Vermont’s sports betting law sets a 20% tax floor on sportsbook revenue. Not one of the three companies actually licensed to take a Vermont bet pays that number — DraftKings and Fanatics settled at 31%, FanDuel at 33%, because Vermont ran its 2023 launch as a bidding war, not a flat license fee. BetOnline never entered that auction. No Vermont agency licenses it, and the offshore book has taken US bets from Panama since 2001, more than two decades before the state’s Department of Liquor and Lottery had anything to license at all. The bookmaking statute on the books here targets whoever runs the operation, not whoever logs into one from a laptop in Burlington.
Is BetOnline Legal in Vermont?
No state agency licenses it, and Vermont’s gambling code wasn’t written with an offshore account holder in mind. 13 V.S.A. § 2151 makes bookmaking and pool-selling a crime — a first offense draws a fine up to $250 or six months, a second offense up to $2,000 or five years. Read the actual text and it’s aimed at the person taking action from other people, not the person placing a wager.
There’s a carve-out worth knowing about, and it says something about how Vermont actually treats gambling: a pool is legal if every dollar paid in by participants gets paid back out, either to the winners or to a nonprofit. Deer pools work that way. So does March Madness — the Vermont legislature runs its own bracket every year, five-dollar buy-in, roughly 95 lawmakers and staff in it, half the pot to the winner and half to charity. Nobody’s ever prosecuted for that, and nobody’s ever been prosecuted under § 2151 for holding an account with BetOnline or any other offshore sportsbook either. The gap between the statute’s harsh-sounding penalty and its actual target is the whole story.
Why Vermont’s Real Sportsbook Tax Isn’t 20%
The Floor Written Into Act 63
Governor Phil Scott signed H.127 — Act 63 — on June 14, 2023, authorizing the Department of Liquor and Lottery to award two to six mobile sports betting licenses. The bill set 20% of gross gaming revenue as the tax rate operators would owe. That’s the number most casual coverage of Vermont still repeats.
What Five Bidders Actually Offered
It’s not what got collected. Five companies applied — BetMGM, DraftKings, Fanatics, FanDuel, and Penn Sports Interactive (ESPN Bet) — and Vermont structured the process as a competitive bid, scoring proposed revenue share along with everything else. DraftKings and Fanatics offered 31%. FanDuel went to 33%. BetMGM proposed a variable share that moved depending on how many operators got licensed, which the state had already signaled it wouldn’t accept, and neither BetMGM nor Penn made the final cut. All three winners launched together on January 11, 2024. Vermont opened January 2026 with a record $27.4 million in handle and $818,835 in tax revenue off that month alone; February brought in $21.9 million in handle. None of that math traces back to the 20% number written into the bill.
Vermont’s Betting Market Has Three Apps and Zero Casinos
No Retail Path Exists Anywhere in the State
Act 63 permits mobile wagering only — no retail sportsbook counter exists anywhere in Vermont, and there’s a structural reason none can: the state has zero casinos, commercial or tribal, period. Every other New England state built sports betting on top of an existing casino floor. Vermont had no floor to build on, so the entire legal market lives on three phones. The law also bans funding a Vermont sportsbook account with a credit card, a consumer-protection line most states didn’t bother writing in.
Scale explains some of the caution. Vermont’s population sits around 646,000 — the 49th-largest in the country, ahead of only Wyoming — which is exactly why a $27.4 million handle in a single month counted as a record instead of a rounding error. Three national operators fighting over a state that small is itself a sign of how thin the competition for licenses got once the bidding opened.
How Neighboring States Compare
That’s not the model next door. New Hampshire ran its own single-operator lottery arrangement for years before opening the market further, but at least had a state lottery infrastructure to build on.
Massachusetts went further still, licensing retail sportsbooks inside its existing casino resorts alongside a much larger mobile field. Vermont skipped the retail step entirely because there was nothing to attach it to — no casino floor, no lottery-run kiosk network, nothing.
When Lawmakers Tried to Shut It Down
Two separate 2026 bills took aim at the market Act 63 built, from opposite directions. Rep. Thomas Stevens filed a repeal bill — backed by Reps. Michael Mrowicki and Headrick — that would have undone Act 63 outright and made offering sports betting a crime again. It never picked up the votes to move.
The second attempt is still alive, technically. House Bill 913, introduced in February 2026, would charge a 50-cent fee on every single wager placed through DraftKings, FanDuel, or Fanatics in Vermont, echoing a model Illinois adopted first. Illinois became the first state in the country to impose a per-wager excise tax when its version took effect in July 2025: 25 cents per bet up to 20 million annual wagers, 50 cents on every bet past that — stacked on top of a progressive revenue tax that already climbs as high as 40% for the biggest operators. Illinois sportsbooks responded by passing the cost straight to bettors, tacking on surcharges and raising minimum wager sizes. Vermont’s H.913 skips the progressive tiers and goes straight to the flat 50-cent number, plus a ban on Kalshi- and Polymarket-style prediction markets in the same bill. For now it’s parked in the House Committee on Government Operations and Military Affairs as a short-form bill — no fiscal analysis, no recorded testimony — which is legislative shorthand for “not happening this session,” though the fact that it exists at all tells you the honeymoon on Act 63 is over.
What BetOnline Offers That Vermont’s Licensed Apps Don’t
A Vermont bettor comparing BetOnline against the three licensed apps isn’t really comparing tax rates or bill numbers — those only apply to DraftKings, FanDuel, and Fanatics, not to an offshore book with no state license to begin with. What BetOnline actually offers is continuity: the same account, the same bankroll, works whether someone’s in Burlington or crosses into a state with no legal mobile market at all. Vermont’s three apps geofence hard at the border; an offshore book doesn’t care which side of the Connecticut River someone’s standing on. BetOnline’s own track record runs back to 2001 under a Panama Gaming Commission license, renamed from BestLineSports in 2007, and it built its reputation on posting odds early rather than waiting for the market to set them. Crypto withdrawals clear in 24 to 48 hours; a check by courier takes 7 to 15 business days and starts costing a fee after the first one each month.
None of that changes the legal read on Vermont. The state’s three-app, zero-casino market keeps growing — handle set a new record in January 2026 — while a bill sits in committee threatening to tax every bet by the click instead of the dollar. Whatever happens to House Bill 913, the gap between what Act 63 says on paper and what actually gets collected in Vermont isn’t going away.