South Africa’s gambling statistics
South Africans pushed R1.5 trillion through licensed gambling operators in the year to March 2025. I saw that number in a headline, assumed someone had slipped a decimal, and went digging through the regulator’s publications to check. The number is real. It is also, for my money, the wrong number to be alarmed about. The right ones sit a few rows further down the spreadsheet.
Turnover counts every rand staked, and online betting recycles the same rand over and over. Win R100 on a Saturday fixture, stake the winnings, lose, stake what’s left. A few hundred rand in an account can generate thousands in turnover in a single afternoon. That is how the headline figure grew about 30% in a year without South Africans finding a third more disposable income.
The figure that measures what the country actually lost is gross gambling revenue: stakes minus payouts. The National Gambling Board puts that at R75 billion for FY2024/25. In 2019/20 it was R32.7 billion. Losses have more than doubled in five years, over a period when the economy barely grew at all.
Betting ate the casino industry
The split by gambling mode is the story hiding inside that total. In 2009/10, casinos took 84% of gambling revenue and betting took 10%. In FY2024/25 betting took roughly 70%, around R52 billion, and revenue from online betting grew 60% in a single year. Casinos still earned R16.6 billion, but all of the growth is on the phone.
Nobody built anything for this shift. The casino era needed buildings and payroll; the industry still employs 33,169 people. The betting era needed cheap data and an app store. That difference in fixed costs explains most of what has happened since 2020.
The Mpumalanga oddity
My favourite detail sits in the provincial tables. The Western Cape books 30% of national gambling revenue, and Mpumalanga comes in ahead of Gauteng, a province with roughly three times its population and far more of its money.
The explanation is administrative. Online operators book revenue in the province that licensed them, not where the punter sits. Mpumalanga’s licensing authority signed up a large share of the big betting brands, so a bet placed in Soweto can land in Mbombela’s column. Provincial gambling data measures paperwork, not behaviour. Worth remembering the next time you see a tidy provincial breakdown of anything.
Who is losing the R75 billion
Stats SA’s household spending data shows gambling participation climbing year after year. Old Mutual’s 2025 Savings and Investment Monitor found that about half of employed adults gamble, and that among people earning R8,000 to R15,000 a month, roughly four in ten gamble specifically to cover household expenses or debt. A year earlier that share was 36%.
Further down the income scale it gets darker. Of the people who sought help for gambling addiction in 2025, 35% were unemployed and living on SASSA grants, which pay under R400 a month. A grant is calculated to be just enough to survive on. Any of it staked is food.
R75 billion is the floor, not the total
One more thing. Online casino games, the slots and the crash games, are illegal in South Africa; only betting is licensed. The offshore sites filling that gap operate mostly under Curaçao licences, and their revenue appears in no South African statistic. Parliament’s trade and industry committee flagged this black market as a growing problem in late 2025. Whatever the true national loss is, R75 billion is its lower bound.
The next NGB statistics release lands around October. Two things I will be checking: whether betting’s growth finally slows now that the base is enormous, and whether turnover crosses R2 trillion. It probably will, it will make headlines, and it will still be the wrong number to quote.