of any large book in Illinois.

The gap between the two giants is the most instructive line in the report. FanDuel turned less volume into more profit purely on pricing and results, and its 14.5% adjusted hold nearly matched the statewide gross figure. Behind them, the drop-off was steep. Fanatics held 8.8% on $110.1 million, BetMGM managed just 6.2%, and bet365 edged BetRivers for the final spot in the handle top ten. Together, DraftKings and FanDuel covered roughly $9 million of the state’s per-wager tax alone, a burden the smaller books have largely avoided by staying under the 20-million-bet threshold.

Handle Down, Tax Up: The Illinois Squeeze

The most quietly remarkable number in the report is the tax line. Illinois bettors wagered about $133 million less than they did last May, yet the state collected roughly $9 million more. That is not an accident. It is policy compounding.

Illinois abandoned its flat 15% tax in mid-2024 for a progressive structure that scales to 40% on the largest operators, then added a per-wager fee in July 2025, 25 cents on the first 20 million bets and 50 cents after. The state’s take as a share of gross revenue has climbed from 10.5% two Mays ago to 29.2% now, and for the biggest books the effective rate on taxable revenue tops 50%. A high-margin month funneled straight into that machine produces the paradox on display: a shrinking market that pays the state more every year.

“Springfield built a tax system that gets richer even when the market shrinks, and May proves it works exactly as designed. Handle down ten percent, tax up twenty. The risk nobody in the capitol wants to say out loud is that the same structure turns brutal in a low-hold month. If June’s World Cup collapse hits Illinois the way it hit everyone else, the state is about to find out what its tax looks like when there’s barely any revenue to tax.”

The World Cup Is the Real Test

Everything about Illinois’s May points forward. The 16.33% hold, the parlay dominance, the near-total absence of soccer, all of it is a snapshot of the market at its healthiest, taken the moment before the largest soccer event ever staged on this continent kicked off in June. Every other big state has already shown what that tournament does to a book’s margin, and Illinois, with the country’s most punishing tax structure, has the most to lose if its hold falls the way New York’s and Kansas’s did. Set against other US states, Illinois remains the number two market by handle and one of the most profitable per dollar. Whether it stays that way through a World Cup summer is the question its next report, whenever it finally arrives, will answer.

Sol Fayerman-Hansen is Editor-in-Chief at RG.org with 20+ years of experience in sports journalism, gambling regulation, and tech. His work has appeared in Forbes, ESPN, and NFL.com, covering U.S. and Canadian gambling laws, major sports events, and wagering trends. Since 2023, Sol has led RG.org’s global editorial efforts, focusing on transparency, data accuracy, and regulatory insight. He works closely with researchers and legal experts to uphold E-E-A-T and Trust Project standards.

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