Betting in America Now Tops Music, Film, Books, and Museums Combined

Americans wagered an estimated $166 billion on sports betting in 2025, a figure that now exceeds the combined annual revenue of the US movie, music, book, and museum industries. For PSPs and acquiring teams, the point is not just scale: betting has become a mainstream consumer spend category, with enough volume to matter on its own balance sheet.

1. According to recent data, gambling has become Americans’ favorite pastime in spending terms, with total wagering outpacing other entertainment categories such as music and cinema. Martin Conway, an adjunct lecturer in Georgetown University’s Sports Industry Management program, said sports gambling has filled a gap in the entertainment market and is increasingly competing with entertainment and hospitality for consumers’ time and spending.
2. Conway also said sports betting is no longer just about picking a winner. In-game bets and proposition bets let fans wager on specific moments inside a contest, which has turned betting into a more interactive form of fan engagement. That matters for operators and their payment stacks because it creates more frequent, smaller-value transaction flow rather than a single pre-game ticket.
3. Legal sports wagering in most of the US was virtually nonexistent before the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban in 2018. What followed was one of the fastest expansions of a consumer industry in modern American history, and 2025 numbers show the scale of that shift: $166 billion wagered on sports betting, versus $8.87 billion for the North American box office, $11.5 billion in recorded music revenue, $18.51 billion in live music, $14.6 billion in book publishing revenue tracked by the Association of American Publishers, and an estimated $16.4 billion for US museums.
4. Those entertainment categories together produced roughly $70 billion in revenue, still less than half of what Americans bet on sporting events in 2025. The comparison is clean and a little brutal: betting has become a larger consumer money flow than several established leisure sectors combined, which is exactly why it shows up on PSP risk lists and not just on sportsbook growth decks.
5. The $166 billion figure also excludes sports wagering through prediction market platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket, which have expanded into sports-related contracts after receiving federal regulatory approval. Whether prediction markets count as gambling is still disputed, but the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries called them “hidden gambling.”

Victor Matheson, an economist at Holy Cross, said prediction markets could add another $50 billion to $100 billion in annual betting handle. If you combine that with legal sportsbooks and unreported tribal wagering, total US sports betting volume in 2025 may have approached $300 billion. One more detail for anyone pricing this market: betting losses are highly concentrated rather than evenly spread.