bet365 Opened in D.C. on Tuesday. The Only Number That Matters Is Whether It Pays 20% or 30%.

bet365 went live in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday morning with more than 100 sports, and announced a multi-year partnership with Monumental Sports & Entertainment that makes it a partner of the Capitals, the Wizards and the Mystics. It gets digital signage inside Capital One Arena, virtual signage during Capitals games, branding at the Mystics' CareFirst Arena, spots across all three teams' broadcasts, and integrations on Monumental Sports Network.

"Bringing bet365 to our nation's capital expands our reach in the U.S.," said Trip Stoddard, bet365's head of development. That is a launch-release sentence. The interesting question is one nobody has answered, and it is worth about ten points of tax.

D.C. does not tax sportsbooks the way anywhere else does

The District charges three rates at the same time, and which one you pay depends on your license class, not your size:

• Class A — 20%. Operators anchored to a major sports venue, with citywide mobile. In July: FanDuel, BetMGM, Caesars.
• Class B — 10%. Bars, restaurants, small venues. In July: one operator, Sports & Social.
• Class C — 30%. Mobile-only, no physical footprint in the District. In July: DraftKings, Fanatics.

The logic inverts what every state does. Instead of scaling tax with revenue, D.C. scales it with what you build in the city. An app with no local presence pays triple what a neighbourhood bar pays for taking the identical bet.

The July 2026 filings show what that produces. Six active books, $64,169,129 of handle, $6,132,928 of gross gaming revenue at a 9.56% hold, $1,457,718 of tax — a blended 23.8% of revenue and 2.27 cents per dollar wagered. Underneath the blend:

Book	Class	Handle	GGR	Tax	Tax per $1
FanDuel	A	$24,530,986	$3,123,709	$624,742	2.55¢
DraftKings	C	$19,823,762	$1,761,140	$528,342	2.67¢
BetMGM	A	$9,312,980	$428,473	$85,695	0.92¢
Caesars	A	$6,164,437	$262,910	$52,582	0.85¢
Fanatics	C	$4,296,342	$553,440	$166,032	3.86¢
Sports & Social	B	$40,621	$3,255	$326	0.80¢

DraftKings earned 44% less revenue than FanDuel and paid only 16% less tax. Fanatics took under a fifth of FanDuel's handle and paid 3.86 cents on the dollar — more than four times Caesars' 0.85 cents. "Two operators can take an identical bet from an identical customer standing on the same corner in DC, and one owes triple the tax," wrote RG.org editor-in-chief Sol Fayerman-Hansen, who assembled the table from OLG filings. "That is not an accident, it is the design."

So: which class is bet365?

We do not know, and it is not a trivial question. The four retail books at the District's venues are already spoken for — Caesars at Capital One Arena, BetMGM at Nationals Park, FanDuel at Audi Field, Fanatics at Northwest Stadium. Caesars has been Monumental's official sports betting partner since 2021 and still operates the arena's physical book. bet365's new Monumental deal is described entirely in marketing terms: signage, commercials, network integrations. Nothing in Tuesday's announcement says bet365 acquires a venue-anchored license, and nothing says it doesn't.

If it is Class C, bet365 enters D.C. paying 30% of revenue while the incumbent market leader pays 20%, and the Monumental deal is a straightforward brand buy. If the partnership is a route into Class A, the same deal is worth ten points of margin a month in perpetuity and the signage is nearly a rounding error. Those are very different transactions wearing the same press release, and the District's own reporting is not clear enough to settle it — the OLG-derived summary pages contradict themselves on rates, which is why the class assignments above are the ones you can verify from the arithmetic rather than from a schedule.

The market it is joining used to be a warning

From 2020 to early 2024, the only phone-based book in most of the District was GambetDC, run by the D.C. Lottery through Intralot under a no-bid contract. It was notorious: geolocation failures, an app that fell over during a Super Bowl, and prices visibly worse than anything a resident could see across the Virginia line.

The annual series is the indictment. D.C. handled $216.2 million in 2022 and then $169.8 million in 2023 — a market shrinking while every neighbouring jurisdiction grew. On March 9, 2024 the OLG confirmed FanDuel as Intralot's new subcontractor, partly, the regulator said, because FanDuel already had roughly 50% share in Maryland and Virginia. Handle for 2024 came in at $461.6 million. For 2025: $855.6 million. Tax receipts went from $5.4 million in 2023 to $22.1 million in 2025.

The epitaph arrived separately. In January 2025, Intralot and its subcontractor Veterans Services Corp. agreed to pay a combined $6.5 million to settle fraud allegations over their manipulation of the GambetDC app contract. Neither admitted wrongdoing.

The case for the old structure, and where it still bites

The honest counterargument is not that GambetDC was good. It is that a concentrated market is a better tax vehicle, and D.C.'s numbers do not refute that as cleanly as the 2024–25 growth suggests.

Look at 2026 rather than the two-year comparison. January handle: $76.1 million. February: $67.6m. March: $75.5m. April: $74.0m. May: $67.2m. June: $69.6m. July: $64.2m. That is a market drifting downward across a competitive year, annualising to something close to flat against 2025's $855.6 million — July's cheerful-looking 14.7% year-over-year gain is mostly a comment on how weak July 2025 was. Hold is compressing too, from 11.58% in January to 9.56% in July, and the District's tax take follows hold. Adding a seventh online book to a jurisdiction of 700,000 people does not obviously grow anything; it splits the same handle across more promotional budgets, and promotional spend is deductible.

Concentration is also still the story. FanDuel took 38.2% of handle and produced 50.9% of revenue, and its single tax payment was 42.9% of everything the District collected in July. Two years after exclusivity ended, one operator is nearly half the market.

That argument is right about 2026 and wrong about the counterfactual. A market that was contracting under monopoly — $216m to $170m, in the middle of the national boom — was not going to produce $22 million of tax at any rate you set. And the welfare point does not dissolve because the fiscal point exists: for four years, D.C. residents either took worse prices than everyone around them or drove across a bridge. The District wasn't protecting them; it was monetising their inconvenience, and then it paid $6.5 million to settle claims about how the contract was run.

Where the monopoly defence lands is on what bet365 is actually walking into: a shrinking, top-heavy market where the incumbent has half the revenue and a two-year installed base. bet365's usual US weapon is the price rather than the bonus — it competes on the number more often than most books. If it does that here, D.C.'s hold should compress further and the District's revenue per dollar wagered will compress with it. The Council will notice that before it notices anything about consumer welfare.

Watch two lines in the autumn OLG reports. The class bet365 is filed under, which tells you what Monumental actually sold. And the District's hold, which tells you whether the seventh book is competing or just advertising.