How the Gambling Harm Index is built
What this is
The Gambling Harm Index is a table of every gambling-harm indicator that U.S. states, the District of Columbia and national bodies publish to the public, pooled into one place and updated as soon as a state's data changes.
It is not a measure of how much gambling harm exists in a state. Nothing published in the United States measures that. It is a measure of how much help-seeking is visible — helpline contacts, self-exclusion enrollments, or treatment entries, as reported by whoever reports it. Where a state reports nothing, the Index says so, because a state choosing not to count is itself the finding.
We publish it because nobody else pools it. The only genuine 50-state series in existence is an appendix inside an annual PDF. There is no CSV, no API, and no monthly national figure anywhere. The Index is the normalization layer.
Cadence
Updated continuously: a row changes the day its source publishes something new or a correction arrives, and every change is dated. The September 2026 baseline lives permanently at /harm-index/2026-09/ and is never overwritten. Every dataset release since then is archived with its own DOI on Zenodo (concept DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22857767, which always resolves to the newest). /harm-index/ always shows the current data.
Updates follow the sources, not a calendar. Most underlying sources are annual, so most rows change rarely; every change is dated in the corrections log with its source and credit.
What we count
Four indicator families, in this order of preference when a state publishes more than one:
- Self-exclusion enrollment — people who asked a regulator to ban them.
- Helpline contacts — calls, texts and chats to a problem gambling helpline.
- Treatment admissions or clients served — people who entered a publicly funded program.
- Regulator responsible-gaming reporting — anything else a gaming regulator publishes as a count of affected people.
Prevalence estimates from surveys are recorded where they exist but are not treated as current indicators; several are more than fifteen years old.
The two layers, and why they are kept apart
The national helpline layer comes from one source for all 51 jurisdictions: the National Council on Problem Gambling's annual helpline report, prepared by the Omni Institute. Appendix A publishes 2024 and 2025 contact volume, a rate per 100,000 residents, and a Poisson significance test on the year-over-year change, for every state and DC. Because it is one publisher applying one method to every jurisdiction, these figures are comparable across states. They are the only figures in the Index that are.
Reporting-methodology change, October 2025
A note NCPG asks every reuser to carry: NCPG reporting includes traffic to 1-800-GAMBLER from June 1, 2023, through September 30, 2025, when it served as the National Problem Gambling Helpline. Effective October 1, 2025, traffic to 1-800-GAMBLER is no longer included in NCPG reporting. As a result, changes in reported contact volume after this date reflect a change in reporting methodology and should not be interpreted as a decrease in overall help-seeking activity. The 2025 column in the Index is therefore a transition year.
The state-published layer is whatever each state chooses to publish about itself. These figures are not comparable across states and the Index never ranks on them. A self-exclusion count from New Jersey and one from Michigan are counts of different things over different periods under different rules. We publish them side by side so they can be found in one place, with the period and the scope attached to each, and we say plainly that adding them up would be wrong.
Normalization — what we do and do not do
What we do:
- Rates per 100,000 residents for the helpline layer, taken directly from NCPG's published rates rather than recomputed. This guarantees our rate and NCPG's rate for any state always agree.
- Stated periods on every value. Every figure carries the exact period it covers — CY2025, FY2026, "as of 9/2/2026." No figure appears without one.
- Stated scope on self-exclusion counts. Whether a number covers commercial casinos, online only, card rooms, sports wagering, or all of the above, and whether it is an active count or a cumulative-since-inception total.
- A publication tier for each jurisdiction: whether it publishes a recurring dated count (A), publishes something stale or partial (B), publishes nothing (C), or has a series we could not retrieve (U).
What we do not do:
- We do not estimate, model, impute or interpolate. Every number is a published number with a URL.
- We do not combine indicators into a single composite score. There is no "harm index number" for a state, and there will not be one, because the inputs are not comparable enough to earn it.
- We do not rank states on their state-published figures.
- We do not adjust for how much legal gambling a state has. A state with more gambling and more help-seeking is not thereby doing worse or better, and we are not going to pretend our data can tell you which.
