Pennsylvania’s bipartisan Joint State Government Commission says online casinos need sharper rules and quicker intervention as gambling addiction becomes an urgent and escalating public-health challenge.
The report, as Public Source described it, presents the commonwealth with a choice between moving fast enough to blunt harm and moving more slowly in search of more tailored changes. It argues that the goal is not to shut down the industry, but to help people who need help, and it treats gambling addiction as a public-health problem rather than a matter of personal failing alone.
The warning lands against the backdrop of a huge market. Pennsylvania legalized online casinos in 2017, and Public Source reported that the state’s total gambling profits reached $7.7 billion in 2025. That level rivals the casinos on the Las Vegas Strip and is growing 10 times as fast as Nevada’s, while Pittsburgh has become the country’s fifth-largest gambling-advertising market and Philadelphia the largest.
The health case in the report is equally stark. Public Source said Pennsylvanians are at least twice as likely as the country as a whole to suffer from gambling addiction, and that more than one in four are estimated to be at risk of developing it. The report also cites studies linking gambling addiction to debt, domestic violence, harassment of college athletes and, in some cases, suicide.
A separate annual assessment from the Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs, Penn State and the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board adds more detail to the picture. The report was based on a 2022 survey of more than 1,993 people and is required under Act 42 of 2017, which also helps fund the work through fees assessed from interactive-gaming licensees.
That assessment found online-gambling prevalence rising across the years of the study, from about 11% in the early years to 16% and then 20%. It said 17% to 30% of Pennsylvania adults engaged in some form of online gambling in the past year, while 60% to 73% gambled in some form overall.
Offline gambling remained more common than online play, at 56% to 69% versus 17% to 30%, and sports betting was the most popular online format for the fifth year in a row. The report’s table also showed that only 3.9% of the population were exclusively online gamblers, but that group had at-risk rates of 13.4% to 37.0% and problem-gambling rates of 5.0% to 5.3%.
One of the commission’s central recommendations is to require operators to give an outside nonprofit anonymized player data, including gender, age, region of residence, frequency of play, length of play, speed of play and amounts wagered. The idea is to let researchers identify harmful patterns more precisely and design responses based on actual player behavior.
The report says it found only three credible estimates of how much gambling-industry profit may come from people with a gambling disorder. Those examples were a Connecticut report that found 5% of gamblers generated 75% of casino profits, a review of internal PointsBet financial documents that found 0.5% of gamblers accounted for more than 70% of profits, and a large study in Great Britain that found 5% of gamblers produced two-thirds of profit.
The Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board is also moving on its own rules. A proposed rulemaking dated July 11 would update compulsive- and problem-gambling language, clarify plan submission timelines, expand advertising safeguards, add a responsible-gaming page requirement and create a cashless-gaming self-limits section.
The proposed rules would also require monthly reports on how many Pennsylvanians set limits, self-excluded or had accounts closed because of problem gambling, and they would be open to public comment for 30 days after publication in the Pennsylvania Bulletin. In the meantime, the state’s helpline continues to show the strain: more than half of calls now specifically mention online gambling as the most problematic form.
