A pair of proposed bills that would regulate sports betting and other gambling in the state have drawn mixed reactions from anti-gambling advocates.
The State House of Representatives has continued to support a pair of bills that would close legal loopholes that have allowed sports betting and other forms of gambling form operating in the state outside of gambling regulations.
The more complex of the two measures is House Bill 2570, which would add a new chapter to the state’s gambling statutes specifically targeting sports wagering.
Under the new chapter, sports betting would only be legal in Hawai‘i if done through licensed sports betting operators. Such licenses would require a $500,000 fee and would need to be renewed every five years, which would require an additional $500,000 renewal fee.
Licensed sports betting operators would also be taxed at a new rate, with the state collecting 15% of the year’s gross wagering receipts.
The bill has received pushback from anti-gambling advocates, who warned that providing further legitimacy to sports betting will worsen addiction and financial insecurity among the state’s most vulnerable.
Honolulu Prosecuting Attorney Steve Alm told the House Committee on Economic Development and Technology last week that, based on a 2024 study by the University of Californa San Diego, policies legalizing online gambling lead to a greater increase of irresponsible gambling among lower-income gamblers.
“So that would mean we’d be making our tax money on addicted gamblers in Hawai‘i,” Alm said. “I don’t think we really want to be in the addiction for profit business.”
On the other hand, several sports betting sites and organizations have supported the measure. Kathleen Owen, representing the Sports Betting Alliance, estimated that Hawai‘i residents wagered more than $680 million in illegal sports betting in 2025 alone.
Assuming that number is accurate, the tax in the bill would generate over $102 million in revenue per year.
Owen added that consumers are hungry for legal gambling markets instead of illegal ones. She cited geolocation data that found that sports betting accounts in Hawai‘i attempted to access sportsbooks that are legal in other states more than 460,000 times last year, but were denied access.
Meanwhile, House Bill 2198 would redefine the state’s definition of “gambling” to include sports betting and other practices.
The measure itself is brief, but explicitly includes under the state’s gambling definition any financial speculation based on a variety of future events. While this new definition includes bets on sporting contests, it also accounts for the existence of prediction markets — essentially, markets where people can gamble on real-world events — by including bets on politics, catastrophe or “mass casualty events.”
The preamble to the bill judges that much of the gambling within prediction markets “violate moral and ethical standards” while also taking advantage of the current gap in Hawai‘i’s gambling statutes.
Alm told the House Committee on Consumer Protection and Commerce earlier this month that prediction markets “are gambling by any other name.”
Alm added that users of prediction markets bet more than $448,000 on whether Gov. Josh Green would use specific words during his State of the State address in January. While he said such bets may be harmless on their own, he added others may be financially incentivized to interfere in world events: in January, an unknown bettor won more than $400,000 through the platform Polymarket by betting that former Venezelan President Nicolás Maduro would be out of office, bets made only hours before Maduro’s capture by U.S. special forces.
No gambling platform has testified on HB 2198, and the bill has received little pushback.
Both bills have passed second reading in the House but have not been scheduled for their final House committee hearings.
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