Betting in Idaho
Online Betting In Idaho
Idaho sits near the hard end of the U.S. gambling spectrum. There are no legal online sportsbooks, no retail sports betting, no commercial casinos, and no regulated online casinos.
Legal gambling in the Gem State is built around a narrow core: the state lottery, pari-mutuel horse racing, charitable bingo/raffles, and a small tribal-casino footprint - and that’s where policymakers have chosen to keep it.
Where many states treated the fall of PASPA as an invitation to explore sports betting, Idaho largely ignored it. Sports wagering remains explicitly illegal under state law: there hasn’t been a meaningful sports-betting bill on the floor, and the state’s constitution still frames most gambling as “contrary to public policy,” with only a few carveouts.
However, Idahoans looking for ways to play aren’t completely out of options.
Real-money sports betting and paid DFS contests are off the table in Idaho, and sweepstakes sportsbooks and casinos that let players redeem prizes for cash aren’t allowed either. But Idaho residents can access federally regulated prediction markets that operate under national oversight rather than Idaho’s gambling code. Those markets are the closest thing Idahoans have to a true real-money option, in a state that otherwise keeps a very tight lid on traditional betting.
Legal Betting Formats in Idaho TL;DR
- Prediction Markets
- Online Sportsbooks
- Online Casinos
- Social/Sweepstakes Sportsbooks
- DFS Traditional
- DFS Pick’em
- Social/Sweepstakes Casinos
Unfamiliar with some of these betting formats? Read our beginner's guide to all type of legal betting in the US.
If you're searching for sportsbooks online, you will often run into sites like Bovada or BetUS, that look like normal U.S. sportsbooks offering their services in Idaho. These sites are located offshore and are not licensed or regulated, which means you have no meaningful consumer protections if something goes wrong.
If a payout is delayed, an account is restricted, or terms change, there’s usually no state regulator, no dispute process, and no enforceable standards to fall back on. For most bettors, the risk simply isn’t worth it - especially when there are legal, regulated alternatives available in Idaho.
List of All Betting Platforms Operating In Idaho
In Idaho, the state hasn’t just closed the door on sportsbooks - it’s shut down almost every modern betting format along with them.
To keep it easy for bettors to see what’s actually on the table, we track and verify the only real-money options that are legally accessible in Idaho today: federally regulated prediction markets.
Below is the most accurate, up-to-date list of every place where Idahoans can legally participate, with each platform reviewed and confirmed for compliance within Idaho’s current legal framework.
| Platform | Website |
|---|---|
| Kalshi | kalshi.com |
| Polymarket | polymarket.com |
| Robinhood Predictions | robinhood.com |
| Crypto.com | crypto.com |
| DraftKings Predictions | predictions.draftkings.com |
| FanDuel Predicts | fanduel.com/predicts |
| PredictIt | predictit.org |
| Webull | webull.com |
| ForecastEx (IBKR) | forecasttrader.interactivebrokers.com |
| Iowa Electronic Markets | iemweb.biz.uiowa.edu |
| Manifold (No real money) | manifold.markets |
7 Quick facts about Idaho Betting
Idaho is one of the most restrictive gambling states in the country. The state has shut the door not just on sportsbooks and casinos, but also on most of the alternative lanes other non-sportsbook states lean on - including paid DFS, Pick ’Em, and real-money sweepstakes casinos.
For Idahoans trying to understand what’s actually left, these quick facts break down the core rules, the narrow legal lanes that remain, and what the state’s hardline approach really means for anyone looking to bet or speculate from inside Idaho.
Idaho didn't just restrict gambling by statute - it fully baked the position into its constitution. Gambling is defined as “contrary to public policy and strictly prohibited,” with only three carveouts: the state lottery, pari-mutuel horse betting, and charitable bingo and raffles.
For bettors, that matters more than any single bill or political soundbite. When a state’s default position is written into its constitution, every new gambling idea starts from “no” and has to fight its way to “maybe.”
Since PASPA fell in 2018, many states have at least introduced sports-betting bills, even if they failed. Idaho hasn’t. Recent coverage from industry trackers notes that no legislator has filed a serious sports-betting bill since 2018, and analysts routinely cite Idaho as one of the states least likely to legalize anytime soon.
That means Idaho isn’t “almost there” or “one vote away.” It’s a state where sports betting isn’t even on the legislative starting line.
In a lot of no-sportsbook states, players lean on things like real-money sweepstakes casinos, social sportsbooks with prize redemptions, or paid DFS and Pick ’Em contests to fill the gap.
Idaho has taken a much harder line. With paid DFS pushed out and gambling narrowly defined around lottery, pari-mutuel, and charitable games, most of the usual workaround formats either don’t operate here or can’t offer real-money cash-out in a way that fits Idaho law.
That leaves Idaho with a much thinner menu of alternatives than you’d see in places like Georgia, California, or even Hawaii.
