- A new National Bureau of Economic Research study found that legalizing sports betting reduced household food sufficiency by 2.1% among working-age adults without a college degree, a decline that climbs to 10.5% among active bettors.
- The researchers estimate that legalization across nine states led to roughly 284,000 additional food-insufficient households and $130.2 million in excess healthcare costs each year.
- The harm ran through financial distress, not mental health or job loss, and was worst during NFL season and among adults aged 25 to 44 and racial and ethnic minorities.
- Texas has no legal sports betting, but residents wager anyway through prediction markets, offshore sites and cross-border trips, so the study’s harm mechanism can reach Texans without the safeguards a regulated market would fund.
- The findings land during the World Cup, the largest betting event in U.S. history, and sharpen Texas’s stalled legalization debate.
AUSTIN – A growing body of research suggests that when a state legalizes sports betting, some of the money wagered comes straight out of the grocery budget. A new study puts a number on it, and the finding lands in the middle of Texas’s long-running fight over whether to legalize the practice at all.
The paper, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research and titled “Wagering the Bread Money,” is the first to measure how legal sports gambling affects household food sufficiency, the ability to consistently afford enough to eat. Using the staggered rollout of state betting laws between 2021 and 2023 and biweekly Census Household Pulse Survey data, economists Xiaohui Guo, Lizhong Peng and Chad Meyerhoefer found that legalization reduced food sufficiency by 2.1 percent among working-age adults without a college degree, an effect that climbs to a 10.5 percent decline among people who actually place bets.
The damage was not spread evenly. It was concentrated among adults aged 25 to 44 and among racial and ethnic minorities, and it tracked the sports calendar, deepening for three to five months during each NFL season. When the researchers traced the cause, they found the losses ran through financial distress, households simply running short of money, rather than through worse mental health or lost work. Scaling their estimates up, the authors calculate that legalizing sports betting across nine states produced roughly 284,000 additional food-insufficient households and $130.2 million in excess healthcare spending every year.
The study builds on earlier NBER research from 2024 that tied the spread of legal sports betting to lower savings, higher credit-card balances and more frequent overdrafts among financially vulnerable bettors. It also arrives amid a broader public-health warning. A 2025 review in The Lancet Regional Health – Americas described online sports gambling as a source of invisible risks fueled by gamified apps and aggressive advertising, found that roughly 61 percent of North American adults had gambled in the past year, and estimated that about 14 percent of them showed signs of risky gambling. The review singled out the 2026 World Cup, now underway, as a moment of mass exposure to betting promotion.
For Texas, the findings cut in two directions, because the state sits on the opposite side of the question the study examines. Texas has never legalized sports betting and is one of the largest states in the country without it, so the research technically measures a harm the state has so far avoided. To opponents of legalization, that is the point: the data shows that opening the market drives measurable financial pain into the households least able to absorb it.
But prohibition has not kept Texans from betting. Without a legal Texas sportsbook, residents wager through prediction markets, offshore sites that ignore U.S. rules, and drives across the border into Louisiana and Oklahoma. That means the financial-distress mechanism the study identifies can already reach Texans, just without the guardrails a regulated market is supposed to carry. Supporters of legalization argue that a licensed system would at least fund problem-gambling treatment, enforce deposit limits and self-exclusion, and let the state see harm it currently cannot measure. The study does not settle that argument. It measures what legalization does, not what prohibition prevents.
What is not in dispute is the timing. The research emerged as Americans bet more on the current World Cup than on any sporting event in the nation’s history, a surge visible even in Texas through prediction markets in Texas and offshore books. The industry outlet CDC Gaming, covering the paper, framed it as evidence that sports betting may be straining household food budgets even as legal wagering remains widely available nationwide.
None of it is likely to change Texas policy soon. Legalizing sports betting here would require a constitutional amendment, and repeated attempts have stalled in a Legislature that does not reconvene until 2027. Under current Texas gambling laws, the debate will keep circling the same question the NBER study sharpens: not just whether Texas should legalize betting, but who ends up paying when it does.