iGaming Marketing Budget 2026: How Operators Actually Split the Spend

Between 14.5% and 22.8% of revenue, based on the three operators that disclosed both figures for full-year 2025. The figures come from DraftKings' fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 results (12 February 2026), Flutter Entertainment's 2025 Form 10-K (26 February 2026), and Rush Street Interactive's fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 results (17 February 2026). All three close their financial year on 31 December, so the periods line up.

Lumina Clippers' arithmetic on two disclosed figures from each company's full-year 2025 results. None of the three publishes this percentage at group level for the full year. Not a benchmark.

Two of the three say nothing about the ratio themselves. DraftKings publishes no percentage anywhere in its 2025 results. Flutter publishes segment-level quarterly percentages only — sales and marketing was 19.6% of revenue in its US segment and 16.3% in its International segment in the fourth quarter of 2025 — and no group full-year figure that reconciles to either.

Rush Street Interactive is the one that publishes its own number, and it is worth reading carefully. The company states that adjusted sales and marketing expense for full-year 2025 was USD 158.4 million, representing 14% of revenue. That 14% sits on adjusted spend of USD 158.4 million, not on the USD 164.7 million in its accounts. The two numerators are different, so the two percentages should never be printed side by side.

A sportsbook and an online casino buy different customers, and their accounts show it.

Flutter's own segment disclosure is the cleanest evidence available. In the fourth quarter of 2025 its US business, which is sportsbook-led through FanDuel, spent 19.6% of revenue on sales and marketing. Its International business, which carries far more casino and lottery revenue, spent 16.3%. Flutter reports both in the same release, on the same basis, in the same quarter — which makes the 3.3-point gap one of the few like-for-like comparisons in this industry that is not somebody's estimate.

The customer economics behind that gap show up in the payer metrics. DraftKings reported 4.8 million average monthly unique payers in the fourth quarter of 2025, unchanged year on year, while average revenue per payer rose 43% to USD 139. All of the quarter's revenue growth came from spending more per existing customer, not from acquiring more customers.

Rush Street Interactive shows the same principle at a regional level. Average revenue per monthly active user was USD 331 in the United States and Canada in the fourth quarter of 2025, against USD 32 in Latin America. Latin America carried the larger user base — over 493,000 monthly actives against over 278,000 — at roughly a tenth of the revenue per user.

BetMGM adds a third view, and the definition matters more than the number. BetMGM reported contribution of USD 607 million for 2025 on net revenue of USD 2.8 billion, defining contribution as net revenue less cost of revenue and marketing acquisition spend — acquisition marketing only, not total marketing. Anyone quoting it as gross profit less marketing is overstating what has been deducted.

Marketing spend as a share of revenue went down at the two operators whose 2024 and 2025 figures were verified on the same basis.

DraftKings spent USD 1,264.9 million on sales and marketing in 2024 against revenue of USD 4,767.7 million — 26.5% of revenue. In 2025 it spent USD 1,379.9 million against USD 6,054.5 million, or 22.8%. Spend rose by about USD 115 million in absolute terms while the ratio fell by 3.7 percentage points, because revenue grew faster than the marketing line.

Rush Street Interactive states the same direction in its own words: adjusted sales and marketing fell to 14% of revenue in 2025, a decrease of 290 basis points from 16.9% during full year 2024.

Two companies is not a trend, and neither disclosure explains itself. But the mechanism visible in the DraftKings numbers is the one that matters for planning: the ratio fell because revenue per existing customer grew while the payer count stayed flat. A budget built on last year's percentage of a smaller revenue base will overshoot if the same thing happens again.

A sales and marketing line in a set of accounts is a single aggregated number, and no operator publishes what sits inside it.

The line is defined by accounting convention, not by marketing convention. What follows is what the category conventionally absorbs, not something an operator has published: paid media, affiliate commissions, promotional credits and free bets where they are classified as expense rather than netted off revenue, sponsorship, brand campaigns, retention and customer-relationship spend, and in most cases the marketing team's own payroll. None of those components is broken out. There is no sub-line for affiliate, no sub-line for brand, no sub-line for retention.

One of the three operators shows how unstable even the label is. Rush Street Interactive called this line "Advertising and promotions" in its 2024 results and renamed it "Sales and marketing" for 2025, restating the prior-year comparative under the new label. The number did not move; the name did.

This is why the per-customer view is more useful than the aggregate for anything operational. A single filed figure cannot tell you what you paid to acquire a depositor, which is why the clipping vs affiliate CPA calculation has to be built from your own data rather than read off anyone's accounts.

There is no published iGaming channel-allocation benchmark. Not a gated one, not an expensive one — none.

Here is what was actually checked. The American Gaming Association and the European Gaming and Betting Association publish revenue, tax and advertising-volume data, and neither publishes marketing spend as a share of revenue or any channel split. H2 Gambling Capital supplies market and revenue data. Grand View Research publishes market sizing with no marketing segmentation. Statista carries a single-company DraftKings series behind a subscription, which is one company, not a benchmark.

