The 5% price and the 10% hold
Published 3 August 2026 · Builds on the
Bookmaker Margin Study (205,491 measured markets) ·
Free to quote under CC BY 4.0
Two numbers about sports betting circulate that appear to contradict each other. Price
measurements — including ours, across 205,491
markets — put the bookmaker's quoted margin near 5%. Yet regulated US
sportsbooks' realized hold — the share of all money staked that they actually keep,
reported monthly by state gaming commissions and tracked by industry aggregators — runs at
10% and climbing. Both numbers are right. This page is the bridge between them.
4.77%
measured margin on an ordinary head-to-head bet (the quoted price)
7.93%
measured margin on player props — the products advertising promotes
20.8%
built-in hold of a 5-leg parlay made of ordinary legs
~10%+
realized US hold, per state commission reporting — and rising as parlays grow
The bridge, in one table
Parlays don't add margins — they compound them. Each leg's price carries its
own margin, and multiplying prices multiplies margins. With each leg at our measured average of
4.77%, the built-in hold of the combined bet is 1 − (1 ÷ 1.0477)ⁿ:
| Bet | Built-in hold | Equivalent cost per $100 staked |
|---|
| Single head-to-head bet | 4.8% | $4.77 |
| 2-leg parlay | 8.9% | $8.91 |
| 3-leg parlay | 13.0% | $13.05 |
| 4-leg parlay | 17.0% | $17.00 |
| 5-leg parlay | 20.8% | $20.77 |
| 7-leg parlay | 27.8% | $27.80 |
And that ladder understates reality, because parlay and same-game-parlay legs are rarely
priced at the head-to-head margin: they are disproportionately player props, which carry a
measured 7.93% per leg — and correlated same-game legs are repriced further in the
bookmaker's favour. Build the same 5-leg parlay from prop-priced legs and the built-in hold is
roughly 31.7%.
So the "hold" isn't a price — it's a product mix
Realized hold is a weighted average of what people actually bet:
- Sharp, price-aware money concentrates in singles at ~5% margins — and pushes hold down.
- Recreational money concentrates in parlays, SGPs and props at 8–30% built-in holds
— and pushes it up.
- The industry's own trackers attribute the multi-year rise in US hold largely to the growth of
same-game parlays. The arithmetic above is why: every extra leg is roughly four more
points of hold.
The quotable version: the sportsbook doesn't
need to move a single price to double its take — it only needs you to move from the
singles column to the parlay column. The quoted 5% is the price of the cheapest item on the menu;
the 10% hold is the till receipt for what the room actually ordered.
The Bet Better Margin Index
Our standing measurement of the quoted price of betting — the market-weighted mean
head-to-head margin across every bookmaker and league in our archive — is published as
the Bet Better Margin Index. Current reading, from 2.7 million cleaned markets:
Margin Index · Q3 2026: 4.77%
(props: 7.93% · AU books: 5.25% · US books: 4.72%)
It updates quarterly with the Margin Study, and the
underlying aggregates are an open
dataset. Journalists and researchers are welcome to cite the Index by name.
Sources and method
- Quoted margins: Bet Better Bookmaker Margin Study —
205,491 head-to-head markets and 699,733 prop markets across 52 bookmakers, method documented
there; aggregates published as an open dataset.
- Realized US hold: monthly state gaming commission reports, as aggregated by industry trackers
(e.g. the revenue trackers maintained by
Covers and
Sportsbook Review,
and the American Gaming Association's commercial gaming revenue reporting).
- Parlay arithmetic: built-in hold of an n-leg parlay with per-leg margin m is
1 − (1+m)−n; correlation repricing in SGPs adds further margin
not modelled here — the ladder is a floor.
Citing this analysis
Bet Better (2026). The 5% Price and the 10% Hold: quoted margins, parlay compounding and
realized hold. https://betbetter.world/studies/price-vs-hold
18+. This page explains why the house wins
on average — nothing here changes that arithmetic, and it is not betting advice. A 5-leg multi
carrying a built-in 20%+ hold is a hope purchase, not an investment. If gambling is causing you
harm: Gambling Help Online (AU) or
1-800-GAMBLER (US).