Young People and UK Gambling — What the GambleAware Data Says
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Twice a year a research organisation in the UK publishes data that quietly reshapes how I think about my own industry, and the GambleAware State of the Nation report is the one that lingers longest. The 2025 edition gave me numbers I cannot un-see — numbers about how young the introduction to gambling now happens, how heavily the marketing surface presses on people who are still legally too young to bet, and how the harm distribution skews toward exactly the people least equipped to absorb it. Reading these numbers as a UK punter who writes about NBA props is uncomfortable, and it should be.
The State of the Nation headline figures
The 2025 GambleAware report delivered findings that landed in the public conversation harder than most years’ editions. The headline number: 30 per cent of UK adolescents aged 11 to 17 had spent their own money on gambling in the previous year. That figure represented an increase of 3 percentage points from the 2024 reading, and the trajectory across recent reports has consistently been upward. The increase is not within statistical noise — it reflects measurable broadening of gambling exposure across an age group that legally cannot bet at most regulated UK operators.
The second finding that drew significant attention: 31 per cent of young people in the UK reported in 2025 that they had seen gambling promotional content from influencers. Influencer marketing of gambling sits in a different regulatory space than traditional bookmaker advertising, with looser controls on placement and audience targeting than the established broadcast and sponsorship rules. The 31 per cent exposure rate translates into roughly one in three young people seeing this content with regularity, which is the kind of saturation that produces measurable downstream behavioural effects.
The third finding is the most clinically significant. Among young adults who do gamble, 19 per cent meet the threshold for problem gambling — more than double the rate of the broader UK adult gambling population. The age cohort is uniquely vulnerable: still developing impulse control, often newly autonomous financially, and exposed to a marketing environment that targets them aggressively. The combination produces a harm rate that public health researchers consider an urgent intervention priority.
The report itself sat within a wider context of UK gambling participation that the Gambling Commission tracks separately. The most recent participation data showed that 10 per cent of UK adults had gambled outside the lottery in the previous four weeks, with 8 per cent specifically betting on sport online or through an app. The young adult figures sit on top of those baseline rates, and the harm rates among young adults are dramatically elevated relative to the older cohorts in the same data.
Influencer marketing and the regulatory gap it exploits
The influencer marketing finding deserves a section of its own because it sits at the intersection of three trends that have all accelerated in the past three years. First, social media platforms have become the dominant marketing surface for younger audiences, displacing the broadcast and print channels that dominated gambling advertising historically. Second, regulatory infrastructure for gambling marketing was built around those traditional channels and has been slower to extend to influencer-driven content. Third, the operators have invested heavily in influencer partnerships precisely because the channel offers reach, trust and engagement that traditional advertising no longer delivers efficiently.
Anna Hargrave, the transition CEO of GambleAware at the time of the 2025 report, framed the finding in language calibrated to push the regulatory conversation forward: “Gambling operators invest significant resources into online marketing because it works at getting people to gamble more. These [findings] should not be ignored, and I would implore those promoting gambling through advertising and marketing to take note of this report, and start to put the necessary actions in place, including clearer health warnings to warn people of the potential risks.” Her framing was deliberately operator-focused — the call was to the businesses that fund and benefit from the marketing, not to the regulators or the public.
The mechanism of influencer harm is structural. A young person sees a content creator they trust — someone whose lifestyle, humour or sporting commentary they identify with — promoting a betting product. The promotion is often integrated into broader content rather than presented as standalone advertising, which makes it harder for the audience to mentally categorise as marketing. The trust relationship that the influencer has cultivated with the audience transfers to the gambling product implicitly, in ways that traditional advertising cannot replicate.
For a UK regulatory framework that has invested heavily in standardised health warnings, age-gating and responsible-gambling messaging on traditional channels, the influencer environment represents a significant exposure surface that has not yet been brought fully under control. The 31 per cent of young people seeing this content is not an accident — it is the predictable outcome of a marketing channel operating at reach without proportional safeguards.
Problem gambling among young adults — the clinical picture
The 19 per cent problem gambling rate among young adult gamblers in the UK is the figure that should drive policy if anything in the report does. The threshold for problem gambling in clinical research is set by validated screening tools — typically the PGSI or comparable instruments — that capture a constellation of behaviours: chasing losses, gambling beyond intended budgets, hiding gambling from family or friends, gambling-related psychological distress, and the impairment of social or occupational functioning.
