How the Gambling Harm Index is built
What this is
The Gambling Harm Index is a monthly 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 published on the 15th of each month.
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 — how many people contacted a helpline, enrolled in self-exclusion, or entered treatment, 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
Published on the 15th of every month, at 9:00 a.m. Eastern. Every edition lives at a permanent versioned URL — /harm-index/2026-09/ (baseline), /harm-index/2026-10/, /harm-index/2026-11/, and so on — and is never overwritten. /harm-index/ always points at the newest edition and carries the full archive list.
A monthly clock does not mean monthly data. Most of the underlying sources are annual. The monthly edition records what was newly published in the preceding month, restates the standing figures, and notes what changed. In a month where nothing new is published, the Index says that too, and that is a real signal about the state of the field.
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.
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, and the state council where one exists, 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
Every edition is permanent at its own URL and is never 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 the affected edition and in the next monthly edition's notes.
- 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 edition plus the full archive index./harm-index/YYYY-MM/— a permanent, immutable edition. October 2026 is/harm-index/2026-10/./harm-index/YYYY-MM/data.csv— the machine-readable file for that edition, at a stable URL, 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 edition.
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 the edition URL. 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 the next edition publishes, 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.