The hope of some US sports betting operators to get a lower mobile NY tax rate appeared crushed Thursday in Pittsburgh.
Troy Mackey, the coordinator of the New York Assembly’s Racing & Wagering Committee, told the National Council of Legislators from Gaming States summer meeting the 51% NY sports betting tax rate will not be lowered.
"New York is doing extremely well and it’s one of those things that you cannot go back now, unfortunately, to reduce the tax rate,” Mackey said at the conference held at Rivers Casino. "We tried to revisit that and there was no justification, well, you couldn’t justify taking away money from education and giving it to a corporation. That is the argument we’ve been up against.
"So we tried to again put legislation out there to bring more entities into New York to reduce the tax rate hoping that would balance it out, in reference to reducing the rate with more entities involved. Folks at a higher pay grade than myself were totally against that.”
Lower NY sports betting rate was proposed
Mackey explained that 51% was not the original expectation when the mobile sports betting legislation was written. That rate ultimately came from former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who wanted to replicate New Hampshire‘s market that taxes DraftKings 51% for its online monopoly.
"When we initially wrote the legislation for mobile sports betting in New York, we wanted to incorporate more entities,” Mackey said. "We wanted more entities involved and we wanted that tax rate to be around 37%. We thought that would have been a fair number.”
New York approved nine sports betting licenses in 2021. Shortly after the January 2022 launch, Sen. Joe Addabbo Jr. and Assemblyman Gary Pretlow wrote legislation that would have expanded the market to a minimum of 16 operators by January 2024.
The legislation died without much fanfare: "It turns out that you don’t tinker with something that’s successful and it may be premature,” Addabbo told LSR at the time.
https://www.playny.com/assemblyman-51-percent-tax-rate-ny-sports-betting-will-not-decrease/