Vermont’s Department of Liquor and Lottery (DLL) reported February’s results for online sports betting in Vermont, the first full month that the legal sports betting market was active after its initial launch on January 11. Vermont sports betting features just three operators:
FanDuel, DraftKings, and Fanatics. These three online sportsbooks in Vermont combined for a total handle of $21.2 million, a slight increase from January’s $19.9 million.
Adjusted revenue dropped from $3.5 million in January to $2.3 million in February. Vermont’s online sports betting sites paid out $18.7 million in winnings to patrons on a 12% hold. January’s 22% hold earned a more lucrative month for the operators as they got rolling in one of the newest legal markets in the United States.
State coffers potted $731,874 in February, over $400,000 less than the $1.1 million Vermont sports betting earned for the government in January.
The Who and What
The DLL does not offer a breakdown of performance metrics for the three legal online sportsbooks in Vermont, but it does report statistics on in-state versus out-of-state bettors, tracking handle, active users, number of bets, and average dollar value of all bets.
Vermont’s in-state residents represented $14.5 million in handle, 27,904 active users, 797,187 total bets, and an average dollar value of $18.22 per bet.
Out-of-state patrons made $6.7 million in wagers from 19,289 active users across 194,029 total bets that averaged $34.67 per bet. Interestingly, the average dollar value of all bets was greater for out-of-state patrons than it was for in-state bettors in both January and February.
The DLL also shows what sports are most popular based on the total handle. Basketball accounted for nearly 45% of all wagers while tennis drove almost 11% of the bets. Football was the top sport in January but only collected $1.7 million in wagers in February with college football and the NFL wrapping up.
Handle By Sports
Here’s a breakdown of all sports and their respective handles in Vermont sports betting:
| Sports | February Handle |
|---|---|
| Basketball | $9,503,958 |
| Tennis | $2,278,261 |
| Football | $1,794,011 |
| Soccer | 1,375,644 |
| Hockey | $800,271 |
| All others | $5,489,685 |
Other Vermont Sports Betting News
Vermont sports betting is only three months old and it's already getting in on major industry trends that have hit the headlines in recent memory.
The DLL updated its mobile sports wagering catalog in early March to ban individual player prop on college sports, joining a majority of states in the US that either prohibit or limit college player prop betting. Ohio and Maryland also enacted similar bans around that same time ahead of NCAA March Madness.
And just about a month after legal sports betting in Vermont officially went live, a bill was introduced to crack down on sports betting ads. H.857 was read in a February 14 session of the Vermont House of Representatives and was referred to the House’s Committee on Government Operations and Military Affairs. No debate has happened yet and there is no guarantee the bill will go much further, but it just goes to show how advertising has been an issue for the still-growing legal sports betting industry.
Online sports betting in Vermont is one of the smaller markets in the legal sports betting industry by both population and number of authorized operators, but that does not make it immune to macro-level trends impacting the regulations governing the action.
