Illinois Gambling Tax Revenue Hits a Record $2.7 Billion in FY2026
Illinois collected a record $2.7 billion in gambling-related tax revenue in fiscal year 2026, a 19.2% jump from the prior year and a 90% increase since fiscal year 2019, according to the state's Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability. The agency's annual "Wagering in Illinois 2026" report, covered by Capitol News Illinois on October 8, found that video gambling terminals — not casinos or the lottery — are now driving the bulk of that growth.
Video terminals overtake the lottery
Video gambling terminals brought in more than $1 billion in combined state and local tax revenue, surpassing the Illinois Lottery as the state's largest-grossing wagering category for the second year in a row, even as players lost more than $3.3 billion playing them over the fiscal year. The state is approaching 50,000 licensed video gambling terminals — a figure COGFA likened to the equivalent of more than 40 full-size Illinois casinos — and net income per machine has climbed from around $117 per day in 2016 to more than $182 per day in 2026. The report flagged that Chicago's city council recently lifted its long-standing ban on the terminals, a change expected to meaningfully boost statewide revenue going forward given that more than a fifth of the state's population lives in the city.
Casino revenue grew, but mostly from new locations
Casino receipts rose 13% from the prior year, continuing a steady climb since Illinois's 2019 gambling-expansion law raised the number of licensed casinos from 10 to 17. COGFA was careful to caveat that growth, however, noting it's "largely due to new casinos opening rather than better performance among individual casinos" — in other words, more locations are splitting a larger pie rather than each existing casino doing meaningfully better business on its own.
Sports wagering remains the fastest-growing category
Lottery revenue stayed essentially flat at $788 million. Sports wagering, while still a smaller slice of the total than video gambling, was the fastest-growing category on a percentage basis: Illinois bettors wagered more than $15 billion in 2026, generating $593 million in state taxes, helped by a new per-wager tax on online bets that kept tax collections climbing even as the state recorded fewer total wagers than the year before. Parlay bets accounted for roughly three out of every five bets placed and carried the highest net player losses of any bet type tracked in the report.
Why it matters
The report underscores a tension state officials face as gambling tax revenue becomes a larger piece of Illinois's budget. "This puts the state in a weird position, right?" said Adam Hoffer, director of excise tax policy at the Tax Foundation. "They want to discourage activity on one hand, but it's their revenue source on the other hand." For players, the headline number is a reminder that overall state-level gambling revenue figures mix several very different products — slot-style terminals, casino table games, the lottery, and sports wagering — each with its own payout structure and, as covered in our house edge guide, very different odds for the person placing the bet.