88% of US online bettors are Gen Z and millennials, per Bank of America

Bank of America, one of the largest banks in the US, looked at its own customer accounts and found that in July, Gen Z and millennial customers accounted for 88% of all betting activity flowing to iGaming platforms. That’s not a survey of stated preferences. It’s transaction data from real accounts, which makes the age skew harder to argue with than the usual self-reported numbers.

The growth curve underneath that figure is steep. Roughly 5% of the bank’s customers placed a bet in July, and the total number of customers doing so has climbed 40% since January. First-time transfers to gambling platforms tell an even sharper story: in June and July, the count of customers making their very first deposit ran more than three times higher than it did in January. Some of that tracks the 2026 World Cup, which pulled new money in during those exact months, but Bank of America framed it as part of a wider pattern rather than a one-off spike. New users have consistently grown during basketball season and American football season too, which points to major sporting events acting as the recurring on-ramp rather than any single tournament.

The survey layer adds a detail worth sitting with. Across 2,300 respondents, 20% described sports betting as a form of alternative investment. Among Gen Z specifically, that view was roughly twice as common, so something close to 40% of the youngest cohort sees a wager on a game as belonging in the same mental category as a stock or a bond.

The framing shifts again for prediction markets. Respondents were more likely to call event-outcome contracts on those platforms an investment than they were to say the same about a straight sports bet, even though the underlying mechanic is often close to identical. That perception gap is showing up in the numbers, with prediction-market trading volume on Kalshi and Polymarket climbing hard through this year. The label a platform chooses, exchange versus sportsbook, appears to change how the same activity gets filed in a user’s head, and the generation now driving most of the volume is the one most receptive to the investment framing.