Image credit: Source: ACSI Entertainment Study 2026 press release. Never imply stock depicts the actual event.
US sportsbook and iGaming customer satisfaction fell to 74 out of 100 in 2026, a 3% year-over-year decline, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index's Entertainment Study, released August 18 with sportsbook-specific detail following on August 20. The score is built from 30,886 completed surveys fielded between July 2025 and June 2026.
The decline landed despite operators improving the two metrics ACSI tracks as technical performance: loading speed and wagering variety, both up 4% year over year. Faster apps and more markets to bet on did not move the satisfaction needle, and in most cases the needle moved the other way.
DraftKings scored 74, in line with the industry average, but posted the largest decline of any major operator, down 5%. BetMGM also scored 74, down 4%. FanDuel scored 74 as well, down 3%, the smallest drop among the three largest US sportsbooks. Caesars Sportsbook was the only major gainer, up 3% to 71. Penn Entertainment's theScore Bet debuted in the survey at 71.
"Content and technology improved across the board this year, yet in most of these industries, satisfaction still declined or barely moved," said Forrest Morgeson, associate professor of marketing at Michigan State University and director of research emeritus at ACSI.
The industry's product race is not the variable that moved the score
Sportsbooks have spent the past two years competing on same-game parlays, streaming, and faster cash out mechanics, betting that features keep bettors satisfied and loyal. ACSI's data cuts against that assumption directly: the attributes operators can control and did improve, speed and variety, rose, while the outcome those improvements are supposed to drive fell.
ACSI itself supplied the counterweight, cautioning that year-over-year swings "are not necessarily tied to anything that the operators did," according to the study's own framing as reported by GamblingNews. Movement often traces to something no product team controls: "whether sports bettors have been winning or losing." A sportsbook can ship a faster app and still watch its score drop if its customers had a losing season.
That caveat matters for how operators should read their own numbers, and it lines up with what hold data has already shown this year. New York's mobile hold rebounded to 11.4% in July, meaning bettors kept less of what they wagered than earlier in the year. A market where the house is winning more is also a market where satisfaction has room to fall for reasons that have nothing to do with app speed or bet slip design.
The segment data backs the point further. Customers who use both a sportsbook and a casino product from the same operator scored 78, against 75 for sportsbook-only customers and 70 for casino-only customers. Privacy was the highest-scoring individual attribute measured, at 80. Sport-by-sport, motorsports bettors were the most satisfied group at 82, and NBA bettors the least at 76.
Caesars gained while the sector average fell
Caesars Sportsbook's 3% rise to 71 stands out precisely because it ran against the grain: every other major operator ACSI tracked either declined or held flat below the sector's technical-improvement gains. ACSI's report does not explain why Caesars alone moved up, and nothing in the study attributes the gain to a specific product change, pricing decision, or marketing push. It is a fact worth flagging, not a mechanism worth guessing at.
What the study does make clear is that satisfaction and retention spend are running on separate tracks. Operators have been shifting budget from acquisition bonuses toward loyalty tiers built to keep existing bettors rather than chase new ones, a bet that a retained customer is worth more than a new one dosed with a free-bet offer. ACSI's numbers suggest that even a well-retained customer base can register lower satisfaction than a year earlier, independent of whatever the loyalty program delivers on paper.
The score measures a mood, not a product
DraftKings, BetMGM and FanDuel all converged on the identical 74 score this year, despite different rates of decline behind that number. A shared endpoint reached by three different paths is itself a signal that something outside any one operator's roadmap, likely the sector-wide run of results bettors experienced this season, is doing more of the work than any single feature launch. Operators reading their own ACSI line this year would do well to check the scoreboard before the product backlog.
Related: Sportsbook Cash Out Is a Quiet Margin Engine | Loyalty Programs Are Replacing Free Bets in US Betting | New York Mobile Betting Hold Rebounds to 11.4% in July