Betting in Washington
Online Betting In Washington
Washington sits at the strict end of the gambling map. There are no state-licensed online sportsbooks you can use from home, no regulated online casinos, and no legal DFS sites. Sports betting exists, but only in a tightly controlled tribal-retail lane that stops well short of a traditional online market.
When PASPA fell, Washington didn’t open the door to commercial books or statewide mobile apps. Instead, lawmakers passed HB 2638 in 2020, authorizing in-person sports wagering at tribal casinos through amended compacts. That gave tribes the ability to run retail books and on-property mobile, but left the state’s broader online-gambling ban fully intact. Under Washington law, internet gambling remains illegal for in-state operators and players alike, outside those narrow tribal exceptions.
However, that doesn’t mean every online betting format is off the board.
While Washington has pushed DFS, Pick 'Em and sweepstakes platforms out by treating them as unlawful internet gambling, residents can still access federally regulated Prediction Markets that fall under national oversight rather than the state gambling code.
While its a a very narrow lane, it gives bettors options in a state that otherwise keeps one of the toughest online betting stances in the country.
Legal Betting Formats in Washington 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 are looking for online sportsbooks in Washington, you’ll quickly come across names like Bovada, BetUS, and others that look like normal U.S. betting sites and claim to accept WA players. These sites are all offshore. They’re not licensed in Washington, they’re not regulated anywhere in the U.S., and they don’t answer to American authorities.
If they slow-roll or refuse a payout, change their house rules after you’ve bet, or shut your account when you’re ahead, there’s no Washington regulator to call and no real dispute process. In a state that has legally-compliant options, sending your bankroll to an offshore site means taking all of the risk with none of the protection.
List of All Betting Platforms Operating In Washington
Washington keeps one of the tightest grips on online gambling in the country, which makes it genuinely hard to know what’s actually safe and legal to use from your phone. Most traditional formats are off the board, and a lot of what you’ll find via Google is either offshore or out of bounds under state law.
To keep things straight, we track and verify every legal platform that is accessible to Washington residents today - including the few sweepstakes-style sites that fit within Washington’s promotion rules and federally regulated prediction markets.
Below is the most accurate, up-to-date list of every place where Washingtonians can play online, with each platform reviewed and confirmed for how it fits within Washington’s current legal framework.
| Platform | Category | Website |
|---|---|---|
| Kalshi | Prediction Markets | kalshi.com |
| Polymarket | Prediction Markets | polymarket.com |
| Robinhood Predictions | Prediction Markets | robinhood.com |
| Crypto.com | Prediction Markets | crypto.com |
| PredictIt | Prediction Markets | predictit.org |
| Webull | Prediction Markets | webull.com |
| ForecastEx (IBKR) | Prediction Markets | forecasttrader.interactivebrokers.com |
| Iowa Electronic Markets | Prediction Markets | iemweb.biz.uiowa.edu |
| Manifold (No real money) | Prediction Markets | manifold.markets |
7 Quick facts about Washington Betting
Washington treats most online wagering as a criminal offense, shutting 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 most sweepstakes sportsbooks and casinos.
For Washingtonians who want a clear picture of what’s actually in play, the facts below break down the core rules behind that structure, the very limited online lanes that still exist, and how alternative legal platforms fit around one of the toughest betting environments in the country.
In most states, online gambling sat in a gray zone for years. Washington did the opposite. In 2006, lawmakers amended RCW 9.46.240 to explicitly add “the internet” and telecommunications systems to the list of banned channels for transmitting or receiving gambling information, and they elevated the penalty to a class C felony.
That move made Washington one of the only states where simply placing a real-money bet online can theoretically carry felony exposure, not just a slap-on-the-wrist misdemeanor. For anyone thinking about offshore books or unlicensed sites, that’s the legal backdrop you’re operating in.
When Washington added sports betting in 2020, it did it the most conservative way possible: tribal-only, on-premise, with no statewide mobile. HB 2638 authorized sports wagering at tribal casinos under amended compacts, and the market was built from there.
There’s still no open licensing system for commercial operators, no framework for non-tribal mobile books, and no state-run competitive marketplace. If lawmakers ever want true online betting, they have to decide whether to expand beyond the tribal model or somehow stretch it statewide - neither is a simple political conversation.
From the outside, it’s easy to assume Washington could just flip a switch and add mobile wagering the way other states did. Inside the system, it’s much harder:
- Online gambling is still treated as a class C felony under RCW 9.46.240.
- Tribal compacts are written around on-premises gambling.
- Card rooms and other commercial interests have already lost a major legal push to join the betting market.
Any true mobile model would need to unwind or carve around felony language, renegotiate compacts, and re-open a politically ugly fight over who gets access. That’s why you don’t see serious, near-term mobile bills with broad support - the structural friction is baked in and hard to overcome.
Where Washington draws a hard line is on state-regulated internet gambling. What it doesn’t directly control are federally supervised products like CFTC-regulated prediction markets, which treat event contracts as financial instruments rather than local wagers.
Platforms in that category can list yes/no contracts on real-world outcomes - everything from macroeconomic data and elections to sports-related markets - under federal oversight, not Washington’s gambling code.
For Washington residents, that makes prediction markets one of the only ways to legally put real money behind a view on future events without running straight into the state’s felony-level internet gambling ban.
