Pennsylvania Study Weighs Credit-Card and VIP Curbs After Record $6.8bn in Gambling Revenue

Pennsylvania collected a record haul from gambling in 2025, and a new report to the legislature asks whether the state should now rein the market back in. Players lost $6.8 billion across the commonwealth's regulated products last year, the fifth straight annual record, and the Pennsylvania General Assembly's Joint State Government Commission has told lawmakers they face a choice: move immediately to cut gambling disorders, or study the problem further before acting.

The revenue figure is exact and public. The Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board reported combined 2025 revenue of $6,796,211,719 from slot machines, table games, sports wagering, iGaming, video gaming terminals and fantasy contests, up 10.74% on 2024's $6.14 billion. Online casino did most of the lifting: iGaming won $2.77 billion from remote players, a 27% jump worth more than $593 million year on year, while sports wagering revenue rose 17.97% to $602.5 million. The state's cut hit $2.98 billion in tax and slot-license fees, the most it has ever pulled from gaming in a single year and up from $2.66 billion in 2024. None of that $6.8 billion counts losses on the state lottery or on unregulated skill machines, so the real spend is higher.

That growth is the backdrop to 2025 House Resolution No. 60, which directed the commission to examine how sports betting and iGaming are affecting Pennsylvania. Its finding is blunt: the state faces an urgent and escalating public health challenge, and the General Assembly has to decide whether to intervene now or keep studying it. The report does not force a rewrite of the rules. It hands legislators a menu.

What the commission put on the table

The recommended interventions read as a direct list of the mechanics that drive online losses. If Harrisburg opts for fast action, the commission wants regulators to:

• Ban credit cards from online sports betting and internet casino deposits.
• Require online gamblers to set limits on losses, session duration and the number of deposits in a given period.
• Restrict advertising in media and physical locations where young people gather, with college campuses named specifically.
• Bar sportsbooks and iGaming apps from sending push notifications to users who are logged out.
• Ban AI-driven, individually tailored marketing and promotions.
• Curtail in-game betting, which the report ties to many players' shift from controlled to compulsive play.
• Ban or sharply curtail VIP programs.

Several of these have a working precedent. The UK Gambling Commission banned gambling on credit cards across Great Britain in April 2020, covering online and most offline betting, after finding that 22% of online gamblers using credit cards were problem gamblers. Pennsylvania would be following a path already walked, and the UK experience is the closest read on what a credit-card ban does to volume and to harm indicators. The push toward mandatory deposit and loss limits also mirrors affordability and stake-limit measures now standard across regulated European markets.

The headline number driving the alarm comes from the Pennsylvania Psychiatric Society and the Pennsylvania Society of Addiction Medicine, which estimate that more than one in four Pennsylvania adults is at risk of developing a gambling disorder. That is a risk figure, not a diagnosed-prevalence figure, and it sits well above the roughly 1% to 2% problem-gambling prevalence typically measured in US population studies, so it should be read as an at-risk screen rather than a count of people with a disorder. The two societies are also pushing the industry to adopt "gambling disorder" over "compulsive" or "problem" gambling, arguing the clinical term reduces the stigma that keeps people from seeking help.

Why operators and affiliates should read this closely

Pennsylvania is one of the largest regulated iGaming markets in the United States, and its rulebook tends to travel. The interventions on the list target the exact tools that acquisition and retention run on. A push-notification ban to logged-out users and a prohibition on AI-tailored promotions would cut into the CRM and personalization stack operators and their affiliates use to reactivate lapsed players. Curbing VIP programs hits the high-value segment that a meaningful share of revenue and of affiliate commission depends on. Restricting advertising near campuses narrows the media plan in a state with a large student population. For affiliates sending traffic into Pennsylvania, a credit-card deposit ban is the most immediate: it lowers first-deposit conversion at the exact moment a referred player signs up, the same drag operators reported in Great Britain after 2020.

Nothing here is law yet. The commission framed its work as a decision point, and the General Assembly can act on all of it, some of it, or none. What has changed is that the case for tightening now carries a state number attached to it. Pennsylvania is set to keep breaking revenue records, and the same report that documents the fifth straight one is the one telling lawmakers the market may be growing faster than its safeguards. The tension between record tax receipts and rising harm is the same one now driving responsible-gambling rulemaking in the UK, and the pressure on push notifications and tailored promos echoes the scrutiny of prediction and betting apps that ship with thin safeguards. How Pennsylvania resolves it will shape the template other US states reach for as their own online-casino and prediction-market revenue climbs.