How Much Do Canadians Lose Gambling? The Real Numbers

In June 2026, the average active online gambling account in Ontario lost $304. Not wagered. Lost: money staked minus money won back, the way the province’s own regulator counts it.

That’s the closest thing this country has to a real answer to how much Canadians lose gambling. Search the question, though, and you’ll be told the average Canadian spends $6.75 a month. That number is real. It also comes from a telephone poll released in March 1998.

How much do Canadians lose gambling?

Nobody publishes a national figure. One province does publish a real one: iGaming Ontario (opens in a new tab), the agency that runs Ontario’s regulated online market, reports every month what players wagered, what they lost, and how many accounts were active. In June 2026, 1,319,000 active accounts lost $400.6 million between them.

The last three months on record

iGO published this data on 30 July 2026, covering the quarter to 30 June.

Across the full fiscal year to 31 March 2026, Ontarians staked $103.3 billion online and lost $4.27 billion of it. March 2026 was the single biggest month in the market’s history at $9.59 billion wagered.

What the regulator is actually counting

iGO’s term is non-adjusted gross gaming revenue, and its own definition is the useful part: total cash wagers “minus player winnings derived from cash wagers”. That’s the players’ net loss, taken from operator accounts rather than anyone’s memory. The figures are unaudited, and promotional bets placed with bonus credit aren’t included.

Where the $6.75 a month figure comes from

It comes from a poll of 1,000 Canadians conducted by telephone between 9 and 12 February 1998, and released by Ipsos on 10 March 1998 (opens in a new tab). The line reads: “the average Canadian spends $6.75 in an average month on gaming and gambling.” Six in ten said they gambled at all, and 3% said they spent over $100 a month.

It was a decent poll. It’s also 28 years old, and the pages repeating it almost never say so. One of the top-ranking Canadian gambling-statistics pages lists “the average Canadian spends $6.75 per month on gaming and gambling” alongside a claim about millions of active online gamblers, and the year 1998 appears nowhere on it. Lottery spending is the one corner of this with current, published numbers, and we’ve gone through those separately in what Canadians spend on lottery tickets.

Consider what didn’t exist when those calls were made. Single-event sports betting was a criminal offence in Canada until 27 August 2021 (opens in a new tab), five years ago this month. Ontario’s regulated online market opened in April 2022. Alberta became the second province with one on 13 July 2026 (opens in a new tab), three weeks ago. A 1998 respondent answering a question about monthly gambling spend was thinking about lottery tickets and a bingo hall.

Wagered and lost aren’t the same number

This is where a lot of coverage goes wrong. Headlines say Ontarians “gambled $103 billion”, which is true and reads as though the money is gone. Players got most of it back and staked it again.

On a slot machine paying out around 96%, a $100 deposit comes back as roughly $96, which gets played again, and again. Your original $100 can generate a couple of thousand dollars of recorded wagers before it runs out. The handle counts every one of those spins. The loss counts the $100.

Across Ontario’s market that gap works out to about 4 cents kept per dollar wagered. June 2026 breaks out like this.

It’s mostly not sports betting

The public conversation since 2021 has been about sports betting, the ads during the game, the odds read out in the broadcast. Most of the money is somewhere else. Online casino games account for 88 cents of every dollar wagered in Ontario and 79% of everything players lose. Sports betting is 11% of the handle.

Sports betting holds roughly twice as much per dollar staked, at 7.6 cents against 3.8. But casino games get played so much faster that they produce far more loss overall. A parlay is one bet on a Sunday. A slot is a few hundred spins in an evening.

Why nobody can give you a national number

Four reasons, and they compound.

Only two provinces run open markets. Ontario’s numbers cover private operators under agreement with iGO. They deliberately exclude OLG’s own online games and horse racing, so even Ontario’s real total is higher than the published one. Alberta’s market is three weeks old, and the province estimates that unregulated operators still hold about 70% of it. Everywhere else, a provincial corporation reports gambling as one line in an annual report.

The best national estimate is seven years old. Rhys Stevens at the University of Lethbridge compiled Canadian gambling revenue back to 1970 for a national research study, and puts it at $14.51 billion in 2019, or about $500 per Canadian adult (opens in a new tab). That’s a research blog entry rather than a peer-reviewed paper, and it predates legal sports betting entirely. It’s still the most careful number available. It works out to about $42 a month per adult, more than six times the 1998 poll figure.

The best participation data is from 2018. Statistics Canada’s survey found 64.5% of Canadians aged 15 or older gambled in the past year (opens in a new tab), and that 1.6% of them, about 304,400 people, were at moderate-to-severe risk of a gambling problem. That study also found something worth keeping in view: people in the lowest-income households were the least likely to gamble at all, and the most likely to be harmed when they did.

And asking people doesn’t work. Robert Wood and Robert Williams put the same question to 2,424 Ontario gamblers twelve different ways (opens in a new tab) and got significantly different answers depending on the wording, then checked each against actual gambling revenue. Household spending surveys come in far under the real figure. Some behaviour surveys come in over it, because “spend” reads as total staked rather than net loss. In the American version of this exercise, gamblers reported finishing the year $3 billion ahead at casinos, in a year the casinos took more than $20 billion off them.

The regulator’s monthly file is an accounting record. Almost everything else is a recollection. If you want the research on why people keep playing while knowing the odds, that’s a separate and better-studied question, and we’ve covered it in why people play the lottery.

A draw with nothing staked

Lodavo is a free Canadian app that runs a weekly cash draw, and the tickets come from saving rather than staking. Every $25 you save earns a free ticket, the draw runs every Sunday with a top prize of $10,000, and at least $100 goes to a user every week. You keep your money in your own bank account the whole time.

It’s the same feeling as having something riding on the weekend. You pick numbers, you check them Sunday against the winning numbers, you might win real money. What’s missing is the part where the number above your balance goes down. Nothing is staked, so there’s no 4 cents on the dollar going anywhere, and the worst week you can have is one where you saved money and didn’t win.

That structure is why it isn’t a bet, and the distinction is a legal one rather than a marketing line. We set out the mechanics in is prize-linked savings gambling, and the wider idea in our guide to prize-linked savings in Canada.

The short version

The average active online gambling account in Ontario lost $304 in June 2026, and $4.27 billion went the same way across the market last fiscal year. The $6.75 figure floating around the search results is a 1998 telephone poll, and the reason it survives is that almost nothing has replaced it.

If the appeal is the draw itself, that part works fine 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.