Alberta Online Gambling: What It's Costing Albertans

On July 13, 2026, Alberta became the second province in Canada to let private companies run online casinos and sportsbooks, with 22 operator sites live on day one. Ontario did the same thing in April 2022 and has published its numbers every month since. That’s four years of receipts, and it’s the closest thing anyone has to a forecast for what Alberta online gambling will cost the people who live here. Ontario players lost $1.41 billion in the market’s first year. Last fiscal year they lost $4.27 billion. Alberta has about 30% of Ontario’s adult population.

What actually opened in Alberta on July 13?

Twenty-two approved gambling sites went live at once, including bet365, DraftKings, FanDuel and BetMGM. The Alberta iGaming Corporation (opens in a new tab) runs the market and AGLC regulates it, the same split Ontario uses. Operators keep 80% of net gaming revenue and the province retains the other 20%. On top of that, 2% of gross gaming revenue goes to First Nations initiatives and 1% to social responsibility programs.

The province’s stated reason is that the money was leaving anyway. Alberta estimates unregulated operators held roughly 70% of the province’s online gambling market before July, which means most of what Albertans were losing went to companies with no Canadian licence, no advertising rules and no obligation to hand anyone a self-exclusion form.

What Alberta did that Ontario didn’t

Two things, and both are real improvements. A centralized self-exclusion system (opens in a new tab) was working on launch day, so one application shuts you out of every registered site at once, plus land-based casinos if you want it to. And operators pay for intensive outpatient treatment for Albertans who need it.

“That’s something that we did on Day 1 that Ontario did not do,” Service Alberta and Red Tape Reduction Minister Dale Nally told CBC News (opens in a new tab). “The other thing that we did that Ontario did not do was we put in system-wide self-exclusion on Day 1.” He’s right on both counts. Ontario took years to get there.

What did four years cost Ontario?

The agency that runs Ontario’s market publishes a monthly file with the total wagered and the total operators kept. The second number is what players lost. Here’s the whole record, from iGaming Ontario’s market performance report (opens in a new tab):

Nothing in that table is a projection. It’s four consecutive years of a market that tripled, in a province whose adult population grew about 8% across the same stretch.

What that file counts, and what it leaves out

Two caveats worth carrying. First, iGO’s figures exclude OLG’s own online gambling and horse racing betting, so the real Ontario total is higher than the table. Second, the market reports count active player accounts rather than people, and one person can hold accounts at several sites. We went through both quirks in more detail in how much Canadians lose gambling.

So what does that mean for Alberta?

Statistics Canada puts Alberta’s adult population at 3.97 million against Ontario’s 13.36 million (opens in a new tab), so Alberta is 29.7% the size on the only measure that matters here. Apply that share to Ontario’s actual results and you get two numbers:

• Ontario’s first year, at Alberta’s scale: about $419 million.
• Ontario’s most recent year, at Alberta’s scale: about $1.27 billion.

Alberta’s own budget lets you sanity-check the first one, and it comes out higher. The province retains 20% of net gaming revenue, and its fiscal 2026-27 covers about eight and a half months of the new market. Working backwards from the Budget 2026 fiscal plan (opens in a new tab), which forecasts $75 million from the Alberta iGaming Corporation in 2026-27 and $109 million by 2028-29, that $75 million implies about $375 million of revenue in an eight-and-a-half-month window. Annualized, roughly $520 million.

So Alberta expects to open about a quarter above the pace Ontario set in 2022, and that’s the province’s own number rather than anyone’s argument about the policy. It isn’t surprising either. Ontario went first, with operators arriving in waves over its opening year. Alberta opened with 22 sites at once, into a province where most people gambling online were already doing it somewhere else.

The gap between those two numbers is the whole story

Roughly $850 million a year separates where Alberta starts from where Ontario is now, and Ontario travelled that distance in four years without anything dramatic happening. No scandal, no new law, no crisis. The market just kept growing.

Weren’t Albertans already losing this money?