Daily Fantasy Sports is banned or unavailable in only a small handful of U.S. states - and Washington is firmly on that list. The major national operators (DraftKings, FanDuel, etc.) all geoblock WA, and legal trackers consistently flag the state as a “no-DFS” jurisdiction.
The problem is how Washington defines gambling. Under state law, risking “something of value” on a contest of chance is gambling unless the activity has been specifically carved out and regulated. Lawmakers never created a fantasy-contest exception, and regulators have long treated paid fantasy lineups as gambling rather than a separate skill-game category. Once the 2006 internet statute made online gambling transmission a class C felony, the risk profile for DFS operators got even worse, not better.
Pick ’Em formats never even got a foothold. In softer states, those contests sit in the gray between props and fantasy; in Washington, they run straight into the same combination of a broad gambling definition and an internet felony rule.
The net result is simple: if you’re in Washington, paid DFS and Pick ’Em apps are off the legal map - not a quiet, tolerated workaround.
In a lot of non-sportsbook states, social and sweepstakes casinos fill the gap by using dual-currency systems - play coins + sweepstakes coins - to offer sports pick and casino games with prize redemptions.
Washington, however, has taken one of the hardest lines in the country on prize-based online play. The Gambling Commission’s own sweepstakes FAQ makes it clear that the way many sweepstakes platforms use that label amounts to unlicensed gambling, and major dual-currency brands like Chumba or Fliff simply don’t serve WA as a result.
Most major sweeps platforms have responded by flat-out blocking Washington accounts, grouping the state with an increasing amount of states where social platforms are treated as off-limits. So while you may see national sweeps brands advertised elsewhere, Washington’s rules mean sweeps platforms sites carve WA out.
Despite the felony framework, offshore books aggressively market into Washington, often geofencing licensed U.S. operators while leaving unlicensed dot-coms wide open. These sites are based overseas, hold no Washington license, and aren’t answerable to any U.S. regulator.
If an offshore book slow-rolls a withdrawal, changes house rules mid-season, or closes a winning account, you have no meaningful safety net: no Gambling Commission complaint process, no guaranteed dispute mechanism, and no enforceable standards behind the odds you’re seeing.
In a state that already treats internet gambling as a class C felony, adding an unregulated operator on top of that is about as far from a “low-risk” choice as it gets.
What Does Our Expert Think?
Washington looks like a gambling state until you try to use your phone. On the ground, you’ve got full-service tribal casinos, a state lottery, pull-tabs, card rooms, and now retail sportsbooks. Online, almost everything is treated as something to be stopped, not something to be managed. That split is the core of the market: a state that’s comfortable with gambling in defined physical boxes, and deeply uncomfortable with gambling that follows you home.
The key decision came in 2006, long before anyone was talking about same-game parlays on an app. Lawmakers rewrote the criminal code to make transmitting or receiving gambling information over the internet a class C felony, then backed it up with a policy statement that gambling in Washington is prohibited unless specifically authorized. That did two things at once: it shut down the early online poker boom in WA, and it locked the state into a posture where any new product has to argue its way into a narrow exception instead of benefiting from a gray area.
Sports betting arrived on those terms. When PASPA fell, Washington didn’t spend years debating an open mobile market. It passed HB 2638 and routed sports wagering through tribal-state compacts only. Tribes could add retail books and on-premises mobile tied to their properties; the rest of the state got no commercial license framework, no state-branded app, no path for card rooms or outside operators. That wasn’t an accident. It reinforced a long-standing policy choice: if there’s going to be meaningful gambling in Washington, it’s going to live on tribal floors, not in a statewide free-for-all.
That legal posture explains why Washington looks so different from other non-mobile states when it comes to alternatives.
In a lot of jurisdictions, DFS and Pick ’Em act as the unofficial pressure valve - a way to approximate a sportsbook menu under a skill-game theory. Washington never allowed that to take root. The combination of a broad gambling definition, the internet-felony statute, and clear operator risk pushed the major DFS companies out.
Social sportsbooks and sweepstakes casinos don’t get any real traction here. Nationally, these products are built to sit in the gap between gambling law and sweepstakes law — play coins up front, a separate sweeps balance you can redeem for prizes or cash on the back end. Washington regulators have taken the view that sportsbook and casino-style sweepstakes models are unlicensed internet gambling, full stop, and the major brands have responded by blocking the state entirely.
Prediction Markets are the sole format that still offers real-money exposure without colliding with state law. CFTC-regulated event-contract platforms treat markets on elections, macro data, and sometimes sports-related outcomes as financial instruments, not state-licensed wagers. From a user’s perspective, you’re still staking money on whether you’re right about a future event; from a regulatory perspective, you’re interacting with a federally supervised product that lives outside Washington’s gambling code. In a state where most online routes are blocked, that federal lane ends up carrying more weight than you’d normally expect.
For Washington bettors, the implications are blunt. If you want a straightforward, fully regulated experience, you go to a tribal property with a book. If you want to stay online, your realistic legal options are limited to a thin layer of federally regulated prediction markets that get their legitimacy from Washington, D.C., not Washington State.
Until lawmakers are ready to revisit the 2006 internet posture and tribes are willing to renegotiate around a wider online footprint, that’s the reality Washington bettors should expect to live with.
