The gender gap in iGaming: why men still make up 3 in 4 players
Regulator and industry data show the gender gap in iGaming is real but smaller than “82%” claims suggest — here’s what the numbers say.
Igaming Demographics: Who is Actually Betting?
iGaming demographics data on age, gender and region shows who really bets online, based on UK, US and EU regulator figures.
Regulator and market-research data from 2025–2026 shows the online gambling audience is broader and older than the "young man on his phone" stereotype suggests. In Great Britain, men aged 55 and over are now the only demographic group with a statistically significant rise in non-lottery gambling participation, while 18-to-24 participation keeps falling. In the US, sports betting has spread well beyond its early adopter base, and women's share of the market is rising in most mature jurisdictions. This category breaks down who is actually betting, by age, gender, region and channel — and why that data feeds directly into how GamblScout.com's algorithm scores operators.
Key takeaways
- The worldwide gambling market is projected to generate $655.31 billion in revenue in 2026, with user penetration at just 11.3% of the global population — most of the world still doesn't gamble.
- In Great Britain, 18–24 participation has fallen three years running (54% in 2023 to 48% in 2025), while men 55+ are the only group recording a statistically significant increase.
- US data shows the sports-betting audience broadening past its "young male" origin: 57% of American adults gambled in some form in the past year, and older bettors are the fastest-growing cohort.
- The gender gap in participation is narrowing but not closed: UK men are still more than three times as likely as women to bet, and men dominate daily online play in the US by a wide margin.
- Demographic data is a direct input into GamblScout.com's scoring — it flags which operator features (deposit limits, game mix, marketing tone) matter most to which player segments.
Table of contents
The global picture: market size and who's actually playing
Before breaking down age and gender, it helps to size the pool. Statista's Market Insights unit projects that
Revenue in the Gambling market is projected to reach US$655.31bn in 2026
, encompassing both online and land-based wagering. Despite the headlines about a booming industry,
user penetration in the Gambling market will be at 11.3% in 2026
, and the number of active users worldwide is expected to reach only
954.5m users by 2030
. In other words, the vast majority of adults globally still don't gamble at all — the "everyone bets now" narrative is a distortion driven by a comparatively small, high-frequency user base.
Regionally, EGBA and H2 Gambling Capital data reported by European Gaming put
Europe's gambling market at €123.4 billion in GGR in 2024, up 5% compared with 2023
, with
online play at 39%
of that total. Grand View Research, meanwhile, found Europe accounting for over 41% of the global online segment in 2025, confirming the region's outsized weight in any demographic analysis.
Age: the shifting center of gravity
The UK Gambling Commission's Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB) is the most granular public dataset available on gambling by age, because it is a large, government-commissioned survey rather than an operator-supplied estimate. Its most recent wave (September 2025–January 2026) found that
a higher proportion of males report gambling in the past 4 weeks than females (49 percent and 44 percent respectively), and overall gambling participation is highest among those aged 45 to 64 (54 to 56 percent)
. Once lottery-only players are stripped out, though, the picture shifts younger:
when those who only participated on a lottery draw are excluded, the age profile shifts downward, showing that those aged 35 to 44 have the highest gambling participation rates in the past 4 weeks (32 percent)
.
The trend over time is arguably more informative than any single snapshot. The Commission's third annual report found that
participation among 18 to 24 year olds dropped to 48% in 2025, compared with 52% in 2024 and 54% in 2023
, a three-year decline in young-adult engagement, while
the 35 to 44 age group had the highest overall participation rate, at 66%
on a 12-month basis. At the other end of the age range,
participation in non-lottery gambling among people aged 65 to 74 rose from 25% in 2023 to 29% in 2025
. The standout finding from the same survey is that
men aged 55 and over were the only group to record a statistically significant increase in non-lottery gambling participation
, even as
non-lottery participation among men aged 18 to 34 went from 54% to 51%, and the 35 to 54 bracket fell from 49% to 48%
over the same period.
Age patterns vary by market. A Statista breakdown of Portugal's licensed operators found that
the age group with the highest share of online gamblers in Great Britain was 45 to 54 years old, with a 42 percent share
— and separately, Portugal's gambling regulator reported that
the most representative age group of registered online gambling players was the one with ages between 25 and 34 years
in early 2025. The takeaway: "young adult" and "core online gambler" are not the same cohort once lottery play and jurisdiction are controlled for.
| Metric | Male | Female |
|---|---|---|
| Any gambling, past 4 weeks | 49% | 44% |
| Betting, past 4 weeks | 13% | 4% |
Overall participation varies by sex, where a higher proportion of males report gambling in the past 4 weeks than females (49 percent and 44 percent respectively)
, and
a significantly higher proportion of males report betting in the past 4 weeks than females (13 percent and 4 percent respectively)
, according to the Gambling Commission's official Wave 4 statistics.
The gender gap: narrowing, not closed
Across every mature market we've reviewed, men still gamble more than women, but the size of the gap is shrinking in specific product categories rather than uniformly. In the US, the American Psychiatric Association's national poll found
of adults who gamble daily, the majority are men (36% of men reported online gambling for at least a few minutes daily, whereas only 20% of women said the same), but men were more likely to report limiting their gambling than women
. A Siena College Research Institute and St. Bonaventure University poll found
twenty-two percent of Americans including 48% of men 18-49 years of age have an account with at least one of the online sportsbooks
— a figure that underlines how concentrated sports-betting accounts still are among younger men, even as overall market participation broadens.
