NH Rejects Sports Betting Age Hike, Focus Shifts to iGaming Bill
New Hampshire decided against raising its gaming age to twenty-one, but an iGaming bill is up next on the cards.
Key Facts:
- New Hampshire keeps sports betting age at 18.
- House Ways and Means Committee didn’t even send the bill for a full vote.
- New iGaming bill also has 18 as legal age.
The New Hampshire Legislature made short work of Rep. Sally Fellows’ bill, HB83, last week, when the House Ways and Means Committee voted 11-7 to shelve the bill under a blanket term, “inexpedient to legislate.” This followed a short but contentious discussion of the bill that would have taken the age to make a sports bet in the state from 18 to 21.
Marlene Warner, CEO of Massachusetts Council on Gaming and Health, found her way up to Concord to share her opinion that the 18 to 20-year-olds in question were “babes making uninformed decisions.”
Nominally, we suppose, because New Hampshire and Massachusetts share a border. She also expressed her distress at the rite of passage of young Massachusetts boys making a pilgrimage to the New Hampshire state line to place a bet.
This seems to fly in the face of recent surveys of Massachusetts sports betters who are 18 months into legal sports betting in the state, where a full 53% said they would have still been betting with illegal bookies if Massachusetts had not legalized gambling.
This makes it unlikely that raising the New Hampshire betting age will stop a young Bostonian from being able to get a bet down, and he could save on gas money as well.
Rep. Fellows also weighed in on her new bill, echoing the sentiment that 18 to 20-year-old males lacked the cognitive ability to evaluate the consequences of risky behaviors.
The New Hampshire lottery, which oversees sports betting in the Granite state, states that this cohort of the gambling population wagered $14 million last year out of a total FY handle of $753 million, or about 2% of all wagers placed.
New Hampshire, which taxes sports books at the highest rate in the country, at 51%, would see an estimated $640,000 hit to the state tax base.
For those wondering about that astronomical tax rate, it does come with a monopoly. The state issued only one license to keep that rate at that amount, and it went to DraftKings.
Kentucky, Wyoming, and Washington DC are currently the only other 18+ sports betting states. Still, when the House Ways and Means Committee voted to raise New Hamshire’s legal betting age and send the bill to the full House for consideration, it fell dismally short 11-7.
Igaming Bill Up Next
While not yet scheduled for a vote, House Bill 168 was referred to the House Ways and Means Committee this week. This bill would authorize at least three and no more than six online casino licenses in the state. All potential operators would need to partner with one of New Hampshire’s already licensed charitable casinos.
The state would keep 45% of all GGR from New Hampshire online casinos, half going to the general fund and the rest divvied up with special education and other programs.
You could probably write a ripped from the headlines thriller about New Hampshire’s recent run-ins with former state senator Andy Sanborn and his Win Win Win charitable casino business.
But for the sake of brevity, we will only mention that New Hampshire came very close to passing iGaming in 2023 before being sunk by Laurie Sanborn, Andy’s wife and then head of the House Ways and Means Committee.
While Rep. Laurie Sanborn is gone, the iGaming bill has picked up an even worse nemesis in the form of Cordish Gaming. Cordish is credited with pretty much single-handedly stopping iGaming in Maryland last year, and they won approval in December to build a $200 million charitable casino in Salem, New Hampshire.
Featuring 900 historical racing machines and more than 40 table games, Salem Live! is unlikely to want any online competition after such a large investment, but we will have to wait and see what its fate ultimately is. No date for a vote has yet been scheduled.
