Are real-money online casinos legal in the District, and what can you actually play online here right now?
DC built the most unusual sports betting license map in the country. The 2018 Sports Wagering Lottery Amendment Act handed exclusive in-venue franchises to four big sports buildings, fenced a two-block mobile ring around each one, and pushed everything else through the DC Lottery's central operator. The June 12, 2024 FY 2025 budget vote added a third tier that finally opened citywide mobile to the national brands.
Class A
Reserved for the four major DC sports venues. The license covers in-person betting inside the building and mobile wagering inside a two-block radius of the licensed location. Caesars holds the Capital One Arena book, BetMGM holds Nationals Park, and FanDuel holds Audi Field. Established by the 2018 Sports Wagering Lottery Amendment Act, D.C. Law 22-312.
Class B
Retail-only license for qualifying bars, restaurants and other small businesses. The statute bars any Class B operator from opening within two blocks of a Class A facility, which keeps the corridors around the four big venues clean for their stadium partners.
Class C
Added by the June 12, 2024 FY 2025 budget vote. Authorizes up to seven mobile-only licenses for operators tied to a DC sports franchise. The new tier ended the DC Lottery’s monopoly on district-wide mobile and brought BetMGM, Caesars, DraftKings and Fanatics live citywide starting July 15, 2024.
The Class C addition matters because it is the mechanism that brought BetMGM, Caesars, DraftKings and Fanatics live citywide starting July 15, 2024. Before that vote, anyone outside a two-block radius of a stadium book had only one legal mobile option: the OLG’s central operator, which from 2020 to 2024 was GambetDC.
D.C. Law 22-312 puts the Office of Lottery and Gaming in charge of sports betting. The law does not address internet casino games.
Intralot's GambetDC goes live as the District's only mobile sportsbook under a no-bid $215 million contract. It is widely criticized for poor odds and low handle.
OLG approves FanDuel as the new exclusive mobile sportsbook through a subcontract with Intralot. Handle jumps 673 percent in the first month.
A budget law lifts the 2-block venue limit on Class A retail books. FanDuel loses its mobile monopoly as multiple operators open citywide apps.
Councilmember Wendell Felder files the Internet Gaming and Consumer Protection Act, which would legalize online casinos and ban sweepstakes platforms.
GambetDC operated as the OLG's exclusive district-wide mobile sportsbook for four years. FanDuel replaced it on April 15, 2024 under a subcontract with Intralot and matched GambetDC's entire four-year tax contribution within roughly the first three months. The numbers are the cleanest argument in DC gambling policy for what an uncompetitive procurement actually costs the District.
May 2020 - April 2024 (~4 years)
The OLG’s exclusive district-wide mobile operator under the $215 million no-bid Intralot contract. The app was widely criticized for poor pricing and a clunky interface; by year four it was generating roughly a fifth of the revenue the 2019 fiscal note had projected.
Live April 15, 2024
FanDuel cleared GambetDC’s entire four-year tax contribution within roughly the first three months of operation. The takeover was structured as a FanDuel-as-subcontractor arrangement under Intralot, not a new prime contract, which kept the original 2019 procurement architecture intact.
GambetDC’s original 2019 fiscal note projected $20 million in annual revenue. The actual four-year take to the District came in at $4.3 million, a fifth of the projection. The FanDuel deal, which keeps Intralot as the prime contractor and adds FanDuel as the subcontracted platform, locks in 40 percent of GGR to the District with a $5 million minimum-revenue floor for year one.
The 2019 sole-source award to Intralot cleared DC procurement rules largely because Intralot pledged that a certified local small business, Veterans Services Corporation, would perform 51 percent of the work. Attorney General Brian Schwalb's office concluded six years later that the arrangement was a paper one. The January 14, 2025 False Claims Act settlement was the formal close on the GambetDC chapter of DC gambling history.
Neither Intralot nor VSC admitted wrongdoing as part of the settlement; both companies disputed the findings while agreeing to pay. The False Claims Act framework allowed the District to recover damages without proving criminal intent. The contract itself remained in place, which is how FanDuel’s 2024 arrival was structured as a subcontract under the existing Intralot prime rather than a fresh procurement.
With no licensed online casinos in the District, sweepstakes sites are the closest legal substitute for slots and table games. These are placeholders until our database is wired in.
