One hundred votes were needed. When the Texas House first tallied HJR 102 in May 2023, the board showed exactly 100 in favor. Two members then reported that their voting machines had malfunctioned and asked to be recorded as yes. The final count was 101, and a sports betting amendment had cleared the House.
It went no further. The Senate let the clock run out, and the 101 votes became a footnote that supporters still quote.
The short answer for Texas
Is sports betting legal in Texas? No. As of October 20, 2026, Texas has no licensed sportsbook, online or in person, and no in-state app may accept a sports wager. A live bet placed from a phone in Dallas, Houston or El Paso has no legal path.
The reason is structural. Because the Texas Constitution restricts gambling, both the 2023 and 2025 proposals were written as constitutional amendments. An amendment needs a joint resolution passed by two-thirds of the House and two-thirds of the Senate, followed by a majority of voters at a statewide election. That is a far higher bar than an ordinary bill.
Gambling that is legal in Texas is limited: the state lottery, pari-mutuel wagering on horse racing at licensed tracks, charitable bingo and raffles, and gaming at a few tribal facilities. Commercial casinos do not exist.
The gap is easy to see on the legal sports betting states map: Texas and California, the two most populous states, are both blank. Texas fields teams in every major league, the Cowboys and Texans in the NFL, the Rangers and Astros in MLB, the Mavericks, Rockets and Spurs in the NBA, and the Stars in the NHL. Every one of them plays its home games in a state where an in-play wager on it, placed from the stands, is illegal.
Three sessions, one pattern
2023: through the House, stopped at the Senate
The 2023 package had two parts. HJR 102 was the constitutional amendment authorizing sports betting. HB 1942 was the enabling law that would have set up licenses and rules if voters approved. Both passed the House in May 2023: the amendment with 101 votes after the verification described above, the enabling bill by 82 to 51, a simple majority being enough for a statute.
In the Senate, the lieutenant governor, who controls what reaches the floor, said there was little to no support among Republican senators for expanding gambling. He has said he will not bring such a bill up without a majority of the Republican caucus behind it. Neither measure got a Senate vote, and both died when the session ended.
What the 2023 market would have looked like
HB 1942 sketched a market built around the state’s pro teams. Each professional franchise and each racetrack would have received one mobile betting license, paying a $500,000 permit fee for three years and $100,000 to renew, with a tax of 10 percent of adjusted gross wagering revenue due monthly. The coalition behind it, the Texas Sports Betting Alliance, brought together Texas franchises, the major leagues, racetracks and betting platforms. The House State Affairs Committee approved it 9 to 3 in April before the floor vote. A Senate companion, SB 715, was filed by a Republican senator, which showed that support existed in the upper chamber even if not in the numbers the lieutenant governor demanded.
A design like that would have made Texas an online-first market from day one, much as North Carolina became, with live betting on the phone as the main product and team-branded apps doing the selling. None of it reached a Senate vote, so none of it exists.
2025: a broader Senate proposal
In the 2025 session a Houston Democrat in the Senate filed SJR 16, a constitutional amendment covering sports wagering and casino gaming at destination resorts, with a new Texas Gaming Commission to regulate both. A House companion, HJR 134, was filed too. By mid-May, reporting described the effort as dead on arrival. No sports betting measure passed either chamber.
2027: the next window
The Texas Legislature meets in regular session only in odd-numbered years, so the next opportunity opens in January 2027. If an amendment passed both chambers that spring, the earliest statewide vote would be November 2027, and a launch would realistically follow in 2028. The lieutenant governor has also directed a Senate committee to study prediction markets before the 2027 session.
Where Texans can bet legally, and how geolocation decides it
Texas borders four states. Two of them, Louisiana and Arkansas, have legal online sports betting. New Mexico allows sports betting only at tribal casinos, and Oklahoma has none.
Licensed apps verify the phone’s position before accepting a wager, and the rule is about location, not residence. A Texan driving east on Interstate 20 crosses into Louisiana just past Waskom. Once the app confirms the phone is in Louisiana, a live bet on the Mavericks’ fourth quarter is legal under Louisiana’s license. Turn around, cross back into Harrison County, and the same app locks the account out of new wagers.
If you live in Texarkana, the line runs down State Line Avenue itself, and which side of the street the phone sits on decides the answer.
Fans who travel for road games run into the same rule from the other side. A Texan in Denver for a Broncos game can bet live from a seat in the stadium; the account opened in Colorado is the same account that stops working at the airport back in Houston.
The college rules differ by destination. In the state snapshot, Louisiana bans college player props, a rule reported as effective for the 2025-26 season, while Arkansas reports no college restrictions. A Longhorns player prop that Shreveport refuses could be offered across the line in Arkansas, if the sportsbook there lists it.
Two practical points if you plan to bet on a trip. First, an account opened in another state still requires the bettor to be physically inside that state for every single wager, and signing up there once does not carry over. Second, near a border the location check can take a moment or fail on a weak signal, which matters when an in-play price is about to move.
Offshore books, prediction markets and other workarounds
Plenty of offshore sportsbooks advertise to Texans. None holds a license from Texas or from any other state. A wager placed with one is not protected by any US regulator, and if the site refuses to pay a winning live bet there is nowhere to file a complaint that will be enforced.
Prediction markets that sell contracts on game outcomes are a newer question, and their legal status is being fought in federal courts and state capitals. The Senate study ordered ahead of 2027 suggests lawmakers see them as a substitute for sportsbooks. They are a separate product with separate rules, and nothing on this page treats them as an answer to whether sports betting is legal in Texas.
Taxes on winnings Texans earn elsewhere
Texas has no state income tax, so there is no Texas tax on gambling winnings. Federal tax still applies. The IRS treats all gambling winnings as taxable income, and the reporting duty sits with the bettor even when no tax form arrives in the mail. The state where the bet was placed may also tax winnings earned there.
From tax year 2026, the deduction for gambling losses is capped at 90 percent of losses, and it is available only to filers who itemize.
A worked example from a Shreveport weekend
Suppose a Texan in Louisiana bets $30 live on an underdog at +260 with the game tied in the third quarter. Profit at positive American odds is stake × odds ÷ 100, so $30 × 260 ÷ 100 = $78.00. The total return is $108.00 if the underdog wins.
The $78.00 profit is the taxable figure. Texas takes none of it. On the federal return it is ordinary income at the bettor’s bracket, and Louisiana may claim its own share of winnings earned inside its borders.
If that same bettor also lost $50 on other wagers during the trip, the federal deduction would be capped at 90 percent, $45.00, and usable only on an itemized return.
The side-track: when the lottery regulator itself was abolished
Texas did act on gambling in 2025, just not on sports. After a run of controversies, including bulk ticket purchases tied to large jackpots, lawmakers passed SB 3070. It abolished the Texas Lottery Commission effective September 1, 2025, moved the lottery and charitable bingo to the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, banned lottery courier companies, prohibited facilitating lottery play by phone, internet or mobile app, and capped sales at 100 tickets per transaction.
That last group of rules points the other way from legal online betting. In the same session that let a sports betting amendment die quietly, Texas went out of its way to stop anyone buying a lottery ticket through an app. Any 2027 proposal for mobile sports betting starts from a Legislature that, two years earlier, wrote “mobile applications” into a gambling ban.