More Than a Quarter of Gen Z Investors Now Treat Sports Betting as Part of Their Wealth Strategy
A new Betterment survey finds 26% of Gen Z investors treat sports betting as part of their long-term wealth strategy — far more than any other generation.
Sports betting is increasingly competing with traditional investing for younger Americans’ attention, and a new survey suggests the shift is more than casual. Betterment’s 2026 Retail Investor Survey found that 26% of Gen Z investors — those born between 1997 and 2007 — now treat sports betting as a deliberate, ongoing part of their long-term financial strategy, compared with just 14% of millennials, 6% of Gen X, and 1% of baby boomers.
The generational gap doesn’t stop there. More than half of young investors, 52%, said they had redirected money originally earmarked for investing into sports betting over the past year, and 14% said they do so multiple times a month. Only about a third of Gen Z respondents said they don’t participate in sports betting at all, compared with 63% of investors across all four generations surveyed.
A Generation Blurring the Lines
Betterment’s fourth annual survey, which tracked 1,000 U.S. retail investors across four generations in April 2026, points to a broader shift in how Gen Z consumes financial information and forms financial habits. Social media has become Gen Z’s most common source for financial news, climbing from 45% in 2024 to 60% in 2026 — nearly three times the rate of those who cite a financial advisor. Nearly half of Gen Z respondents also said artificial intelligence has influenced a financial decision they’ve made.
Betterment CEO Sarah Levy framed the sports betting findings as a warning sign for an industry still adjusting to how younger consumers build wealth. “When a prediction market or sportsbook starts to feel like a retirement strategy, we have a problem,” Levy said. “These products are designed to keep people seeking the next quick score, not to help them build toward the next decade.”
Rapid Expansion Meets a New Investor Mindset
The results underscore how quickly the legalization and expansion of sports betting — alongside the rise of prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket — has reshaped the options competing for young adults’ discretionary dollars. Money that might have gone into a Roth IRA or brokerage account a decade ago is now, for a meaningful share of Gen Z, flowing toward same-game parlays and player-prop wagers instead.
Not every young bettor sees it as reckless. Some investors who spoke about their approach described applying investing principles to sports betting itself: doing research before placing a wager, setting strict unit sizes, and treating losses as a cost of participation rather than emotional setbacks. Still, the survey’s broader finding — that 56% of all investors rely primarily on their own research and judgment, a habit that drops sharply with age, from 40% among Gen Z to 69% among baby boomers — suggests younger bettors are navigating both markets with less institutional guidance than previous generations had.
As more states continue to legalize and expand access to online sportsbooks, the line between entertainment spending and long-term financial planning appears likely to keep blurring for the generation that grew up with a betting app as accessible as a brokerage one.