New York Sports Betting Hold Slips to 6.6% in September

New York’s mobile sportsbooks took in $2,401,727,530 in wagers in September 2026, about 5.0 per cent more than in September 2025, but kept far less of it. According to the New York State Gaming Commission’s statewide mobile sports wagering report, gross gaming revenue (GGR) was $159,403,122, down 17.7 per cent from $193,756,855 a year earlier. Dividing revenue by handle gives an implied hold of 6.64 per cent, compared with 8.47 per cent in September 2025. Net revenue to education, the state’s share, came to $81,315,247, which is $17.5 million less than in September 2025. Handle for the month was the largest of any September in the commission’s published history, which begins in January 2022. The hold was the smallest for any September in that same record. The result puts a sharp split between how much New Yorkers bet and how much the operators retained, and it arrives as the state’s fiscal year reaches its halfway point.

What the Commission Reported

The commission publishes mobile sports wagering results for the whole state and for each licensed platform. The statewide report lists handle, GGR, net revenue to platform providers, prior-period adjustments and fines, and net revenue to education, month by month, for each fiscal year, which starts on April 1. September 2026 is the sixth month of fiscal year 2026/27, and its row appears in the report file posted in October 2026.

The statewide row for September 2026 shows net revenue to platform providers of $78,107,530, prior-period adjustments and fines of $19,655 and net revenue to education of $81,315,247. Those figures split GGR almost exactly in half: the education share works out to 51.0 per cent of GGR and the platform share to 49.0 per cent, by GamingNewsNow’s calculation from the report.

The report carries a note that matters for every monthly comparison. Sports wagering revenue in New York is recorded on a cash basis, so bets placed on future events count as current-period revenue for tax purposes, while winning payouts are counted when they are redeemed. The report also notes that $12 million of net revenue to education is set aside for problem gambling education and treatment, and $5 million for a youth sports grant program.

September in Numbers

The table sets September 2026 beside September 2025 and the month before. Every value except the changes and hold figures comes straight from the commission’s statewide report; the changes and hold percentages are GamingNewsNow’s calculations from those values.

Against August 2026, handle of $1,731,302,503 rose 38.7 per cent into September, while GGR slipped from $168,476,334 to $159,403,122, a decline of 5.4 per cent. August’s hold was 9.73 per cent, so the drop to 6.64 per cent happened inside one month. Handle was still 9.1 per cent below the record month in the commission’s history, October 2025, when bettors wagered $2,642,692,499.

The September figure is also not the weakest hold of the fiscal year. June 2026 recorded $116,764,161 of GGR on $2,253,568,545 of handle, an implied hold of 5.18 per cent. What separates September is that it is the lowest for that calendar month since launch, in a month when volume was high.

Five Septembers Compared

The commission’s history lets readers set September 2026 against every earlier September since mobile wagering launched in New York in January 2022. The table lists handle, GGR and the implied hold for each.

Handle has risen every September, and the 2026 figure is 91.1 per cent above September 2022. GGR tells a different story: September 2026 GGR is 22.1 per cent below September 2024, even though handle is 15.9 per cent higher over the same two years. Compared with September 2022, GGR is up 11.2 per cent on handle that has nearly doubled.

The implied hold has fallen in three of the last four year-over-year comparisons, with 2024 the exception at 9.88 per cent. The pattern is worth stating carefully. The commission’s report presents the numbers but does not explain them, and a single month’s hold can move with results of games and the timing of payouts under the cash-basis method. Five data points do not establish a trend, only a direction.

What Operator Reports Show

The commission also posts a monthly report for each operator, and two of them, DraftKings and Fanatics, were available for September 2026 in the sources GamingNewsNow reviewed. The commission’s revenue page lists nine mobile operators in all, and the remaining operators’ September figures are therefore summarized below as one combined remainder, calculated by subtracting these two from the statewide row.

DraftKings handled $840,135,369, down 3.5 per cent from $870,562,820 in September 2025, and its GGR of $56,009,109 was 16.0 per cent lower than the $66,686,329 it reported a year earlier. Its implied hold fell from 7.66 per cent to 6.67 per cent. DraftKings accounted for about 35.0 per cent of statewide handle and 35.1 per cent of GGR.

