The 90% loss cap is pushing US bettors toward prediction markets, John…
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A player who wins $100,000 and loses $100,000 this year now owes federal tax on $10,000 they never kept. The 90% cap on gambling loss deductions applies from the 2026 tax year, and the venues competing hardest with licensed sportsbooks are not clearly bound by it.
We spoke with John Isaac, Editor at online-gambling.com, who covers US gambling law alongside the Indian and Dutch markets. He explains why the July hearing settled nothing, where the repeal effort now sits, and why the resulting tax gap should worry operators more than it worries players.
TheGamblest: John, thank you for joining us. To start with, what does the 90% cap actually change for someone who breaks even?
John: The arithmetic is the whole story. Until this tax year, a player who itemized could deduct losses up to the full amount of reported winnings, so a break-even year produced no federal bill. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed in July 2025, capped that deduction at 90% from the 2026 tax year.
Take someone who wins $100,000 and loses $100,000. All $100,000 of the winnings is reported as income, but only $90,000 of the losses can be offset against it. The remaining $10,000 is taxed as income even though the player finished the year exactly where they started.
That is the part people struggle to accept. The bill does not track profit at all. It tracks volume, and it lands hardest on anyone who plays often enough for both sides of the ledger to get>
TheGamblest: The IRS held a public hearing on the rules in July. Why did that not resolve it?
John: Because the hearing was about the wrong layer. It covered the proposed regulations, which set out how the cap is enforced and also raise the reporting threshold for slot and bingo winnings. Every speaker who appeared opposed the cap, including Representative Dina Titus, the American Gaming Association and the tax practitioners who actually prepare these returns.
Procedurally, none of that mattered. The 90% figure sits in the statute rather than in the regulation, so the agency writing the fine print has no authority to remove it. Only Congress can.
Federal tax is also only one layer. State tax changes are reshaping operator economics at the same time, and players in several states face their own treatment of winnings on top of the federal position.
TheGamblest: Where does the repeal effort stand now?
John: Slower than its supporters hoped. Titus introduced the FAIR BET Act within days of the law passing, which would restore the full deduction, and it went to Ways and Means with bipartisan cosponsors. A second bill, the FULL HOUSE Act from Max Miller and Steven Horsford, followed soon after. Neither has reached a floor vote.
The procedural routes have not worked either. A unanimous consent request in the Senate was blocked in 2025, and the House Rules Committee declined to attach the repeal to the defense authorization bill in January. Titus has since filed a discharge petition to force the bill out of committee, which tells you how few options are left.
There is also real opposition. Senator James Lankford has described it as a fairly minor change in tax policy, and that view has not gone away.
TheGamblest: You have argued that the cap opens a gap between sportsbooks and prediction markets. How does that work?
John: It comes down to gross versus net. Prediction markets and sportsbooks are already different products in how they are built and supervised, and the tax layer sits on top of that. Gambling winnings are taxed on a gross basis, which is exactly what makes the 90% cap bite. Event contracts traded on a CFTC-regulated venue are financial instruments, and if they were treated under section 1256 of the tax code the holder would report a net result for the year, with losses deductible and a fixed split between long and short term treatment.
I want to be careful here, because this is not settled. The IRS has issued no ruling, notice or guidance on how prediction market contracts should be taxed, and practitioners describe claiming section 1256 treatment as an aggressive position rather than a safe one. Some platforms do not even issue a transaction level statement.
The uncertainty is the point, though. A high volume bettor now faces a known penalty on one side of the market and an open question on the other.
TheGamblest: How has this changed your own editorial work?
John: It changed the running order. Tax used to sit near the bottom of a state page, well below bonuses and payment methods, and now it is one of the first things readers ask about. So at online-gambling.com we moved the filing and record keeping questions much closer to the top.
The other change is tone. We spend more time saying what we cannot answer. Whether a prediction market position is reported as a capital gain or as gambling income is a question for a tax professional who knows the individual’s circumstances, and pretending otherwise would help nobody.
TheGamblest: You said operators should be more worried than players. Why is that?
John: Because the exposure is concentrated in the customers operators most want to keep. A recreational player who never itemizes is barely touched by this. A high volume or professional player can generate enormous reported winnings and matching losses, and they are the ones who end up owing tax on a gap that bears no relation to what they actually earned.
Those are also the most mobile customers in the market, which is the part I think gets underestimated. They read tax treatment carefully and they act on it. Titus made this argument directly when she introduced her bill, warning that the cap risks pushing players toward offshore and unregulated sites.
If that happens, the revenue the measure was meant to raise leaves the regulated market along with the player.
TheGamblest: What should operators and affiliates be doing before the first affected filing season?
John: Start with the statements. Session level data has gone from a convenience to something players genuinely need in order to file correctly, and any platform that makes exporting it difficult will hear about that in the spring.
Then stop treating tax as a footnote in customer communication. It now changes the real cost of playing, so it belongs in the same conversation as pricing and payment methods rather than buried in a help page nobody opens.
The harder part is engaging honestly with the prediction market comparison instead of avoiding it. Customers are already reading about that gap in financial media with no connection to gambling coverage, and an operator who refuses to discuss it simply looks uninformed.
TheGamblest: Finally, how do you expect this to look a year from now?
John: I expect the cap to still be in place, because nothing in the current process suggests otherwise, and I expect the first filing season under it to be the moment the argument becomes real for people. Numbers on a return persuade in a way that hearings do not.
The more interesting question is whether the IRS says anything about prediction markets before then. If guidance arrives and it is unfavorable, the gap closes and this stops being a competitive issue. If the silence continues, licensed operators spend another year at a disadvantage they did not create.
My advice to players has not changed. Keep detailed records and get proper advice before you file rather than after. And only stake what you can afford to lose, which stays true regardless of what Congress decides to do.
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