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10% of Ontario students in grades 7 to 12 bet on sports online in 2025, up from 1% in 2019, according to the 2025 Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey (OSDUHS) published by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH).
Participation in any form of online gambling reached 12% of students in 2025, up from 8% in 2023. 23% of students said they see gambling advertising every day.
CAMH surveyed 11,108 students in 246 schools across 42 Ontario school boards between December 2024 and June 2025. The OSDUHS has run since 1977 and reports on mental health, substance use and risk behaviours in the same population every two years, which is what makes the gambling trend line usable.
“The rapid growth of online gambling among young people is really concerning. The results raise important questions about how young people are able to access gambling products despite age restrictions, and about the influence that widespread gambling advertising and its normalization have on attitudes and behaviours. We need stronger measures to reduce youth exposure during a vulnerable time of brain development and better prevent the long-term impact of these trends,” said Peter Selby, principal investigator at CAMH’s INTREPID Lab.
Gambling rose while mental health improved
The gambling numbers moved in the opposite direction to most of the survey. 46% of students reported moderate to serious psychological distress in 2025, with 23% at the serious level. Both figures are down on 2023 and both remain well above where they sat a decade earlier.
Self-rated mental health improved on the same measure. 30% of students described their mental health as fair or poor in 2025, against 38% in 2023 and 15% in 2015. 29% said they had needed professional support in the past year and did not seek it, most often because they believed they could handle the problem themselves, feared their parents would find out, or doubted that help would work.
Substance use fell as well. 48% of students abstained from alcohol, tobacco and cannabis entirely, 3.5% smoked tobacco cigarettes and 6% used nicotine pouches. Among students who vape, 65% had tried to quit and 39% had made three or more attempts.
“We are relieved to see that the acute mental health challenges during the pandemic have eased. Several measures of student well-being have improved since 2023, and some have returned to levels observed before the pandemic began in 2020, which is good news. However, mental health concerns remain elevated, and many indicators are significantly higher than they were a decade ago, reminding us that there is much more work to do,” said Hayley Hamilton, co-director of CAMH’s Institute for Mental Health Policy Research and lead on the survey.
Advertising exposure and screen time
The 23% who see gambling advertising daily sit inside a wider shift in screen habits. 25% of students spend five or more hours a day on social media, up from 11% in 2013, and 78% report three or more hours of recreational screen time, up from 55% in 2009.
Ontario tightened its advertising rules in February 2024, when the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO) barred athletes and most celebrities from gambling advertising aimed at the province. The OSDUHS measures exposure rather than the source of it, so the survey does not separate advertising from registered operators from advertising by affiliates, influencers or offshore sites. Other regulators are moving on that distinction: New South Wales has committed AU$95.2m to gambling reform that includes new transparency rules for affiliate and influencer promotions.
An access question in a licensed market
The legal gambling age in Ontario is 19, and every operator registered with iGaming Ontario runs age and identity verification at account opening. Students in grades 7 to 12 are below that threshold, so a 10% online sports betting rate describes activity that is largely happening outside the registered market.
Hamilton said students still find ways to gamble, and not necessarily through licensed websites. That points at the routes the regulated perimeter does not cover: offshore sites, social casino and sweepstakes products, in-game betting mechanics, and accounts opened on someone else’s identity.
Ontario opened its private operator market in April 2022 and the model is spreading across the country. Alberta launched its own regulated market in July 2026 and has since added Casino Time and Vegas Club Casino, taking the province to 29 sites run by 19 companies. Each new provincial market adds licensed supply, licensed advertising and a fresh set of questions about what sits beyond it.
What comes next
CAMH is calling for stronger measures to reduce youth exposure rather than a specific regulatory instrument, and neither the AGCO nor iGaming Ontario has responded to the findings with a policy change. The Responsible Gambling Council has identified young men aged 19 to 24 as the group most exposed to long-term gambling harm, which is the cohort these students enter within a few years of the survey.
Regulators elsewhere are already examining the products that sit between gaming and gambling for this age group. Slovakia’s gambling authority ÚRHH has commissioned research into loot boxes and skin betting mechanics aimed at Gen Z and Gen Alpha players. For operators registered in Ontario, the exposure is reputational before it is regulatory: the next OSDUHS lands in 2027, and a second consecutive rise in underage online betting will be read as evidence about the market as a whole, not only about the sites that sit outside it.
Source: Centre for Addiction and Mental Health