Fanatics moved the other way on volume. Its handle rose 21.8 per cent, from $219,032,744 to $266,838,473, but its GGR dropped 29.8 per cent from $20,453,298, and its implied hold fell from 9.34 per cent to 5.38 per cent. The operator held 11.1 per cent of statewide handle and 9.0 per cent of GGR.

For context on the largest operator in the remainder, the commission’s FanDuel report shows $790,417,140 of handle and $77,635,365 of GGR in September 2025, an implied hold of 9.82 per cent. The commission’s FanDuel September 2026 row could not be retrieved in this session, so no current FanDuel figure is reported here. The combined remainder’s hold of 6.88 per cent suggests that the lower hold was not confined to one operator, but that is an inference from group arithmetic and not an operator-level finding.

Why the Gap Matters

Handle measures activity; GGR and the education share measure what the state and the operators can count on. The state’s share fell by $17.5 million from September 2025 to September 2026, even though more money was bet. Under the report’s figures, education receives 51.0 per cent of GGR, so a drop in hold flows through to the state almost one for one.

For operators, the figures show how sensitive a revenue line can be to a few points of hold. Moving from an 8.47 per cent hold to 6.64 per cent on the same handle would have cut revenue by more than a fifth, and the 2026 handle was higher. In the commission’s September row, handle growth of $113,965,264 over the previous September was more than offset by a $34,353,733 fall in GGR.

For readers following state budgets, New York’s education line is tied directly to GGR. The report states a set-aside of $12 million for problem gambling education and treatment and $5 million for youth sports in fiscal year 2026/27. The problem gambling allocation was $6 million in each of the preceding fiscal years’ reports, according to the same commission file. The change in that allocation is a policy item that is separate from month-to-month revenue swings.

How to Read the Figures

A lower hold does not mean fewer people bet or that the market shrank. Handle is at its highest level for any September, and the fiscal-year handle is higher than a year ago. A lower hold also does not mean the lower revenue is permanent. The commission’s own history shows hold moving widely from month to month, including 5.18 per cent in June 2026 and 9.73 per cent in August 2026.

Readers should also keep two definitions apart. Hold in this article is GGR divided by handle, which is a calculation GamingNewsNow performed from the commission’s figures; the commission’s report does not print a hold percentage. GGR is not profit either, because it is measured before operators’ own costs, which the report does not cover.

Finally, the cash-basis note means a single month can contain wagers placed earlier, such as bets on future events, and payouts counted when winning tickets are redeemed. The report does not say how much of September’s figures came from such timing effects. Without that, the report supports a description of what happened, not a diagnosis of why.

The Fiscal Year So Far

Through September, fiscal year 2026/27 handle totals $12,562,590,575, which is 6.9 per cent above the $11,748,045,028 recorded in the same six months of fiscal year 2025/26. GGR over the six months is $1,107,298,760, compared with $1,175,650,598 a year earlier, a decline of 5.8 per cent. The six-month implied hold is 8.81 per cent, against 10.01 per cent in the prior-year period.

Net revenue to education for April through September 2026 totals $564,781,972. The same six months of the prior fiscal year produced $599,574,741, a difference of 5.8 per cent, by GamingNewsNow’s calculation from the commission’s monthly rows.

GamingNewsNow has covered other states’ September reports separately, including Michigan’s September online sports betting handle and Maryland’s September sports betting hold. Because each state counts revenue on its own basis, comparisons across states need care.

What Comes Next

The commission’s next monthly report will add October 2026 to the fiscal-year table. October 2025 is the benchmark to beat for handle, at $2,642,692,499, and its implied hold was 9.03 per cent.

The commission’s weekly statewide reports, which are posted separately, will show direction sooner than the monthly file. No official monthly October figure has been published yet, so any statement about October’s hold would be speculation. Later monthly reports will show whether the fiscal-year hold, now 8.81 per cent, moves back toward the 10.01 per cent recorded in the first six months of last year.

Sources

• New York State Gaming Commission — Monthly Mobile Sports Wagering Report, Statewide (October 2026 file)
• New York State Gaming Commission — Monthly Mobile Sports Wagering Report, DraftKings (October 2026 file)
• New York State Gaming Commission — Monthly Mobile Sports Wagering Report, Fanatics (October 2026 file)
• New York State Gaming Commission — Monthly Mobile Sports Wagering Report, FanDuel (September 2026 file)
• New York State Gaming Commission — Revenue Reports