Kansas Sportsbook Revenue: Chiefs' Late-Season Losses Were Sportsbooks' Gains in 2025
Many Kansas residents no doubt are still celebrating the December 2025 announcement by the Kansas City Chiefs NFL team that the franchise would move a few miles west from Missouri to Kansas into a $3 billion domed stadium. The new facility is scheduled to open in 2031.
But that news also came in the waning days of a two-month collapse by the Chiefs that proved quite lucrative for Kansas sportsbook operators.
The Chiefs, who reached the Super Bowl in February 2025, got off to a respectable 5-3 start last fall. And with no major professional sports teams located in Kansas, the Chiefs are the favorite betting squad of choice for many state residents.
Those eight games took place in September and October, and it's no coincidence that the "hold rate" - the amount of total wagers kept by the state's sportsbooks - for those months were an industry-standard 8.4% and 8.1%, respectively.
But the Chiefs lost seven out of eight games in November and December, and the hold rate for the sportsbooks jumped up to 13.2% and 12.7%. Clearly, Chiefs fans mostly lost betting on the team to win, to cover the point spread, and on countless multi-leg parlay bets that included either wager. Even individual “Over” bets on player yardage too often were a losing ticket.
The resulting $68.4 million in sportsbook revenue was a state record for a two-month span since the gambling started in Kansas in September 2022.
The Chiefs won the Super Bowl in February 2023, and the sportsbooks actually lost a collective $845,377 for a hold rate of negative 0.4%. The Chiefs repeated as champions in February 2024, and the books held just 4.2% of wagers. Those two rates are, not coincidentally, the lowest such monthly rates in state history.
To further prove the correlation, the Chiefs lost the Super Bowl in February 2025 - and the sportsbooks held a state monthly record 16.7% of wagers as a result.
How much will Missouri impact Kansas sportsbook numbers?
The $2.83 billion collected by the state sportsbook industry last year followed $2.55 billion in 2024, $2.12 billion in 2023, and the $0.72 billion in the fall of 2022.
The double-digit annual boosts in handle may well continue, and the rate of increase in annual betting handle also makes it possible that 2026 will be the first calendar year of more than $3 billion in bets in Kansas.
But if that milestone is not reached, sportsbook operators will need to look no further than the fact that next-door neighbor Missouri finally launched its own sports betting industry on Dec. 1, 2025.
That means that some Kansas City residents who have had no interest in making illegal, offshore sportsbook wagers surely will stay close to home – as in, their own living rooms – in 2026 rather than take a ride over the state border. Many Kansas sportsbooks also are now live in Missouri, making the transition all the more seamless.
The market leader in Kansas in 2025 reported $93.6 million in handle and $10.3 million in revenue, followed closely behind by FanDuel with nearly $84 million in wagers and more than $10 million in revenue.
BetMGM placed a distant third out of the state's six sportsbooks in handle with $19.4 million and revenue with $1.4 million.
Meanwhile, Hollywood Casino at Kansas Speedway in Kansas City led the four state casinos in gaming revenue with $83.6 million from mid-2024 to mid-2025 - Kansas's official Fiscal Budget Year.
Kansas Star Casino & Resort, located in a suburb of Wichita, was close behind at $80.8 million, while Boot Hill Casino & Resort in Dodge City reported $23.6 million in revenue in the same span. The Kansas Crossing casino property in Pittsburg - near the Missouri border - was last at $19.8 million.
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