Nearly 54% of US adults to wager on Super Bowl this year and bets to exceed $1 billion
| Updated: February 7, 2023 
The final playoff game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs this weekend is likely to attract a larger amount of bets than any sports event in U.S. history. According to some estimates, sportsbooks across the country could take in anywhere between $1 billion and $16 billion in wagers on Super Bowl LVII.
Considering last year’s record amount of $947 million spent on bets, even an estimate of $1 billion for 2023 is quite conservative. Considering the bets made through official sportsbooks (and it should be noted that many people still go to underground bookies), the amount wagered on this year’s game should be astronomical, with Kansas, Maryland, and Ohio joining the Super Bowl betting party for the first time. Our team at SportingPedia decided to look at the projections for 2023 based on a recent survey published by Statista that suggests that more than half of all American adults will be betting on the Super Bowl this year.
Wagers on Super Bowl in the Past
According to media reports, Americans spent roughly $947 million on Super Bowl bets last year. This is a massive amount considering not all states had legal betting – in fact, until 2019, wagers on sports events could be made legally only in Nevada. The 2022 figure is an estimation rather than an official figure for the sports betting handle taken in by all betting operators. The actual number could be several times higher, especially when including money wagered illegally.
Each year, the Nevada State Gaming Control Board releases figures from all sportsbooks just prior to Super Bowl that show how much has been wagered on the event. Along with the total handle, i.e. the total amount of wagers placed by bettors, the regulator also includes the amount sportsbooks have won from this betting and what percentage it is of the handle.
As the chart shows, the largest amount ever to be wagered on Super Bowl in Nevada was $179.8 million in 2022. You would think that after more and more states started legalizing sports betting, the amount wagered with sportsbooks in Las Vegas and across the state would fall. People from neighboring states would stop going there to place bets as they could now wager on their favorite teams from their home state and town. The numbers show a different trend, however – even though Americans could legally bet from multiple places in 2022, Nevada bookies still saw a huge amount of wagers on Super Bowl.
At the same time, the American Gaming Association also makes projections about the amount that will be wagered on various popular sports events. For 2022, the Association expected that a record 31.4 million American adults would bet on Super Bowl. According to their research, $7.61 billion was projected to be spent on Super Bowl LVI – 18.2 million people said they would place traditional sports wagers online, at a retail sportsbook, or with a bookie. Also, 18.5 million planned to bet casually with friends or as part of a pool or squares contest.
How Much Will Be Wagered on Super Bowl LVII?
After sports betting went live in several states late last year, legal wagers can now be placed across sportsbooks in 33 states and the District of Columbia. According to a survey among American adults published recently by Statista, 53.68 percent of people in the U.S. plan to place wagers on the Super Bowl. Interestingly, an equal percentage of adults (9.75%) say they would be betting either between $1 and $25 or between $51 and $100 on the event.
Another 6.3 percent of respondents say they plan to wager between $26 and $50, while 6.73 percent admit they will be spending a lot more on Super Bowl bets – between $500 and $1,000. Those who are not wagering on the game are in a minority – 46.33 percent of adults in the survey say they will not be spending any money.
It is impossible to predict how much Americans will actually spend on Super Bowl bets this year based on this survey, as it was based on a pool of only 1,159 respondents – hardly a representative sample of the adult population in all states that have legal sports betting. However, if the American Gaming Association’s projections are realistic, we can expect billions of dollars to be spent across hundreds of sportsbooks in the country on a single sports event.
This year, AGA expects betting on Super Bowl LVII to smash all previous records with 50.4 million Americans saying they would be placing bets. According to the survey commissioned by the Association, 30 million adults plan to place a traditional sports wager online, at a retail sportsbook, or with a bookie. This is an increase of 66 percent from 2022. AGA estimates that the total amount wagered on the game will be around $16 billion, more than twice the projection for last year.
However, the survey was conducted among 2,199 adults, also not enough people to be considered representative of the whole nation, and while the expected $16 billion in bets is a bit too optimistic a projection, AGA may be correctly predicting the growing interest for sports betting among Americans.
Methodology
The team at SportingPedia collected data for the total amounts wagered on Super Bowl over the past 30 years from the official website of the Nevada State Gaming Control Board, the regulatory body that oversees all gambling and sports betting activity in Las Vegas and the state of Nevada. We also looked at an interesting survey among more than 1,600 adults in the U.S. about their plans for Super Bowl LVII – whether they will place real money bets on the event and if so, how much they will spend. The survey was conducted in mid-January and published at the end of the month by Statista.