7.2 Million Accounts, 2,545 Calls for Help

Two numbers, one report

New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli's office released figures this month on the state's gaming revenue. Mobile sports betting is now the second largest gaming revenue source in the state. Since the January 2022 launch, New Yorkers have wagered $91.2 billion, producing $8.3 billion in gross gaming revenue.

In fiscal 2026 alone, the state's cut was $1.3 billion in tax. In fiscal 2023 it was $727.4 million.

The same reporting carries a second number. Calls to the state's problem gambling helpline reached 2,545 in 2025, an 8.5% increase over 2020.

Those two figures are usually reported as a pair, with the rising call volume presented as the warning attached to the revenue. That reading has it backwards. The call volume is not the warning. The call volume is how few people are counted.

What one call per 2,830 accounts means

The state counted 7.2 million unique mobile wagering accounts in 2025. The average account wagered about $3,500 over the year, at an average bet of $42.

Set the 2,545 calls against 7.2 million accounts and you get 0.035%. One call for roughly every 2,830 accounts.

Accounts are not people. Plenty of bettors hold three or four, chasing sign-up offers across books, so the true number of individuals is lower than 7.2 million. That cuts in the direction of caution, and it is worth doing the arithmetic conservatively.

Research consistently finds problem gambling rates among sports bettors well above the general adult population. Take a deliberately low figure and assume just 1% of those accounts belong to someone experiencing gambling disorder. That is 72,000 people. Against 72,000, the 2,545 who called represent 3.5%.

Take an even more cautious view, halve the account base to correct for duplicates, and the share who called still lands in the single digits.

The national number this lands on

That arithmetic is not a New York anomaly. It is what the literature has been reporting for twenty years.

Writing in November 2025, NIDA Director Nora Volkow put it plainly: "Just 7–12% of people with GD seek help from treatment or even support groups." The underlying source is Slutske's analysis of two US national surveys, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 2006.

Note what that range measures. Not "did not complete treatment." Not "could not find a provider." It counts people who never reached out at all, to anyone, including a free peer support meeting that costs nothing and asks for no insurance.

So when New York's helpline logs 2,545 calls in a year with 7.2 million wagering accounts, the state is not seeing a small problem. It is seeing the fraction of a large problem that made it to a phone.

One dollar for every hundred and eight

New York doubled its problem gambling services funding from $6 million to $12 million. Doubling is real, and it is more than most states have done.

It is also $12 million against $1.3 billion in mobile betting tax revenue: about one dollar of treatment funding for every $108 the state collected from the activity.

The ratio matters more than either number alone, because the two sides scale differently. Betting capacity grows with marketing budgets and phone penetration. Treatment capacity grows with appropriations, licensure, and the slow work of training clinicians in a specialty most graduate programs never cover.

Volkow noted the structural version of this in the same post: sports betting is legal in 38 states and the District of Columbia, and in 26 states a person can place a wager on the same device they use to text their therapist.

What rising call volume does and does not prove

An 8.5% rise in helpline calls is genuinely good news in one narrow sense. Somebody built awareness campaigns, and some people who would have stayed silent picked up a phone.

It does not show that help-seeking is keeping pace. Over a three-year window, revenue grew 78.4%. Over a five-year window, calls grew 8.5%. Those are different measurement periods and should not be subtracted from one another as though they were the same series. But no reasonable alignment of the two windows produces a picture where help-seeking is tracking participation.

Comptroller DiNapoli's own conclusion was measured: rising participation, "particularly among younger people, warrants more study and consumer protection."

The honest reading of the pair is narrower than "betting causes calls" and more uncomfortable than "the system is working." It is this: the number of people in trouble is not knowable from the helpline, because the helpline is the part that is visible, and the research says the visible part is under one in eight.

Why people don't call

The barriers are well documented, and money is only one of them.

Gambling disorder carries a specific kind of shame that other addictions do not. There is no substance to blame. The losses are numeric, itemized, and timestamped, which makes them feel like a running tally of personal failure rather than a symptom. People describe the arithmetic of their own account history as the thing they cannot say out loud.

Gambling is also the most concealable addiction there is. Nothing is on the breath. Nothing shows in the eyes. A phone screen looks the same whether it holds a bet slip or a weather app. Concealment is available in a way it simply is not for alcohol, and availability shapes behavior.

And there is the structural piece. Many insurers still handle gambling disorder poorly despite its place in the DSM-5 and its ICD-10 code, F63.0. People who do try to get help sometimes find out the coverage is not there, which teaches an expensive lesson about whether reaching out is worth it.

What the number would look like if it were working

If New York's help-seeking rate matched what we see for depression and anxiety, where 70 to 90% of people eventually seek treatment, the helpline would not be taking 2,545 calls. Applied to even the conservative 72,000 estimate above, it would be taking tens of thousands.

That is the gap. Not between the revenue and the calls, which is the comparison that gets made, but between the calls and the people.

If you are in it

You do not have to call yourself anything, and you do not have to have lost a certain amount to qualify for help. The research above describes hundreds of thousands of people who never said it to anyone. There is nothing unusual about being one of them, and nothing required of you beyond telling one person.

Our urgent help page lists the national helpline, crisis lines, and same-day options by state. All of it is free and confidential, and it is reachable by text if saying it out loud is the part you cannot do yet. New York residents can also reach state services through NYS OASAS.

If you want to know where you stand before you talk to anybody, our self-assessment walks the behavioral, emotional, and financial signs without asking who you are.

Sources

• New York mobile sports betting revenue climbs as problem gambling calls rise. Fingerlakes1, 17 September 2026. Source for the fiscal 2026 and fiscal 2023 tax figures, the $91.2 billion handle, the 7.2 million accounts, the $3,500 average annual wager and $42 average bet, the 2,545 helpline calls and 8.5% change, the $6M to $12M funding increase, and the DiNapoli quote
• Office of the New York State Comptroller. Thomas P. DiNapoli, State Comptroller. Originating office for the gaming revenue reporting
• Gambling disorder in the age of mobile sports betting. Nora Volkow, Director, National Institute on Drug Abuse, 14 November 2025. Source for the 7 to 12% help-seeking range and the 38-state and 26-state figures
• Natural recovery and treatment-seeking in pathological gambling: results of two US national surveys. Wendy S. Slutske, American Journal of Psychiatry, 2006. Peer-reviewed. The primary source underlying the 7 to 12% range
• NYS Office of Addiction Services and Supports, problem gambling. State treatment and prevention services
• National Council on Problem Gambling. National helpline, free and confidential, 24 hours, by phone, text or chat