A new poll shows that more than a quarter of Gen Z investors see gambling on sports as part of “their long-term financial strategy” — and more than half say they have bet on sports at least once in the last year with money originally set aside for investing.
The online survey of 1,000 U.S. retail investors, which was published Tuesday by the personal finance platform Betterment, underscores a dramatic cultural and generational shift.
Sports betting has become ubiquitous since 2018, the year the Supreme Court struck down a longstanding federal ban on the practice. In 2025 alone, Americans wagered far more on sports — roughly $166 billion — than the U.S. movie, music, book and museum industries generated in revenue combined, according to Fortune. Sports betting now rakes in 42 times more revenue ($17 billion) than it did in 2018 ($400 million), according to some estimates.
Yet no other age group is nearly as likely as Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2007) to view sports gambling as an investment — rather than, say, a form of entertainment.
According to the Betterment survey, just 14% of millennials (born between 1981 and 1996), 6% of Gen Xers (born between 1965 and 1980) and 1% of baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1965) have made sports betting a deliberate, ongoing part of their financial plans — compared with 26% of Gen Zers.
Likewise, just 31% of millennials, 10% of Gen Xers and 4% of boomers have recently redirected investment money into sports betting — compared with 52% of Gen Zers.
Overall, only about one-third of Gen Z investors (34%) say they don’t participate in sports betting. Among all investors surveyed, that figure is nearly twice as high (63%).
So why are Gen Zers increasingly gambling their financial future on sports?
Exposure, access, normalization
Since 2018, 39 states plus Washington, D.C., have legalized sports betting, creating a lucrative new source of tax revenue. Thirty of those jurisdictions now allow online or mobile-app betting. As a result, more than 90% of bets are now placed online rather than in person, according to the American Gaming Association. Users can wager on minute-by-minute outcomes (like the next pitch or play) while watching games live. Payments are instant, digital and frictionless. Advertisements appear across television broadcasts, social media feeds and in stadiums. Major sports leagues and media companies have even partnered with betting companies like DraftKings and FanDuel, effectively normalizing the practice.
As the most online generation, Gen Z is more exposed to these enticements than older generations, and may be more susceptible. According to Betterment’s survey, social media has become Gen Z’s most-cited source for financial news, up from 45% in 2024 to 60% today. By comparison, just 21% of Gen Zers say they rely on a financial adviser.
But exposure isn’t the whole story.
‘Disillusionomics’ and ‘financial nihilism’
Experts also say Gen Z is turning to sports betting because they’ve lost trust in more traditional ways of earning a living and saving for retirement. Right now, the unemployment rate for Gen Zers under 25 is 8.5% — roughly double the rate for all workers, according to federal data. (Prior to 2022, young college graduates actually had lower unemployment numbers than the general population for four straight decades.) Since 2023, postings for entry-level jobs in the U.S. have plummeted by 35% in part due to AI, according to research firm Revelio Labs.
Meanwhile, it’s never been more expensive to buy a home in the U.S. Thirty-year fixed-rate mortgages now carry interest rates of about 6.7%, more than twice as high as they were five years ago, when they were under 3%. The median new home price in the U.S. now hovers around $411,000, up 81% from roughly $227,000 in 2011, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Incomes haven’t risen nearly as fast. As a result, the median age of a first-time U.S. homebuyer is now 40 — up from the norm of about 30 that persisted from the 1980s through the 2010s.
According to British economist and author Alice Lassman, a Gen Zer herself, young adults have responded to their uncertain financial future by embracing “disillusionomics,” which can include house hacking, content creation, buy-now-pay-later services, dupe culture and so on.
“The financial commitments that tied previous generations to long-term careerism — having children, affordable mortgages, college debt — are largely unattainable,” Lassman wrote last year in the Guardian. “College, long considered a reliable pathway to success, has rapidly diminished in importance for Americans. Childcare costs are so prohibitive that a growing share of adults say they’re unlikely to have children. And with housing prices rising at more than twice the rate of inflation since 1960, one in three gen Z-ers believe they’ll never own a home. Locked out of these futures — for better or worse — we’re no longer tethered to economic paths that once rooted people to jobs, and more importantly, to communities.”
“Connecting the threads, we see a generation that is not entitled, not indulgent, but reacting to a political and economic climate we’re disillusioned by,” she concluded. “These are survival strategies in an affordability crisis.”
The upshot, as economics Substacker Kyla Scanlon wrote a few months later in the Wall Street Journal, is precisely the kind of “financial nihilism” that can transform sports betting into an investment strategy.
“When every conventional path narrows, people start to look for alternatives. And in practice, that has meant turning toward the few places where a real upside still appears possible, even if the risks are high,” she wrote. “When people start treating the economy like a game, it’s a sign that the traditional ways of winning no longer feel real.”
Unfortunately, winning at online gambling is also unlikely. According to a 2024 University of California, San Diego, study, 96% of the 717,724 bettors included in researchers’ sample appeared to lose money to online gambling over the five-year study period. Just 4% turned a profit.