UK data tells a similar story from a different angle.
The largest gender gap was observed in betting, with 17% of men participating, 14% of them online, compared to just 4% of women
, and
men continue to gamble more than women in all formats, particularly online, where 23% of males reported gambling versus 11% of females
. Casino-style and instant-win products show far less disparity: the Wave 4 data noted
little variation between male and female participation in scratchcards and online instant win games
. This suggests the gender gap is a product-category story, not a blanket gambling-behavior story — it's concentrated in sports betting, not casino games or lotteries.
Channel and product mix: mobile, sports betting, casino
Device and product choice correlate strongly with demographic segment. Mordor Intelligence's market model found
sports betting leads with 52.05% of 2025 revenue
globally, while
mobile and tablet stakes are expanding at a 13.65% CAGR
, faster than desktop. Grand View Research's independent estimate similarly found
the sports betting segment dominated the market, with a revenue share of 50% in 2025
. Regionally, Mordor notes
North America leads regional growth at a 15.40% CAGR through 2031
, a pace driven largely by newly regulated US states rather than by Europe's already-mature base.
In the US specifically, the American Gaming Association's consumer research found
more than half of all American adults (57%) participated in some form of gambling in the past year, with more than a quarter of adults (30%) gambling at a physical casino and 21% placing a sports bet
. Casino visitation is now at a record:
134 million American adults, or 53% of the population, visited a casino for gambling or other entertainment purposes in the past 12 months, the highest level of casino visitation on record
. Physical and digital channels are increasingly used by the same person rather than by distinct populations, which is one reason our data-scraping methodology tracks cross-channel promotions rather than treating online and retail operators as separate universes.
Risk: who is actually vulnerable
Demographic breakdowns matter most where they intersect with harm. The good news in Great Britain's latest data is directional:
the overall problem gambling rate dropped to 2.4% in 2025, down from 2.7% in 2024
, equal to roughly
1.3 million adults across Great Britain
, and
the first drop since the survey began three years ago
. But the aggregate figure masks a divergence: the Commission's own Head of Statistics flagged that
one trend observed across the three years of available data was increasing gambling participation among men aged 55 and older
, a group not traditionally the focus of harm-reduction messaging aimed at "young, impulsive" bettors.
Youth exposure is measured separately from the adult PGSI survey. The Commission's dedicated study of 11–17 year olds found
8 percent of young people reported online gambling in the past 12 months, including 3 percent who had placed a bet on a betting website or app and 3 percent who played an online game on a casino website
. That figure is a useful benchmark against operator claims of "robust" age verification, which is one of the checks covered in our security and fraud detection review.
Regional splits: why geography changes the demographic story
None of the age or gender figures above generalize cleanly across borders. Product mix, legal minimum ages, tax regimes and marketing rules all shift who ends up gambling and on what. Europe's online share of GGR sits at
39% of Europe's total GGR in 2024
, whereas some emerging regulated markets are almost entirely mobile-first from launch. Our regional deep dives and global-split coverage unpacks how these market-level differences change the demographic weighting our algorithm applies per jurisdiction, and how that connects to the broader macroeconomics of the iGaming sector.
Why demographics drive our scoring
GamblScout.com doesn't publish demographic data as trivia — it's an input. An operator whose player base skews toward men 55+ needs to be judged on different criteria (clarity of terms, phone support, deposit-limit visibility) than one whose base skews toward mobile-first bettors in their 20s (speed of KYC, live-betting latency, app stability). We explain the reasoning behind that approach in our core principles on why we don't rely on "human" reviews, how we read player sentiment in our NLP and sentiment analysis methodology, and how each data point is turned into a comparable score in our scoring system and algorithmic weights.
Frequently asked questions
What is the average age of an online gambler?
There is no single global average; it depends heavily on product and jurisdiction. UK data puts the highest four-week online participation in the 45–54 bracket, while the highest overall (including lottery) 12-month participation sits in the 35–44 group. Sports betting skews younger than casino or lottery play in most markets studied.
Do more men or women gamble online?
Men participate at higher rates than women in almost every market and survey reviewed, and the gap is widest in sports betting specifically. UK Gambling Commission data shows men betting at more than three times the rate of women, while casino-style games and instant-win products show far less gender disparity.
Which demographic group is growing fastest?
In Great Britain, men aged 55 and over are currently the only group with a statistically significant increase in non-lottery gambling participation, even as participation among 18–24 year olds continues to fall. In the US, older bettors have become one of the fastest-growing segments of the sports-betting audience as the market matures beyond its early adopter base.
Is online gambling participation still growing overall?
Globally, yes: market revenue and user counts are both projected to keep rising through 2030, though penetration remains a small share of the world's adult population. Within specific mature markets like Great Britain, overall four-week participation has been broadly stable to slightly declining even as the underlying online share increases.
Methodology note
For this category, GamblScout.com's algorithm cross-references publicly published regulator surveys (UK Gambling Commission GSGB waves, US state gaming board disclosures) with operator-level signals gathered through our own scraping pipeline — game-type mix, promotional targeting patterns, and language used in terms and marketing copy — to infer which demographic segments a given operator is actually built for, rather than accepting an operator's stated target audience at face value.
Gambling involves risk. Only play with money you can afford to lose and use the deposit limits and self-exclusion tools available in your jurisdiction.
The age shift: why younger bettors now dominate online gambling
Online gambling age demographics data reveal under-45s lead spend and activity, though UK regulator figures complicate the youth-dominance narrative.
