Betting in Montana
Online Betting In Montana
Montana technically has legal sports betting, but it doesn’t look anything like a modern online market. The entire system runs through Sports Bet Montana, a state-lottery product that can only be used at licensed wagering locations - bars, restaurants, taverns, and other lottery retailers.
There’s no competitive sportsbook market, no multi-operator apps, and no true bet-from-your-couch experience.
That model fits how Montana handles gambling generally: tightly controlled, lottery-centric, and highly aggressive towards new online formats that sit outside the state’s own framework. The legislature has never opened the door to commercial online sportsbooks, does not allow paid DFS, and in 2025 became the first state in the country to explicitly ban online sweepstakes casinos that offer real cash prizes.
However, Montanans aren’t completely shut out of digital play.
Bettors that don't want to be limited to betting at licensed retail locations still have one clean online option: federally regulated Prediction Markets. These CFTC-supervised platforms are the only legal option left that lets Montanans legally speculate for real money on sports and other real-world outcomes from anywhere in the state, without running afoul of Montana’s gambling laws.
Legal Betting Formats in Montana TL;DR
- Prediction Markets
- Online Sportsbooks
- Online Casinos
- DFS Traditional
- DFS Pick’em
- Social/Sweepstakes Sportsbooks
- 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 looking for places to bet online in Montana, you’ll quickly run into offshore sportsbooks that look like normal U.S. betting sites and claim to accept Montana players. These sites are not licensed by the state, and they don’t answer to any U.S. regulator.
If a withdrawal stalls, your account gets limited, or a dispute pops up over grading or bonuses, there’s no Montana agency to call, no formal complaint process, and no enforceable standards backing you up. In a state where legal options exist, sending money to an unregulated offshore book is all downside and no protection.
List of All Betting Platforms Operating In Montana
In Montana, it can look like Sports Bet Montana is the only game in town - but there are other legal platforms that can offer you some action once you step outside the lottery app.
To keep it easy for bettors to see what’s actually available, we track and verify every platform that is legally accessible in Montana – including all federally regulated prediction markets operating in Big Sky Country.
Below is the most accurate, up-to-date list of every place where Montanans can legally play, with each platform reviewed and confirmed for compliance within Montana’s current legal framework.
| Platform | Website |
|---|---|
| Kalshi | kalshi.com |
| Polymarket | polymarket.com |
| Robinhood Predictions | robinhood.com |
| Crypto.com | crypto.com |
| PredictIt | predictit.org |
| Webull | webull.com |
| ForecastEx (IBKR) | forecasttrader.interactivebrokers.com |
| Iowa Electronic Markets | iemweb.biz.uiowa.edu |
| Manifold (No real money) | manifold.markets |
6 Quick facts about Montana Betting
Montana is one of the only states where “online sports betting” really means “betting through a state lottery app at a bar.” Sports Bet Montana is live, but it’s geofenced to licensed retail locations, there’s no competitive sportsbook market, and most of the alternative real-money formats other states rely on have been shut out or banned.
For Montanans trying to understand what’s actually left, these quick facts break down how the lottery model works, which online options are truly legal, and what that reality means for anyone looking to bet or speculate from inside Big Sky Country.
Montana didn’t end up with a lottery-run sportsbook by accident. In 2019, lawmakers considered two very different sports betting models:
- HB 725 – sports wagering run exclusively through the Montana Lottery, using its retailer network and a single tech partner.
- SB 330 – a more open framework that would have allowed multiple private sportsbook operators to enter the market and compete.
Governor Steve Bullock signed HB 725 and vetoed SB 330, explicitly choosing a lottery monopoly model and shutting out commercial competition. That decision locked Montana into a structure where Sports Bet Montana is the only legal sportsbook, bets are tied to licensed retail locations, and national operators have no path to run their own apps under Montana law.
For bettors, having a controlled, single-operator environment continues to define the experience. Where other states have half a dozen or more books competing on odds, promos, and product features, Montana is shaped by a state-run monopoly, not by market competition. Any talk of “opening the market” would have to start by undoing the 2019 decision that made the Lottery the sole gatekeeper.
Because Montana’s sports betting is lottery-run and geofenced to retail venues, anyone who wants true online, real-money exposure to outcomes has to look elsewhere - and federally regulated prediction markets currently fill that gap.
These platforms let Montanans speculate on simple yes/no contracts tied to sports, politics, economic data, and other real-world events, under federal oversight rather than state gambling law.
