Rhode Island’s legislature closed just after 1:30 a.m. Saturday, and the House failed to take up a bill that would have opened the sports wagering market from a single operator to five. An amended version of SB 748 passed the Senate on June 4, 30-2, but never got a committee hearing in the House.
The bill was reported to have been important to the late Senate President Dominick Ruggerio, which Senate Majority Leader Frank Ciccone acknowledged as the bill moved through the Senate. Ruggerio, the author of Rhode Island’s 2018 and 2019 retail and digital sports betting bills and its 2023 iCasino bill, died at age 76 on April 21 after battling cancer.
Rhode Island remains among a handful of states with a monopoly for digital sports betting. Delaware, Florida, New Hampshire, and Oregon are the others. In three of those states, the single operator works in partnership with the state lottery. In Florida, the Seminole Tribe negotiated a monopoly into its compact in the state. International Gaming Technology (IGT) runs the back end for Sportsbook RI.
The amended bill would have prohibited the state from renewing IGT’s contract and would have required the lottery to open a competitive-bid process in 2026. But given the long runway, House leaders said during the process that they did not see the need to move a bill this session.
DC opened its market last year
The District of Columbia had a single-operator market until July 2024. After almost four years of using the underperforming platform GambetDC and three months with FanDuel as the sole operator, the DC Council opened the market. Five operators are now live in the city. Both handle and tax revenue have skyrocketed.
According to an InGame analysis, between late May 2020 and the end of 2023, the highest annual handle in D.C. was $216 million. With an open market for less than half the year in 2024, handle reached $460.9 million. Four months into this year, handle is $290.2 million. The most the city collected in tax revenue was $9.7 million in 2022. In 2024, when there was a single operator for 6½ months and multiple operators for 5½, that number rose to $11.7 million.
Through April 2025, D.C. had already collected $9 million in taxes. The current tax rate for mobile operators ranges between 10-30%, depending on the class of license.
