South Africans are betting on a staggering scale. Reporting by GroundUp, with data by The Outlier, shows the country wagered roughly R1.5 trillion on gambling in the 2024/25 year, about a fifth of the entire economy. Online betting alone accounted for R1.1 trillion of that, up from just R30 billion a decade ago, while casino spending has flatlined below R300 billion. Behind betting and casinos, slot machines drew R55 billion and bingo R28 billion. Province by province, the most was wagered in Mpumalanga, at R623 billion, followed by the Western Cape at R402 billion and Gauteng at R179 billion.
The human cost is climbing faster
The money is only half the story. Calls to the national gambling helpline rose from 65,000 in 2022/23 to 140,000 the next year, and then to over a million in 2024/25. Among people aged 18 to 35, treatment referrals more than doubled. The share of problem gamblers, people who keep betting despite the damage to their lives, has jumped from about 6% in 2017 to over 31% today. Many are gambling money they cannot spare. "Many people see gambling as a source of income and are gambling with their SASSA grants or NSFAS allowances," GroundUp reports, "while the gambling companies profit". By one measure, gambling platforms are now searched online more often than SASSA, the agency that pays out grants and pensions.
What is driving it
GroundUp points to aggressive, often deceptive marketing, a wave of paid "betting influencers" making false claims, and celebrity endorsements. Betting games are now cheap to build and the industry is largely unregulated. The deeper roots, it argues, are South Africa's extreme inequality and high youth unemployment, which make a long-shot bet look like a way out. Meanwhile the industry's revenue grew more than 25% in a year, outpacing the economy, yet it paid just over R5 billion in tax, about 7% of its revenue.
With regulation still thin and the money still pouring in, the numbers suggest the boom, and the harm riding alongside it, has plenty of room left to run. The South African Responsible Gambling Foundation runs a free, confidential helpline seven days a week on 080 000 6008.