Prediction markets let you trade on real-world outcomes using simple “yes or no” contracts - Will Team X win? Will inflation fall? Will a bill pass? Prices move based on what the market thinks will happen, and contracts settle cleanly when the outcome is known.
These platforms are regulated at the federal level through the CFTC, which is why they don’t depend on Idaho passing a sports-betting law. For Idaho bettors, that makes prediction markets the one straightforward, real-money option that doesn’t run head-first into the state’s constitutional gambling ban.
When DFS exploded nationally, Idaho didn’t give it a soft landing. In 2016, the Attorney General’s office announced an agreement with DraftKings and FanDuel: both companies would stop offering paid daily fantasy contests to Idaho players, after the AG concluded those contests constituted illegal gambling under state law. Free-to-play contests were allowed to remain, but the real-money DFS lane was essentially shut.
For Idaho players, the takeaway is simple: unlike many states that chose to tolerate or regulate DFS, Idaho made it clear it sees paid daily fantasy as gambling - and treated it accordingly.
Social sportsbooks and social/sweepstakes casinos have become quite popular in Georgia because they’re built to operate outside traditional gambling law.
Instead of placing a direct cash wager the way a sportsbook does, these platforms use dual virtual currencies - free coins for fun, and sweeps coins that can lead to real prize redemptions. That structure is why they’re available in Georgia: they operate under sweepstakes rules, not state sportsbook licensing.
For Georgia players, the appeal is practical: you can get sportsbook-style pickmaking and casino-style gameplay without stepping into offshore territory or waiting on legalization.
Because Idaho has no legal sportsbooks, it’s easy to stumble onto offshore sites that look like normal betting apps and claim to accept Idaho players. The problem is that these operators aren’t licensed in Idaho - or anywhere else in the U.S. for that matter - and they don’t answer to any US regulators if something goes wrong.
If your payout gets delayed, your account gets limited, or a dispute pops up, there’s no formal complaint process and no regulator with jurisdiction to help you. In a state as restrictive as Idaho, offshore books might look like the only option - but in practice, you’re taking on all the risk with none of the protection.
As long as there are legal options like Prediction Markets available, in our opinion, offshore sites are simply is not worth the risk.
What Does Our Expert Think?
Idaho isn’t a no-sportsbook state because it’s “behind the times.” It’s a no-sportsbook state because it deliberately engineered a system meant to keep nearly all forms of betting away from its population. The constitution doesn’t treat gambling as something to manage or modernize - it labels it “contrary to public policy” and then carves out a few narrow exceptions: the lottery, pari-mutuel horse racing, charitable gaming, and tribal casinos under compact. Everything else starts on the wrong side of that line.
That’s a different starting point than you see in a place like Georgia or California. Those states are arguing over how to add more gambling to systems that already exist. Idaho is not looking to budge on the gambling self-image it wrote into law decades ago. That’s why you don’t see serious sports-betting bills every session, or big public campaigns about “modernizing” the market. Sports betting isn’t an unresolved project here. It’s something the state has chosen not to engage with.
You can see how firm that posture is in the way Idaho handled daily fantasy sports. A lot of states let DFS operate in the gray while they figured out what to do with it - Idaho did the opposite. The Attorney General’s office made it clear from the start that paid DFS contests were considered illegal gambling under state law, and the major operators agreed to leave rather than fight it out.
That’s the pattern: if a new product looks too much like wagering, Idaho would rather shut it off than retrofit the law around it. In states with a softer stance, you can usually find three or four different ways to approximate a sportsbook menu, but here there are no thriving sweepstakes sportsbook or casino scene offering dual-currency games with cash prizes. There’s no soft tolerance for paid DFS or Pick ’Em that lets players quietly treat them as de facto sportsbooks.
The usual “in-between” products that other states lean on either don’t operate here, or can’t offer real-money cash-out in a way that fits within Idaho’s narrow set of exceptions. Idaho has shut down every one of those within its power, with just one remaining: Prediction Markets.
Those platforms work precisely because they don’t depend on Boise for permission. They structure participation as simple yes/no contracts on real-world events and operate under federal oversight instead of state gambling codes. Functionally, they give Idahoans a way to speculate with real money on the outcomes they care about - sports, politics, economic prints, major events - without ever asking the state to expand its gambling footprint. It’s not a full sportsbook experience, and it’s not trying to be. It’s a narrow but clean lane that slips past the constitutional roadblock because it was never routed through it in the first place.
Idaho is not a “sleeping giant” market waiting to flip a switch. It’s a state that hard-anchored a minimalist gambling policy and has stuck to it, even as the rest of the country built out layers of regulated betting on top of their old rules. Until there’s a genuine appetite to revisit that constitutional posture - not just talk about sports betting as a trendy revenue idea - Idaho will keep looking like what it is now: a jurisdiction where almost every modern betting format is filtered out at the border, and the only meaningful action lives in products designed to operate entirely outside the state’s gambling system.
