Australians lose more money to gambling, per person, than any other nation on Earth. We know the pokies story. The one we don’t talk about: wagering — betting on racing and, increasingly, sport — is the fastest-growing slice, and it has been stitched into the games and teams we love. These five interactive charts trace that shift, using official figures from the Australian Gambling Statistics (40th edition).
Chart 1 sets the scene: how does Australia compare to the rest of the world? A simple ranking is the hook — it grabs attention before we go deeper. Australia is coloured red so the eye lands on it instantly.
Top 10 gambling losses per adult, 2017 (US$). Source: H2 Gambling Capital, via ABC News (2018).
Australia loses the most. The natural next question is: where is all that money going? Chart 2 breaks the national gambling bill into its parts, year by year, so we can see which type is growing.
Source: Australian Gambling Statistics, 40th ed. (QGSO, 2025).
Pokies still dominate, but wagering — the red band, betting on racing and sport — is the part climbing fastest. Chart 3 zooms into wagering alone and asks: is this happening everywhere, or just in one state? One line per state lets us compare trends side by side.
Wagering = betting on racing and sport. Source: Australian Gambling Statistics, 40th ed. (QGSO, 2025).
Note: the Northern Territory licenses most of Australia’s online bookmakers, so its wagering figures reflect nationally-placed bets rather than NT residents’ spending. Big states naturally spend more simply because they have more people. To compare fairly, Chart 4 switches to spending per adult. The heat-map shows state × gambling type at a glance — darker red means a heavier loss per person.
Per-adult spending, FY2024. Source: Australian Gambling Statistics, 40th ed. (QGSO, 2025).
Finally, the payoff. Chart 5 turns the dollars into a share: how much of every gambling dollar now goes on betting? The dashed line marks 25%, so you can see wagering has reached a quarter of all gambling losses — nearly double its 1990s level. This is exactly the point the 2026 advertising reforms target.
Source: Australian Gambling Statistics, 40th ed. (QGSO, 2025).
The bottom line. Australia’s gambling problem isn’t standing still — it’s changing shape. As pokies plateau, betting on racing and sport has quietly grown into a quarter of all the money Australians lose, woven so tightly into the games we watch that many of us no longer notice it. The 2026 advertising reforms are a first step, but with wagering still climbing, the real question is whether they go far enough — or whether we’ll look back and ask how we let sport become the country’s biggest betting shop.
Queensland Government Statistician’s Office. (2025). Australian gambling statistics (40th ed., 1998–99 to 2023–24) [Data set]. Queensland Treasury. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Letts, S. (2018, November 20). Chart of the day: Are Australians the world’s biggest gambling losers? ABC News. Data from H2 Gambling Capital.