Some of it, and the amount is bigger than most people assume. AGLC’s own annual report (opens in a new tab) puts Play Alberta’s online gambling net sales at $269.9 million in the year to March 2025, up from $192.6 million two years earlier. That’s a 40% climb in two years, on one government-run site with no advertising war behind it.

Now put that beside the province’s estimate that unregulated operators held about 70% of the market. If Play Alberta was the regulated 30%, Albertans were already losing somewhere near $900 million a year online, most of it to companies nobody could measure.

That reframes the question. Alberta isn’t starting from zero, so the regulated market’s first job is moving existing spending onshore rather than creating it. The number that decides whether this costs Albertans more is whether the total grows once 22 companies start competing for attention.

Ontario answered that one. Its regulated total didn’t just absorb the grey market. It tripled in four years.

Why the ads are everywhere right now

If you live in Alberta you’ve noticed. Paul Messinger, a marketing professor at the University of Alberta, expects the current frequency to last three to six months before it tapers to something steadier. His concern is where the ads land.

“We have a number of forms of entertainment, forms of gambling, which are possible in casinos [or] in racetracks, and those are very carefully regulated,” he told CBC. “But this really takes it into our living rooms … and the risks of people really betting too much, putting in jeopardy their financial security, are pretty high.”

Carrie Shaw, an assistant psychology professor at the same university, made the availability point plainly. “There’s times where the casino is closed. However, online gambling doesn’t have that open and closed time, so it’s readily available 24/7. You don’t have to leave your home to engage.”

Alberta’s rules do restrict what operators can say. Ads can’t depict minors or people who look like minors, can’t use characters or celebrities that mainly appeal to young people, and can’t promote bonuses or free bets to anyone who hasn’t opted into direct marketing. What the rules don’t cap is volume, and Nally has been open about why: he thinks legal operators need to outshout the offshore ones to pull players away from them.

What comes back the other way

One percent of gross gaming revenue funds social responsibility programs. On a $419 million first year that’s about $4.2 million, and Alberta has asked for expressions of interest (opens in a new tab) in gambling addiction services beyond what Recovery Alberta already provides, which includes a 21-day bed-based treatment program and the existing help lines. The deadline is September 10.

Whether that’s enough is a question the next few years will settle. What’s already measurable is demand: 6,540 Albertans signed up for self-exclusion in fiscal 2024-25, which AGLC reports as a 66% increase year over year, and that was before a single private operator opened here.

If you want that option, it’s at selfexclusion.ca (opens in a new tab), and the GameSense Info Line is 1-833-447-7523. If you’d rather block access at the device level first, we went through the tools in apps to help you stop gambling in Canada.

There’s a version of this where you keep the money

Lodavo is a free Canadian app that runs a weekly cash draw, and the tickets come from saving instead of staking. Every $25 you keep saved earns a free ticket, the draw runs Sunday with a top prize of $10,000, and at least $100 goes to a user every week. Your money stays in your own bank account throughout, and you can check the winning numbers the same way you’d check anything else.

The appeal is honestly similar. You pick numbers, you wait for the weekend, you might win real money. What’s different is the direction the balance moves. Nothing is staked, so the worst Sunday available to you is one where you saved money and didn’t win. We set out why that structure isn’t a bet in is prize-linked savings gambling.

The short version

Alberta’s regulated online gambling market opened in July with 22 operators and genuinely better player protections than Ontario had at the same stage. It also opened into a province where people were already losing something close to $900 million a year online. Ontario’s four years of published data say a market like this triples, which would take Alberta from roughly $419 million to roughly $1.27 billion a year. Alberta’s own budget forecast starts it higher than that.

If the part you like is having a number to check on Sunday, that works without the stake. Download Lodavo free on the Apple App Store (opens in a new tab) or Google Play Store (opens in a new tab) and start earning tickets for the weekly draw.

Terms and conditions apply. No purchase necessary (alternate method of entry available). Skill-testing question required. Open to legal residents of Canada who are the age of majority. Odds depend on the number of eligible entries received. Full rules and odds at our contest rules.