Colorado Introduces New Betting Protection Law: Which States Will Follow Next? 

Colorado's sports bettors woke up to a different set of rules this week. 

As of Wednesday, Aug. 12, the state's Sports Betting Protections Act (Senate Bill 26-131) is in force, and it's already being described as the most comprehensive online betting protection law in the country.^[1] 

The question worth asking isn't whether Colorado has tightened up, it clearly has, but which parts of this law actually matter for the rest of the US market, and which are just catching up to where the industry already was.

What's Changed

Licensed online sportsbooks in Colorado can no longer accept more than six separate deposits from a single customer in a 24-hour gaming day. Credit cards are banned outright as a funding method, a Class 2 misdemeanour for operators who break the rule, with fines of up to $25,000 from the Colorado Limited Gaming Control Commission. 

Push notifications and unsolicited text messages soliciting bets or deposits are also prohibited, and advertising aimed at anyone under 21, including on platforms where the majority of the audience is expected to be underage, is now against the law.

The bill passed with genuine bipartisan sponsorship: Democrat Matt Ball and Republican Byron Pelton in the Senate, Democrat Steven Woodrow and Republican Dan Woog in the House. It cleared the Senate 20-14 and the House 50-13. Supporters point to polling from Healthier Colorado showing 73% of Coloradans believe legalized sports betting has made problem gambling worse in the state, a figure that's done a lot of work in the public case for the bill.

The Part Most Coverage is Missing

Deposit caps and credit card bans are the headline-grabbing pieces, but they're not actually the most disruptive part of this law. 

SB 26-131 also bans “player limiting”, the practice of sportsbooks shrinking bet sizes or restricting deposit frequency specifically because a customer is winning, unless there's evidence of fraud or a gambling disorder. That's standard industry practice everywhere in the US, and it's rarely discussed publicly because operators don't like advertising how liability management actually works. 

Colorado banning it, even in this narrower form, is a genuinely novel intervention, arguably more significant than the credit card ban, which the industry had already largely made redundant on its own terms.

It's also worth flagging that the deposit cap moved during negotiations. The bill was introduced with a five-deposit limit and amended up to six before final passage, a modest concession to industry pushback. And Colorado's own fiscal analysis attributes roughly $800,000 in lost state tax revenue to the credit card ban alone, a useful reminder that “harm reduction” here came with a price tag the state chose to absorb.

Catching Up, Not Leading, On Cards

On credit cards specifically, Colorado is following rather than leading. DraftKings dropped credit card deposits in summer 2025, FanDuel and BetMGM followed in March 2026, bet365 and Caesars did the same in April. 

At least nine states, including Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Tennessee, already had bans in place before Colorado's took effect, and Illinois, Maine and Virginia have added restrictions within the past year. 

Ohio's regulator is running its own rulemaking process on the same issue, with a decision expected by late summer.

Who Might Follow, and On What

New York, Maryland and New Jersey have all previously floated credit card ban legislation, making them the most likely near-term followers on that front. 

Massachusetts is arguably a step ahead on enforcement appetite, DraftKings was fined $450,000 there last year for taking more than 1,000 credit-card-backed wagers despite an existing state rule against it, which suggests Massachusetts could plausibly be the next state to extend into deposit-frequency territory rather than just payment restrictions.

The deposit-cap and player-limiting provisions are the parts genuinely worth watching for replication elsewhere, not the credit card ban, which the market has mostly already solved on its own.