Legal Sports Betting May Be Hurting Food Security. Here's What We Know.

A study released on June 10, 2026, by GamblingHarm.org found a direct connection between the ability to bet legally on sports and food insecurity — people's ability to afford enough food — in American households. Until now, most debate about legal sports betting has focused on how much money the industry makes, not on how it affects people's lives.

The timing matters. The 2026 FIFA World Cup is happening right now, and the U.S. sports betting market is bigger and easier to access than ever before. You can bet on your phone from almost anywhere. When the American Gaming Association looked at the 2022 World Cup, they found that 20.5 million American adults — about 8% of all adults — planned to bet a combined $1.8 billion. The 2026 number will almost certainly be larger.

What the Research Shows

The food insecurity finding is part of a growing body of research that treats sports betting as something that actually affects household budgets — not just as an abstract financial activity. An NBER working paper looked at real bank and credit card records to see how online sports betting changed how families spent money, saved, and managed debt. This method — using actual financial records instead of asking people to remember what they spent — is harder to pick apart or dismiss.

The food insecurity connection carries real weight because food insecurity is already getting worse in America. According to data from Public Health Post published in February 2024, 10.2% of U.S. households reported difficulty affording food in 2021. By 2022, that number had jumped to 12.8% — the first time it got worse instead of better in years. This happened before most states pushed hard to get people betting legally on sports, which means any problems from betting are getting added on top of an already difficult situation.

The bigger economic picture makes this worse. A Reuters report from May 27, 2026, reporting on New York Federal Reserve research, found a "remarkable" jump in food insecurity concentrated among less educated people, lower-income households, and families with young children — the groups that research shows are most likely to struggle when their budgets get hit by unexpected expenses.

The Way the Betting Industry is Built

To understand why this matters, you need to see how the sports betting industry is designed to work.

Paysafe's research from January 2026 on people betting for the first time found that 38% of them pick a betting site based on brand trust, while 33% say fast payouts matter most. Both of those numbers point to an industry deliberately making it easy and quick to place bets and get your money back. When you can see results and get paid out quickly, you're more likely to bet again.

This matters because the faster the cycle between placing a bet and getting the payout, the faster money can go straight back into betting instead of toward other household needs like groceries.

We've seen this pattern before. In the 1980s and 1990s, state lottery systems deliberately designed instant-win scratch-off games to give you results immediately. Research later showed this pulled more money, especially from lower-income families. Sports betting isn't the same as lottery tickets, but the design goal is similar: get people to gamble more by removing delays and barriers.

Michigan is a useful early example. The state began allowing legal sports and online betting in February 2022, and almost immediately the state's health department issued guidance on responsible gambling — a signal that officials recognized they needed to monitor for harms as the betting market grew.

Research published in major medical databases found consistent patterns of harm from sports betting across different countries and different regulatory systems, which suggests the way betting is designed and made available — not just how many problem gamblers there are — drives whether entire populations suffer harm.

Why This Matters to People in Financial Services

For credit card companies, banks, and lenders, the research linking sports betting to food insecurity introduces a variable they haven't been tracking carefully. Sports betting spending doesn't show up as a separate line item on your credit file. It gets mixed into general spending or — worse — gets paid for with credit card borrowing that increases your credit utilization (the percentage of available credit you're using) without any warning flag in the lending process.

The food insecurity link is the key issue here. It suggests people are cutting back on necessities like food to fund betting, not on luxuries like restaurants. A household cutting restaurant spending to fund betting might look fine from a credit perspective. A household struggling to afford groceries is in a different risk category: they're more likely to incur medical expenses, be less productive at work, and struggle if their income drops.

For lenders with significant exposure to lower-income customers in states where sports betting is mature and easily accessible, the emerging data warrants paying attention to how customers in these areas perform on loan repayments and defaults — particularly in lower-income neighborhoods. It's too early to build a precise mathematical model linking state-level betting legalization directly to credit losses. The data is too new, and too many other factors are in play. But the research trend is consistent enough that pretending the problem doesn't exist would be a mistake.

The World Cup Effect

The World Cup is a huge sporting event that brings in a lot of first-time bettors — exactly the group that Paysafe's research says will surge in 2026. First-time bettors typically don't know what to expect when they lose, and they often bet based on which country or team they like rather than on actual odds and probability. Betting companies make money by recruiting these new bettors and then converting some of them into repeat customers.

Regulators and public health officials are facing a question they should have answered long ago: Has the betting industry grown so fast that society hasn't had time to measure and manage the harms? The June 10 food insecurity study is one more piece of evidence suggesting the answer is no.

What this means for betting companies, the payment processors that handle the transactions, and banks serving affected households remains uncertain. But the research is now detailed and credible enough that any of these groups saying "we didn't know this was happening" is no longer a valid excuse.