Ontario’s regulated online gambling market took $82.7 billion in wagers during the 2024-25 fiscal year. The figure that reached an income statement was $2.9 billion. Both numbers sit in the same document, the annual report published by iGaming Ontario, the provincial agency that holds the commercial agreements with the operators.
Neither is a typo. The larger figure is handle, which is the same money staked, settled and staked again across twelve months. The smaller one is what stayed behind once winning bets had been paid. Around three and a half cents of every dollar wagered survived as revenue.
That ratio raises an awkward question about the cost side of the business. Canadian sites publish deposit floors as low as a single dollar, and a dollar deposit costs real money to accept, verify and hold. If only a few cents per wagered dollar ever becomes income, what justifies opening the cashier at that price? The answer is arithmetic, and it runs the opposite way to most people’s intuition.
Three and a Half Cents on the Dollar
The financial summary in the 2024-25 annual report is unusually legible for a gambling document. Gaming revenue was $2,901.5 million. Operator payments took $2,327.4 million of that. Net gaming revenue, the province’s residual share, came to $574.1 million.
Split by product, online casino play generated $2.2 billion of the total, betting $654 million and peer-to-peer poker $59 million. Casino therefore accounted for roughly three quarters of what the market earned, on a product where the margin per wager is thin and the recycling is fast.
Handle is the number that gets quoted in headlines because it is enormous. It measures throughput and nothing else. Revenue measures what the house edge actually collected after payouts. A market can add billions to its handle by moving players onto faster games with lower margins and finish the year only marginally better off.
That distinction matters before any discussion of deposit minimums, because the deposit is not revenue either. A deposit is a cash movement. It becomes revenue only in the fraction that the games eventually retain, and that fraction is small and slow.
The Flat Part of a Payment Fee Is What Bites
Card and wallet pricing almost everywhere has the same shape: a percentage of the transaction plus a fixed amount per transaction. Stripe publishes 2.9% plus CA$0.30 per successful domestic card payment for Canadian online merchants. Stripe does not serve gambling, and specialist acquirers in the category price above mainstream rates, but the structure is the industry standard.
Run a deposit floor against that structure and the flat component does the damage.
|
Deposit accepted |
Cost at 2.9% plus C$0.30 |
Cost as a share of the deposit |
Cash left from the deposit |
|
C$1 |
C$0.33 |
33% |
C$0.67 |
|
C$5 |
C$0.45 |
9% |
C$4.55 |
|
C$10 |
C$0.59 |
5.9% |
C$9.41 |
|
C$50 |
C$1.75 |
3.5% |
C$48.25 |
|
C$100 |
C$3.20 |
3.2% |
C$96.80 |
The player’s balance still reads one dollar. The operator’s bank account holds sixty-seven cents of it, and the games then have to grind that down at a few cents on the wagered dollar before anything resembling margin appears.
Canadian rail economics soften the picture, and they do it in the fee line. This magazine’s own history of the country’s real-time rail notes that Interac charged retail merchants as little as a cent per transaction for years, and that it stayed cheaper than most competitors even after later increases.
Swap the card line for a bank-approved transfer with a near-trivial fixed cost and the table above collapses. The percentage component on a one dollar deposit is under three cents whatever rail carries it. Only the flat fee decides whether the transaction is worth accepting, and a domestic rail built by the banks themselves prices that flat fee close to nothing.
The Costs That Do Not Move When the Deposit Does
The largest expenses attached to a regulated Canadian gaming site ignore deposit size entirely. The Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario charges internet gaming operators $100,000 a year per site in registration fees, alongside $15,000 for a manufacturer of gaming equipment and $3,000 for a gaming-related supplier.
With 50 operators active at the end of 2024-25 and more than 80 registered sites in the market, registration fees alone exceeded $8 million for the year, payable whether the site took one deposit or ten million.
Then comes the revenue split. Operator payments of $2,327.4 million against gaming revenue of $2,901.5 million works out at just over 80%, leaving a fifth of the market’s earnings with the province by contract. That share is calculated on gaming revenue, not on deposits, so the deposit floor never enters the calculation.