What N/A means
The Index uses four distinct markers and they are not interchangeable:
| Marker | Meaning |
|---|---|
| N/A — state publishes nothing | We checked the state behavioral-health agency, the gaming regulator or lottery (including its report and financial-report pages), the state council where one exists, the agencies' annual reports, and reports and testimony filed with the state legislature, and no recurring gambling-harm count is published. The checks are listed per state. |
| Not retrieved | A series is believed to exist but the host blocked automated retrieval or the figure exists only as an image or in a viewer with no text layer. We have not concluded the state publishes nothing. |
| Not published in readable form | The state produces the number and puts it somewhere the public cannot extract it — a rasterized chart, an InDesign viewer, a slide in a hearing deck. |
| Not comparable | A figure exists but its scope or period makes cross-state comparison invalid. It is shown with the caveat attached, never in a ranking. |
"N/A" in this Index never means "zero harm" and never means "we did not look."
Corrections policy
Nothing is silently edited.
- Corrections are appended, not substituted. When a figure is wrong, the edition keeps the original value struck through, adds the corrected value, and carries a dated correction note naming what changed and why.
- Every correction appears in a running log at
/harm-index/corrections/, newest first, with the edition it affects. - Material corrections are flagged at the top of /harm-index/ and in the corrections log.
- Anyone can send one. Corrections go to support@betttr.net. State agencies, councils and regulators who believe we have their number, scope or period wrong are the most valuable senders and we will correct on their word plus a source.
- We publish corrections we find ourselves the same way we publish corrections we are sent.
If a figure turns out to be unsupportable rather than merely wrong, we remove it and say that we removed it. We would rather have a hole with an explanation than a number we cannot stand behind.
Marking unverified figures
Any figure we could not confirm against a primary published source is marked unverified in the table and in the CSV, with a note saying where it came from. Press-only figures with no primary source are excluded from the published-value columns entirely. We do not launder a news article into a dataset.
Versioning and the archive
/harm-index/— the current data, updated continuously./harm-index/2026-09/— the September 2026 baseline, permanent and immutable./harm-index/data.csv— the current machine-readable file;/harm-index/2026-09/data.csv— the baseline file. Both at stable URLs, free, no registration, no rate limit./harm-index/corrections/— the running corrections log./harm-index/methodology/— this page. Changes to the method are dated and listed at the bottom, and a method change never applies retroactively to a published release.
The CSV is the point. Every source we draw on is a PDF. If the Index is also a PDF it has added nothing.
Reuse
The data is free to use, including commercially, with attribution to the Gambling Harm Index and a link to /harm-index/. Journalists do not need to ask. Researchers do not need to ask. We would like to know where it gets used, but that is a request, not a condition.
Who makes this, and who pays for it
The Gambling Harm Index is produced by Betttr LLC, maker of a gambling-recovery app. No operator, affiliate, or sportsbook funding.
Betttr LLC is a Delaware limited liability company based in Sherman Oaks, California. Its revenue comes from people who use its app, and from nothing else. It has never accepted money, sponsorship, data, advertising, placement or in-kind support from a sportsbook, a casino, a lottery, a gambling operator, an affiliate marketer, a gambling trade association, or anyone acting for them, and it will not. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed on this page before it takes effect, and the change will be dated.
The Index includes an App Store panel that counts gambling-specific apps, and Betttr's own app is one of them. It is counted the same way as every other app in the panel, by the same public App Store data, with no adjustment and no favorable placement. We are in our own dataset and we say so every time.
We have a stake in gambling harm being taken seriously. That is a reason to check our arithmetic, and the reason every number here carries the URL it came from.
Contact
Corrections, source tips, and questions: support@betttr.net.
If gambling is a problem for you or someone you know, the National Problem Gambling Helpline™ is 1-800-MY-RESET (1-800-697-3738) — call or text, 24/7 — or chat at 1800myreset.org.
Method version 1.0, published September 21, 2026. Changes to this page are dated and listed here as they happen.
- 2026-10-05 — Search scope widened and cadence changed. After Vermont's, Arkansas's and Arizona's counts turned up in a legislature report, a lottery's financial-reports page and an agency annual report, every row rated stale or publishes-nothing was re-checked against those source classes too (see Corrections). The index moved from a monthly edition on the 15th to continuous updates.