Online gambling among Ontario teenagers has increased significantly, with new research showing a particularly steep rise in sports betting despite provincial age restrictions.
The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) found that 12% of Ontario students in grades 7 through 12 had participated in online gambling during the previous year. That was up from 8% in the 2023 edition of the Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey (OSDUHS), representing a 50% increase in two years.
Sports betting showed an even more dramatic long-term shift. Ten per cent of students reported betting on sports online in 2025, compared with just 1% when the survey measured the behaviour in 2019. Across online and offline formats, approximately one in five students reported taking part in some form of gambling during the previous year.
The findings come from one of Canada’s longest-running studies of adolescent health and behaviour. CAMH has conducted OSDUHS every two years since 1977, tracking issues including substance use, mental health, physical health, bullying, gambling and other risk behaviours.
More Than 11,000 Ontario Students Surveyed
The 2025 study was based on anonymous responses from 11,108 students attending grades 7 to 12. Data was collected between December 2024 and June 2025 from 246 schools across 42 Ontario school boards.
Researchers found that the rise in gambling is occurring alongside a broader shift towards digital activity among young people. One-quarter of respondents said they spent at least five hours per day using social media, while 78% reported three or more hours of recreational screen time each day.
CAMH also measured gambling advertising exposure for the first time in the 2025 survey. Nearly one-quarter of students, 23%, said they encountered online gambling advertising every day. Gambling Insider reported that more than 80% had seen or heard an online gambling advertisement during the previous month.
CAMH researchers said the figures raise concerns about how minors are gaining access to betting products and whether widespread advertising is contributing to the normalisation of gambling among young people. The organisation has previously supported tighter restrictions on gambling promotions, including limits on celebrity and athlete endorsements and restrictions on advertising during sports broadcasts.
Ontario’s Regulated Market Has Expanded Rapidly
The increase has taken place during a period of rapid growth for Ontario’s regulated online gambling sector.
The province opened its competitive iGaming market to private operators in April 2022. By the end of the 2024-25 financial year, 50 operators were active in the market, while approximately 2.6 million player accounts had recorded wagering activity. Those accounts do not necessarily represent 2.6 million individual players because one person can maintain accounts with several operators.
Ontario recorded C$82.7 billion in wagers during that financial year. The market generated C$2.9 billion in gaming revenue under the accounting used in iGaming Ontario’s annual report, while an earlier market-performance release reported C$3.2 billion in gross gaming revenue using a different reporting basis.
The scale of the legal market has increased scrutiny of safeguards designed to prevent minors from gambling. Ontario’s regulated operators must verify customers and enforce the province’s minimum gambling age, but the latest student data indicates that some teenagers are nevertheless finding ways to place bets online.
The issue is not limited to Ontario’s latest school survey. Public Health Ontario highlighted separate longitudinal Canadian research earlier this year that followed nearly 28,000 secondary school students. That research found that adolescents reporting high depressive symptoms were 58% more likely to report online gambling one year later than those with low depressive symptoms, after accounting for demographics and previous gambling behaviour.
Public Health Ontario has consequently argued that youth gambling prevention may be more effective when incorporated into broader mental-health and early-intervention programmes rather than treated as an isolated issue.
The latest OSDUHS results also show that overall youth mental health has improved from the pandemic period, although significant concerns remain. Some 46% of students reported moderate-to-serious psychological distress in 2025, down from recent highs but almost twice the 24% recorded a decade earlier.
For policymakers, the combination of rising online gambling, widespread advertising exposure and persistent mental-health pressures is adding to calls for stronger measures preventing minors from accessing or being heavily exposed to gambling products.