Seven US States Allow Online Casino. Barely Any Offer Bingo
Real-money online casino gaming is legal in seven US states. In almost none of them can you sit down to a game of online bingo for cash.
That gap has widened this year. The dual-currency sweepstakes sites that quietly served as America’s real-money bingo rooms in unregulated states are being shut down one legislature at a time. The regulated route that was meant to replace them has not moved. No new state legalised online casino play in the latest legislative sessions, and the licensed operators that could run bingo have mostly walked away from it.
At a glance
- Legal iGaming statesSeven live (NJ, PA, MI, WV, CT, DE, RI); Maine joins on 29 July 2026
- New states this cycleNone; New York, Illinois and Wyoming bills all stalled or died
- Real-money online bingoAll but gone, roughly one variant at one New Jersey operator
- Bottom lineFor US players, legal online bingo is contracting, not growing
The seven states where the games are legal
Seven jurisdictions run live, licensed online casinos today. New Jersey and Delaware got there first, back in 2013. Then things crawled. Pennsylvania didn’t switch its online casinos on until 2019, with West Virginia a year behind it. Michigan and Connecticut both arrived in 2021. Rhode Island is the newest, live since 2024.
| State | Online casino live since |
|---|---|
| New Jersey | 2013 |
| Delaware | 2013 |
| Pennsylvania | 2019 |
| West Virginia | 2020 |
| Michigan | 2021 |
| Connecticut | 2021 |
| Rhode Island | 2024 |
| Maine | Not yet live (legalised; opens 29 July 2026, tribal-only) |
Two footnotes matter for the count. Nevada is the odd one out. It regulates online poker but not casino games, so it doesn’t count among the seven. Maine is a different case. It has just become the eighth state to legalise, but the terms are unusual. Online rights there belong only to the four Wabanaki Nations, and the law won’t take effect until 29 July 2026. So nobody is playing there yet.
No new state joined the list this cycle
The obvious fix for a thin market is more states opening up. It did not happen.
New York looked the likeliest. Senator Joseph Addabbo’s bill proposed a 30.5% tax on online casino revenue, but it never won the governor’s backing and died when the session closed. Illinois pushed a rival measure at a 25% rate; it stalled in committee. Wyoming’s attempt failed outright. Massachusetts and a handful of others kept bills alive on paper without moving them anywhere.
So the regulated map looks much as it did a year ago. Maine aside, and Maine is a tribal-exclusive market unlikely to prioritise bingo, no fresh state has arrived to widen the options.
Legal still doesn’t mean playable
Here is the part the state-by-state trackers tend to skip. Even inside the seven legal markets, dedicated real-money online bingo has all but disappeared.
New Jersey is the tell. It is the largest and oldest of the regulated markets, the one place you would expect a healthy bingo offering. For a while it had one: Borgata Bingo, a proper licensed product. It closed in November 2023. What is left is thin. Search the licensed lobbies today and real-money bingo comes down to roughly a single 90-ball room at one operator. Not the 75-ball, five-by-five game most American players picture when they think of bingo. One variant, one site.
The licence allows bingo. The commercial reality is that operators chase slots and live tables, where the money is, and let the bingo tab wither. A player in a regulated state can have ninety online slots a click away and nowhere sensible to dab a card.
Squeezed from the other side
A static regulated market would matter less if the informal one had held. It has not.
For years those sweepstakes sites were the workaround for players stuck in states with no regulated casino. That workaround is closing fast. A wave of state bans, which we covered in detail here, has already pushed operators out of market after market, with more bills sitting on governors’ desks.
Put the two together and the squeeze comes into focus. The sweepstakes option is being legislated away in the states without regulated casinos. The regulated states are not expanding to absorb those players. And where regulation does exist, the bingo product has quietly been switched off. Different pressures, the same direction of travel.
What US players can do now
None of this leaves players with nothing, but the honest options are narrower than the marketing suggests.
If you are in one of the seven regulated states, the licensed US bingo sites are the safe route, with the caveat that the bingo tab may be near-empty. It is worth checking the actual game library before you sign up rather than assuming a big-name casino still runs bingo. Many no longer do.
Offshore sites will happily take American players and advertise bingo freely. They are not regulated in the US, which means no state protection if a withdrawal is refused or an account is frozen. That risk is real and worth naming plainly.
The longer view is a little brighter. Legislative interest has not vanished, the New York and Illinois bills are expected back in 2027, and each new regulated state is a potential home for licensed bingo if operators choose to build it. For now, an American looking for a legitimate real-money bingo card has fewer places to sit down than at almost any point in the past few years.