The headline rate of 19 per cent compares against an adult population rate of roughly 7 to 8 per cent in the same screening framework. The gap is enormous. It reflects a specific vulnerability profile: young adults who gamble are doing so in a higher-risk way, more often, with more aggressive product engagement, and with less established coping infrastructure when losses occur.
What does this mean for the broader UK gambling environment? The Gambling Commission tracks operator-level GGY across the regulated industry, and the most recent annual figures showed total industry GGY of £16.8 billion for the financial year ending March 2025, with the Remote Casino, Betting and Bingo segment contributing £7.8 billion of that total. The industry-level scale gives some sense of why marketing and product engagement remain priority commercial concerns for operators, and it gives some sense of the resources being deployed against the kinds of audience that the GambleAware research is most concerned about. The Gambling Commission’s quarterly online operator data for the first quarter of the 2025-26 financial year showed average monthly active online betting accounts at 12.7 million — a meaningful proportion of that activity sits among populations the research identifies as elevated-risk.
The regulatory response has accelerated in 2025 and 2026. From 6 April 2025 a statutory levy of 0.1 to 1.1 per cent of GGY applies to every UKGC-licensed operator, with the £120 million annual fund distributed across NHS England, the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, and UK Research and Innovation. The levy was specifically designed to provide stable, ringfenced funding for harm reduction research and treatment, replacing the earlier voluntary contribution model in which operators paid £40 to £60 million per year on a discretionary basis. The structural change matters because the new framework gives the harm reduction infrastructure a guaranteed income that does not depend on operator goodwill, and the broader implications of the levy reshape are covered in our breakdown of the UK statutory gambling levy.
Practical implications for how I think about prop content
I write about NBA props for adults who choose to bet recreationally with regulated UKGC-licensed operators. That is a legitimate audience and a legitimate activity, and nothing in the GambleAware research argues against the legality or the legitimacy of regulated betting for informed adults. But the research does shape three operational choices that I make when I write content like this site publishes.
The first is age verification. Every UK gambling-adjacent content site has an obligation to make age verification visible, prominent, and unambiguous. The 30 per cent of UK adolescents who reported gambling activity did not all access regulated operators — much of that figure represents informal gambling, scratch cards, fruit machines and similar activity. But the regulated environment still has a responsibility to keep its content gated, and the research is a reminder that complacency on age verification has population-level consequences.
The second is tone. Content that glamorises betting, that treats prop selection as a lifestyle activity, or that frames losses as character-building “tough luck” feeds the cultural environment that the GambleAware research is trying to counteract. Honest content about prop betting acknowledges variance, projects realistic expectations of long-run profitability (which for most punters is negative), and presents responsible gambling resources alongside the practical research framework. That tone is a small contribution but a real one.
The third is the marketing surface itself. UK content publishers in the gambling vertical have direct control over what their pages display, what they link to, and what they imply about the audience-product relationship. Content that exists primarily to drive affiliate revenue from operator referrals carries a different responsibility profile than content that exists primarily to inform punters about how prop markets actually function. The line between the two is not always sharp, but it matters, and the GambleAware research is one of the clearest ongoing reminders of why it matters.
What age group does the GambleAware State of the Nation report cover?
The State of the Nation report focuses on young people aged 11 to 17 and on young adults more broadly, with the 2025 edition reporting that 30 per cent of UK adolescents aged 11 to 17 had spent their own money on gambling in the previous year. The report draws on multiple research streams including population surveys and clinical screening data.
Are influencer gambling promos legal in the UK?
Gambling promotional content by influencers is permitted within the UK regulatory framework, but it is subject to the same standards as other gambling advertising — including age-gating, responsible gambling messaging and prohibitions on targeting minors. The practical concern is enforcement: the influencer marketing channel has scaled faster than the regulatory infrastructure for monitoring it, and the GambleAware findings on adolescent exposure suggest the current framework is not delivering the protection the rules envisage.
Prepared by the nba Best Player Prop Bets editorial staff.