Stack those together and the picture inverts. Fixed regulatory cost, platform and content deals, anti-money-laundering staffing and the province’s cut all sit above the deposit line. The floor is not a finance decision at all. It is a shop-window decision that finance then has to live with.
Why the Floor Is Published at All
If the minimum were a serious commercial lever, you would expect it to vary with each site’s cost base. It does not. No Canadian rule sets a minimum deposit, and operators are free to pick any number they like, yet a single dollar recurs across sites of wildly different vintage and scale.
That convergence is observable rather than theoretical. Gambling.com maintains a Canadian comparison page for the $1 deposit casino category, written by Marina Carli and last updated on 3 September 2026, with a launch year printed against each listed brand and an affiliate-commission disclosure at the top.
Those launch years run from 1998 to 2025. A site that opened in 1998 and a site that opened in 2025 carrying the identical floor is not the signature of independent cost modelling.
It reads instead as a market convention that now doubles as a listing requirement. A brand setting its minimum at ten dollars would simply be absent from the comparison pages Canadian players use to shortlist, which is a marketing cost rather than a payments one.
The same page shows the rails each listed minimum runs on, with Interac and Instadebit sitting beside Visa, Mastercard, Paysafecard, Apple Pay and PayPal. A floor that has to work across seven rails of very different cost per transaction cannot be tuned to any one of them, which is another way of saying the number was never a finance output.
What an Active Account Is Actually Worth
The number that decides whether any of this pays sits further down the funnel. That same fiscal year recorded over 2.6 million active player accounts. Divide $2,901.5 million of gaming revenue across them and the market averaged roughly C$1,115 per active account, or about C$895 once the province’s share is removed.
Read that carefully, because iGaming Ontario is explicit that active accounts are not people. An individual holding accounts at four sites appears four times. The per-account figure is therefore a per-relationship figure, and the per-person number is lower by an unknown multiple.
Even so, the order of magnitude explains the floor. An acquisition cost worth incurring is judged against several hundred dollars of annual revenue per relationship, not against the size of the first transaction. Against a denominator in the hundreds, whether the opening deposit was one dollar or twenty is close to noise.
What the floor does change is the mix of accounts a site ends up holding. A brand that opens its cashier at a dollar and a brand that opens it at twenty are building different books out of the same market, and the difference would surface in retention rather than in the deposit line.
Where the Public Data Runs Out
Four caveats sit on the figures above. The wager totals exclude promotional wagers, so the handle counts cash staked rather than everything spun. The market reports carry a warning that they are unaudited and subject to adjustment. The aggregate hides enormous variance between a site holding two hundred thousand accounts and one holding two thousand.
The fourth is the largest. No Canadian regulator publishes the distribution of deposit sizes, the share of minimum-floor accounts that ever fund a second time, or what any of them cost to acquire. Those numbers sit inside operator finance teams, which is why every outside estimate of low-floor economics is an inference from the totals.
Payment behaviour is also moving underneath all of it. Payments Canada’s 2024 methods and trends summary recorded 22.5 billion retail payment transactions worth $12.2 trillion across the country, both up 3% on the previous year.
Within that total, online transfers grew 16% in volume and 23% in value in a single year, and 175% in volume across five. Credit and debit cards still carried 33% and 30% of transaction volume respectively, so the expensive rail has not gone anywhere; it is simply growing more slowly than the cheap one.
If the cheap rail keeps taking share from the expensive one, the flat-fee penalty in the table shrinks further and the one dollar floor gets easier to defend on paper. If interchange or scheme fees move the other way, it gets harder. Payments economics will settle that question, not anything happening on the games themselves.
For readers in Ontario, online gambling is restricted to those aged 19 and over, and ConnexOntario provides free, confidential support 24 hours a day on 1-866-531-2600. The arithmetic above describes an industry’s cost base. It says nothing useful about any individual session, because the house edge is a long-run average and never a forecast.