Casinos we play at. We earn a commission when you sign up through these.
DC built its online gambling framework around the Sports Wagering Lottery Amendment Act of 2018, Bill B22-0944, codified as D.C. Law 22-312. The Council passed it on December 18, 2018, Mayor Muriel Bowser signed it on January 23, 2019, and it took effect on May 3, 2019 after the mandatory congressional review. That law put the Office of Lottery and Gaming in charge of sports betting but did not authorize internet casino games. The DC iLottery launched in December 2020 under the older 1981 lottery statute, again with no provision for online slots or table games.
On April 9, 2026, Councilmember Wendell Felder introduced B26-0656, the Internet Gaming and Consumer Protection Act of 2026. The bill would legalize online casino games under the OLG, with a $2 million license application fee, five-year licenses, and a 25 percent tax on adjusted gaming revenue. It would also ban the dual-currency sweepstakes model and impose civil penalties of up to $100,000 per violation. The Committee on Human Services held the first public hearing on May 4, 2026 and took no vote. The full 13-member Council, the Mayor's signature, and a 60-day congressional review would all need to clear before the bill could take effect.
DC is the smallest US jurisdiction with regulated sports betting, and roughly 29 percent of its 68 square miles is federally owned land where bets and iLottery tickets cannot legally be placed. The restriction map includes the obvious parcels and dozens of obscure ones, which is why GeoComply's head of regulatory affairs publicly called DC the company's hardest geolocation problem.
Open FanDuel on the National Mall and the app refuses the wager. Try to buy a Powerball ticket on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and DC iLottery refuses the purchase. The Office of the Chief Technology Officer publishes a public Entertainment Sports Gambling Restriction Zones dataset on opendata.dc.gov that operators feed into their geofence configurations alongside GeoComply’s federal-property layer.
The regulated and tolerated options available to DC residents and visitors today.
Legal since 2019 under D.C. Law 22-312. FanDuel runs the OLG's district-wide app under a subcontract with Intralot. BetMGM, Caesars, DraftKings, and Fanatics also operate citywide after the July 15, 2024 expansion. Minimum age is 18, though BetMGM and Caesars self-restrict accounts to 21.
Launched December 2020. Sells Powerball, Mega Millions, and e-instant scratchers online to anyone 18 or older physically located within DC boundaries. Geolocation blocks federal land like the National Mall and Rock Creek Park.
Caesars at Capital One Arena, BetMGM at Nationals Park, FanDuel at Audi Field, and DraftKings at Northwest Stadium. The four Class A licenses are capped at one per major sports venue under the 2018 act.
Licensed under the 1981 lottery and bingo law, codified at D.C. Code 36-601. Bingo halls, raffles, and one-night Monte Carlo events run by qualifying nonprofits are the only in-person casino-style games allowed. Players must be 18 or older.
DC has no current statute banning sweepstakes operators, so sites using the dual-currency model are accessible to residents. B26-0656 would ban that model with civil penalties up to $100,000 per violation if it becomes law.
Councilmember Wendell Felder opened the Committee on Human Services hearing by citing an estimated $700 million in annual DC-resident play flowing through unregulated offshore casinos and sweepstakes apps. The room split cleanly along the same lines the rest of the country has seen in 2025 and 2026 iGaming fights: national mobile operators on one side, brick-and-mortar interests and anti-gambling advocates on the other. The committee took no vote.
FanDuel
Already operates the OLG’s district-wide mobile app under the Intralot subcontract and holds the Audi Field Class A license. Public testimony argued that an OLG-licensed iGaming framework would extend the consumer protections already in place for sports.
BetMGM
Holds the Nationals Park Class A license. Parent MGM Resorts runs BetMGM Casino under iGaming licenses in seven states and would expect to enter DC alongside its existing market-access deal.
Caesars Entertainment
Operates the Capital One Arena Class A sportsbook. Caesars Palace Online has live iGaming in NJ, PA, MI, WV and Ontario.
DraftKings
Holds a Class C citywide mobile license through a 2024 partnership with DC United. DraftKings Casino runs in five of the seven US iGaming markets and has publicly testified for legalization in additional states throughout 2025 and 2026.
