March Madness highlights Gen Z’s skyrocketing sports betting addiction

Super Bowl Sunday always mints a lot more winners and losers than just those who play in the game. It’s the biggest day in sports betting annually, with the American Gaming Association estimating a record $1.39 billion in the big game last month. For casual sports bettors, a Super Bowl wager might be enough gambling to last the entire year. For many others, though, it was just a warm-up for the 67 games of March Madness, the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament, which kicks off this week.

Sports betting has been a huge growth industry in the U.S. since it was legalized nearly seven years ago. With the help of online gambling companies such as DraftKings, legal sports betting brought in $13.7 billion in 2024 alone, up from $248 million—with an “m”—in 2017, when the industry was last restricted just to the state of Nevada. According to a new study, however, this enormous growth has come at the expense of financial stability, mental health, and a happy family life for millions of Americans—especially members of Gen Z.

Intuit Credit Karma commissioned the study from data firm Qualtrics ahead of March Madness, to shed light on some of the collateral damage wrought by the booming sports betting industry.

“Plenty of people bet on sports very manageably and responsibly,” says Courtney Alev, consumer financial advocate at Intuit Credit Karma. “But like any vice, it can be a slippery slope.”

The study’s findings show just how harmful sports betting has become since the 2018 SCOTUS decision in Murphy v NCAA made it legal in 38 states and Washington, D.C. Nearly a quarter (23%) of 1,000 respondents who engage in sports betting, or have a partner who does, admitted to being sports betting addicts. Almost the same number (22%) said that betting had caused financial distress for themselves and their families. And nearly half (48%) of all respondents claimed to have experienced mental health issues including depression as a result of their betting activity.

A separate, similar study published last month by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) further attests to the addictive nature of sports betting. That study analyzed aggregate Google search trends over the past eight years for queries that mentioned such words as gambling, addiction, and anonymous, and found that searches for help with gambling addiction cumulatively increased by 23% across the country in that time.

One demographic that seems particularly susceptible to sports betting addiction, according to the Intuit Credit Karma study, is Gen Z—37% of whom reported being addicted. That’s 14% more than the number of respondents across all age demographics claiming to be addicts.

“We’re seeing that sports betting is really impacting Gen Z at higher rates, which likely has a lot to do with just how digitally native that generation is,” Alev says. “Growing up in an era where everything is online, sports betting has just become another piece of that.”

Indeed, part of the reason so many users of all ages have gotten in over their heads seems rooted in online bets taking all the friction out of gambling. The rise of online sportsbooks such as FanDuel and ESPN Bet has essentially given most Americans a casino in their pocket at all times. It’s no wonder they’re reportedly responsible for 95% of all sports betting in the U.S.

These companies are known to spend up to a billion dollars annually on marketing, which anyone who’s watched an NFL game in recent years can attest. Part of their strategy for enticing new customers—and maintaining existing ones—is through eye-popping promotions that can be difficult to resist. FanDuel and DraftKings, for instance, both offer newcomers $150 in bonus bets on their first $5 bet, and sometimes offer deposit bonuses, matching a percentage of new money players add to their sportsbook accounts. Bonuses like these give the betting-curious uninitiated a positive early experience, hooking them in for the long haul.

As the Intuit Credit Karma study reveals, about a quarter of bettors (24%) pointed to these bonuses and incentives as primary motivators for their sports betting activity.

In addition to gathering data on the financial distress that follows many Americans’ sports betting, the study also reveals its impact on their partners and children’s lives.

“We wanted to focus on the family aspect of it too because if you’re addicted to something like sports betting, you might have blinders on in terms of whether you actually have a problem,” Alev says. “A lot of spouses and children deal with those negative implications, maybe even more so than the bettor themselves.”

To that end, roughly a quarter (23%) of partners of those surveyed claimed they’ve had to pull from their children’s college funds to either keep the hobby going or pay off debt related to it, while 16% reported abuse and another 16% reported family estrangement.

Not many guardrails exist to keep sports bettors from hitting bottom. Although the American Gaming Association launched the Have a Game Plan campaign in 2019 to encourage responsible betting, actual protections have been scant. In order to defend themselves and their families, Alev offers a common-sense solution for casual sports bettors: building in friction.

“Don’t save your credit card numbers, hide your card somewhere where you have to go find it—make it not just as simple as a click to be able to bet,” she says. “The important thing is forcing yourself to pause and reflect on where you are and the behavior.”

Beyond individual solutions, the JAMA study proposes some sweeping steps the U.S. government could take, including increased funding for gambling addiction services, enhanced advertising regulations, and stronger safeguards, such as betting limits and age limits, enforced breaks, and restrictions on credit card use for gambling.

The most effective solution, however, seems both obvious and elusive. As the Intuit Credit Karma study points out, 28% of sports bettors wish sports betting was illegal again.