That lane is currently under pressure, however. In March 2025, the Montana Gambling Control Division sent a cease-and-desist letter to Kalshi over its sports event contracts, explicitly treating those markets as illegal gambling under state law.
The broader fight over whether CFTC-regulated markets are subject to state gambling rules is still unresolved, so prediction sites continue to serve Montana for now - but there’s no guarantee how long that access will last.
In many states, Daily Fantasy Sports slid in before sports betting and carved out its own legal lane. Montana went a different direction. Lawmakers never passed a modern DFS bill, and the state’s existing gambling rules don’t provide a clear exemption for paid fantasy contests.
'The net result is that DFS operators have treated Montana as off-limits or too risky, leaving residents without the kind of widespread DFS and Pick ’Em ecosystem you see in Minnesota, Georgia, or California.
Montana is one of the few states that has explicitly targeted online sweepstakes-style sportsbooks and casinos.
Lawmakers and regulators have moved to treat cash-prize sweepstakes gaming as illegal gambling when it mimics slots or table games online, closing off a lane that many non-sportsbook states rely on as a real-money alternative.
For players, that means the usual “social+sweeps” workaround you might see marketed elsewhere is not a clean option here - Montana has largely chosen to shut that door rather than regulate it.
Because Montana doesn’t offer a true at-home sportsbook experience, offshore books aggressively advertise to residents and try to fill the gap as if they were legitimate U.S. operators. They’re not.
These sites aren’t licensed in Montana, don’t answer to the Lottery or any U.S. regulator, and don’t provide meaningful consumer protection.
If a payout gets delayed, rules change, or your account is limited, there’s essentially no recourse. In a state where the only legal sports betting runs through the Lottery and prediction markets provide a regulated online alternative, sending money to an offshore book is a risky play with no institutional backstop.
What Does Our Expert Think?
Montana is one of the strangest “legal sports betting” states in the country, because the phrase doesn’t mean what it does anywhere else. On paper, remote sports betting is live. In practice, it is completely routed through a single state-run product - Sports Bet Montana - and tethered to bars, taverns, and lottery retailers instead of phones and competition.
That’s not an accident. In 2019, lawmakers had a real fork in the road: a bill that would put sports betting under the Lottery, and a competing bill that would have opened the door to commercial operators. The governor signed the Lottery bill and vetoed the competitive option.
From that moment on, Montana wasn’t building a market so much as extending its lottery footprint. Sports betting became another state-controlled game tied to a network of small businesses, not an open ecosystem where FanDuel, DraftKings, or BetMGM fight for market share.
You see that design choice in how the product actually works. Sports Bet Montana looks like an online sportsbook at first glance - there’s an app, you can register from home, you can deposit and scroll a board. But the bet button is geofenced to licensed locations. If you’re not in a bar or retailer that hosts the Lottery’s terminals, you’re not placing a wager.
Where a lot of states used online betting to modernize and expand, Montana used it to reinforce what it already had. The same instinct shows up in how Montana handles everything around that core.
Daily Fantasy Sports never got a real foothold here. Lawmakers didn’t carve out a modern fantasy statute, big national DFS operators largely stayed away, and using DFS and Pick ’Em as a proxy sportsbook never became part of the culture the way it did in other no-mobile states. If you’re a Montana player used to seeing DFS everywhere else, the silence here is telling: anything that looks too much like betting is expected to fit inside the state’s existing structure, not sit alongside it.
Sweepstakes casinos and social sportsbooks ran into an even harder wall. While other states quietly tolerate dual-currency models that let players make sports picks and spin slot-style reels and cash out prizes, Montana quickly moved to classify those products as unlicensed online gambling and shut the door. The message was simple: if you’re trying to deliver casino economics over the internet without going through Montana’s system, you’re on the wrong side of the line.
Prediction markets became the next pressure point. For a while, they were the cleanest way for Montanans to get real-money exposure to outcomes from home: simple yes/no contracts on sports, politics, and economic data, built under federal CFTC oversight rather than state gambling law. As the category grew, Montana responded the same way it did to sweeps - by treating online event contracts sold into the state as gambling, and backing that position with cease-and-desist letters and a broad statute aimed at unlicensed internet betting.
The national legal fight over whether fully regulated prediction markets sit under state gambling rules at all isn’t settled yet, which is why these platforms still serve Montana. But the direction of travel inside the state is unmistakable: Montana regulators will do everything they can to push against formats that live outside of the regulated lottery lane.