National Association Against iGaming
A trade group backed by land-based operators Churchill Downs Inc. and The Cordish Companies. Argued online casino legalization would cannibalize physical casino revenue and shift jobs out of the brick-and-mortar workforce.
Stop Predatory Gambling (Les Bernal)
National director Les Bernal testified against the bill and against handing iGaming oversight to the same OLG that regulates the lottery. His widely quoted line at the hearing was that the proposal would amount to putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank.
B26-0656 still has three procedural hurdles ahead: approval by the full 13-member Council, signature by Mayor Muriel Bowser, and a 60-day congressional review period. The bundling of online casino legalization with a same-bill ban on dual-currency sweepstakes is what gives the proposal its odd coalition shape. The brand sportsbooks support the casino half. The brick-and-mortar opponents target the casino half too. The sweepstakes operators, with civil penalties up to $100,000 per violation on the line, opposed the ban half quietly through trade groups rather than at the hearing podium.
B26-0656 sets a 25 percent state tax on adjusted gaming revenue plus a 2 percent local fee, a 27 percent combined headline. The seven existing US iGaming jurisdictions span a 39-point range. The DC proposal sits in the middle, below Michigan's top tier, above the Connecticut and New Jersey rates, and a long way below Pennsylvania's 54 percent on slot revenue.
25% + 2%
25 percent state tax on adjusted gaming revenue plus a 2 percent additional local fee, a 27 percent combined headline rate. $2 million license application fee, five-year license term. Not yet enacted.
54%
The highest iGaming tax rate in the country, applied to online slot revenue. Table games are taxed at 16 percent. PA produced about $700 million in iGaming tax to the state in calendar 2024 alone, the largest single-state contribution in the country.
20-28%
Graduated by adjusted gross receipts: 20 percent on the first $4 million, stepping up through 22, 24, 26 percent tiers to 28 percent above $12 million. Governor Whitmer’s FY 2026 budget proposed a top tier of 36 percent above $185M AGR, not enacted as of this writing.
19.75%
Raised from 15 percent effective July 1, 2025 under bill A 5803. Governor Murphy originally proposed 25 percent; the legislature negotiated the rate down. Applies equally to iGaming and online sports.
18%
PA 21-23 set iGaming at 18 percent for the first ten years (through 2031) with a scheduled step-up to 20 percent thereafter. Two operators only: FanDuel under Mohegan and DraftKings under Mashantucket Pequot.
15%
The lowest iGaming rate in the country. Five operators live: BetMGM, DraftKings, FanDuel, BetRivers, and Caesars. The state took in roughly $34 million in iGaming tax in calendar 2024.
51% / 15.5%
51 percent on slot GGR, 15.5 percent on table GGR. Single-operator Bally’s exclusive launched March 2024 under the Bally’s Twin River compact terms.
~50% net split
Contracted through the Delaware Lottery on roughly a 50-50 net split with the state. Rush Street Interactive operates the platform under the BetRivers brand since January 2024.
The rate band matters for what kinds of operators would actually compete in DC. Pennsylvania’s 54 percent on slots squeezes margins so hard that operators rely on table games and live dealer to stay profitable. West Virginia’s 15 percent is generous enough that the state has attracted five national brands on a tiny population base. A 27 percent rate puts DC roughly where Michigan’s mid-tier sits, which is the closest analogue on demographics and per-capita income.
No. DC has not legalized real-money online slots or table games. Bill B26-0656, introduced by Councilmember Wendell Felder on April 9, 2026, would change that, but the Council has not voted on it.
Yes. FanDuel has been the OLG's district-wide partner since April 15, 2024. After the July 2024 expansion, BetMGM, Caesars, DraftKings, and Fanatics also operate citywide. Federal land like the National Mall and Capitol grounds are off-limits by geolocation.
18 for sports betting, the DC iLottery, and charitable games. BetMGM and Caesars self-restrict accounts to 21, even though DC law allows 18.
There is no current law banning sweepstakes, so social and sweepstakes sites are accessible to DC residents. Bill B26-0656 would ban the dual-currency model with fines up to $100,000 per violation if it becomes law.
B26-0656, the Internet Gaming and Consumer Protection Act of 2026, is the first serious attempt. The Committee on Human Services held its first public hearing on May 4, 2026 with no vote. We update this page when the legal status changes.
