Sportsbooks Projected to Handle Nearly 80% of NFL Wagering This Season, as DraftKings Reports Its Own Handle Up 15%

Two different sets of numbers are circulating about NFL wagering this season, and they answer different questions. DraftKings says its own sportsbook handle is up about 15% year-over-year through the first two weeks of the season. Separately, a gaming-industry research firm projects that traditional sportsbooks will handle nearly 80% of all regulated NFL wagering this season, with prediction markets taking the rest. Neither number describes the same thing, and forecasters do not agree with each other on the market-wide totals.

What DraftKings Reported About Itself

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Speaking at the Wells Fargo 9th Annual Consumer Conference on September 22, DraftKings co-founder and CEO Jason Robins said the company's traditional sportsbook handle rose about 15% year-over-year during the first two weeks of the 2026 NFL season. That figure covers only DraftKings' conventional sportsbook operations; it excludes the company's separate Predictions business, which Robins said saw trading volume climb nearly 2.5 times since July, with more than 1 million customers now participating and the company claiming what Robins described as a "near-double-digit" share of sports prediction-market activity. Robins also said nearly 30% of DraftKings' NFL activity on a recent Sunday involved combination-style prediction products, and that the company holds roughly three times as many NFL prediction offerings as competitors Kalshi and Polymarket. These are all figures DraftKings itself has reported, from a CEO's remarks at an investor conference, not from an audited filing.

DraftKings' own SEC filings add a caveat worth keeping in view: in its most recent quarterly report, the company disclosed that its Sports Net Revenue Margin actually fell 1.9 percentage points year-over-year, to 6.8%, which it attributed to customer-friendly sports outcomes and higher promotional spending on both its Sportsbook and Predictions offerings. Rising handle, in other words, has not automatically meant rising margin.

What Independent Research Firms Project for the Whole Market

Gaming research firm Eilers & Krejcik Gaming (EKG) published a note on September 16 projecting that Americans will wager roughly $40.5 billion on the NFL this season through regulated channels: $31.7 billion via traditional sportsbooks and $8.4 billion via prediction markets, using a metric EKG calls "Handle Analog." That works out to a 79%/21% split favoring sportsbooks. EKG itself flagged a limitation in its own analysis: the method for converting prediction-market trading volume into a handle-equivalent figure is unpublished, and the firm noted that early Week 1 data pointed toward a possibly larger prediction-market share than its full-season estimate assumes.

Other forecasters do not agree on the total. The American Gaming Association, the trade group representing licensed casino and sportsbook operators, projects a flat $29.5 billion in legal NFL handle this season and has attributed the lack of growth in part to what it calls "backdoor sports betting on so-called prediction markets" — a characterization that reflects its members' institutional interest rather than a neutral measurement. H2 Gambling Capital projects $31.4 billion, which would be the first year-over-year decline in the legal sports-betting era. RotoWire's analysis projects a record $32.3 billion at sportsbooks alongside $36.8 billion in prediction-market trading volume — but RotoWire itself notes that trading volume is not the same thing as betting handle, making its own figures not directly comparable to EKG's.

Why the Numbers Differ

Much of the disagreement comes down to definitions rather than genuinely conflicting observations: which operators count as "regulated," whether futures and preseason bets are included, and — most consequentially — how to translate prediction-market trading volume, a genuinely different kind of transaction, into something comparable to a sportsbook's handle. No source reviewed for this article claims to have resolved that methodological question definitively.

The Competitive Backdrop

Sportsbooks are currently outspending prediction-market platforms on customer acquisition this season: Bet365 is advertising a $365 welcome offer and FanDuel and Fanatics up to $350, compared with DraftKings' own $200 headline offer and considerably smaller sign-up incentives reported at Polymarket ($50) and Kalshi ($25), according to Casino.org. Separately, EKG has estimated that Kalshi reached roughly $2 billion in monthly handle-equivalent volume as of March 2026 — enough, by that measure, to place it among the five largest U.S. sports-wagering platforms, ahead of established sportsbooks including BetMGM and Caesars.

Bottom Line

On DraftKings' own numbers, its sportsbook handle is growing at a healthy clip even as its prediction-markets business scales quickly. On the market-wide numbers, the most-cited current projection has traditional sportsbooks still handling the large majority of NFL wagering this season, though estimates of exactly how large that majority is vary by forecaster and by definition, and the firm behind the most widely cited 79%/21% split has itself cautioned its prediction-market estimate could prove too low as the season progresses.