What ranks for these queries instead is affiliate-software vendors and statistics aggregators publishing round numbers with no stated sample, no universe and no method, frequently recycling each other's figures. One widely circulated claim that gambling operators spent USD 3.9 billion on marketing is a public-relations agency's own marketing asset. Another set of figures in wide circulation attributes USD 485 million of 2025 marketing spend to DraftKings — against the USD 1,379.9 million in the company's filed accounts.

The structural reason no benchmark exists is accounting, not secrecy. You cannot build an industry channel split out of numbers that do not contain a channel split. It would have to be commissioned as primary research, and nobody has published it.

So this page does not give you one. What it gives you is the size of the envelope, which is the part that can be sourced. How that envelope divides is a question about channel roles rather than industry averages — clipping marketing strategy covers where distribution sits in a funnel.

Sports betting advertising volume fell for a fourth consecutive year in 2025, down 1% year on year and down 27% from the 2021 peak. That 27% figure covers all measured media — television, print, digital, out-of-home and cinema — according to the American Gaming Association's 2025 Sports Betting Advertising Trends study, conducted by Nielsen, published March 2026.

Television alone fell faster. Sports betting television advertising units declined 9% year on year, and the study's resource page states there are nearly 50% fewer than in 2021. Gambling-related television advertising units across all gambling categories were down 4% from 2024.

The scale comparison in the same study is the one worth keeping. For every sports betting advertisement on television, consumers saw more than four telecom/wireless advertisements and 39 for pharmaceuticals. Gambling is not a dominant category on television; it is a small category that became briefly conspicuous and has been shrinking since.

Falling advertising volume alongside rising revenue is the same pattern that pushed DraftKings' marketing ratio from 26.5% to 22.8% between 2024 and 2025. It also explains the pressure on every other channel — why iGaming brands market without ads covers the ad wall, and the short-form video statistics describe where that attention moved.

United States commercial gaming produced USD 78.72 billion in gross gaming revenue in 2025, up 9.2%, and all 38 commercial gaming markets grew, per the American Gaming Association, 26 February 2026. Within that, iGaming reached USD 10.74 billion, up 27.6%, and sports betting reached USD 16.96 billion, up 22.8%, on handle of USD 166.94 billion, up 11.0%.

The two are diverging in 2026. The American Gaming Association's Commercial Gaming Revenue Tracker, reporting May 2026 data in July 2026, shows iGaming revenue up 14.7% year on year at USD 1.03 billion. Sports betting revenue fell 1.8% to USD 1.34 billion on handle down only 0.4% — a hold story, not a volume story.

Europe is measured differently, so the two are not directly comparable — the US figure is commercial gaming only for 2025, while the European figure covers online and land-based together for 2024. European gambling gross gaming revenue reached EUR 123.4 billion in 2024, up 5%. Online accounted for EUR 47.9 billion of that, or 39% of the total, and online casino for EUR 21.5 billion, per the European Gaming and Betting Association with H2 Gambling Capital, 24 March 2025. In Great Britain, remote casino generated GBP 1.5 billion in October to December 2025 — 70% of the GBP 2.1 billion remote sector total, per the UK Gambling Commission's quarterly report published 4 June 2026.

Multiply your annual revenue by 14.5% for the low end and 22.8% for the high end. That is the range three operators fell in during 2025.

Worked example. An operator doing USD 50 million of annual revenue lands on an envelope of USD 7.25 million at 14.5% and USD 11.4 million at 22.8%. If that operator is sportsbook-led and growing its player base, the top of the range is the realistic planning number, because that is where DraftKings and Flutter sat while acquiring. If it is casino-led with a stable player base, and revenue growth is coming from spend per player rather than player count, plan against the bottom of the range. That is the Rush Street Interactive position — the only one of the three already below 15%.

Once you have the envelope, the next question is what a unit of distribution costs against it, which is what how clipping campaigns are priced covers, and what casino and iGaming clipping campaigns run at in practice. The calculator below places your own ratio against the three filed reference points.

Operator filings. DraftKings, fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 results, 12 February 2026, and full-year 2024 results on the same basis. Flutter Entertainment, 2025 Form 10-K, 26 February 2026, and Q4 2025 segment disclosure. Rush Street Interactive, fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 results, 17 February 2026. BetMGM, full-year 2025 results (contribution as defined in its release).

Advertising and market data. American Gaming Association, 2025 Sports Betting Advertising Trends study, conducted by Nielsen via Ad Intel, published March 2026. American Gaming Association, 2025 US commercial gaming revenue, 26 February 2026, and Commercial Gaming Revenue Tracker reporting May 2026 data in July 2026. European Gaming and Betting Association with H2 Gambling Capital, 24 March 2025. UK Gambling Commission, quarterly report for Q3 of financial year 2025-26, published 4 June 2026.

Method and caveats. Every percentage in the headline range is Lumina Clippers' arithmetic on two disclosed figures per company; none of the three publishes the full-year group ratio itself. The three companies do not define their sales-and-marketing lines identically, the line is not audited as a comparable metric, and three companies in one year is a reference range, not an industry standard. Checked at the primary source in July 2026.