None, and nothing pending. Alaska is one of only five states with no lottery, alongside Alabama, Hawaii, Nevada and Utah. Governor Dunleavy proposed an Alaska Lottery Corporation back in 2020 and it died in committee; the most recent attempt was in 2023. No lottery bill was introduced at all in the 2025-2026 legislature.
Legal and genuinely big — about 390 million dollars in gross receipts in 2025 across roughly 1,300 permits, run by nonprofits and municipalities under state permit. Pull-tabs sold in bars make up about two-thirds of it, alongside bingo and raffles. Nearly 30 million dollars went to Alaskan nonprofits.
Legal, and unique to Alaska. State law specifically authorises betting on when river ice breaks up, when the first goose or crane arrives, the coldest winter temperature, how many cases of salmon get packed, the weight of the state fair’s biggest cabbage, sled-dog race times, fish derbies — even which hole a hamster runs into. The Nenana Ice Classic has run since 1917: the 2026 pot was 144,749 dollars, split by two Fairbanks residents when the ice went out on May 4.
Four are open — but two are in active litigation. Metlakatla and Klawock have run small electronic bingo halls for years. Then Eklutna’s Chin’an Gaming Hall opened near Anchorage in 2025 and has grown to 224 machines, and Tlingit & Haida’s Two Coppers opened in Juneau in mid-2026. All are Class II electronic bingo — no table games, no poker, no sports betting.
None, and the law is blunt about why: Alaska’s charitable gaming statute expressly does not authorise playing cards, dice, roulette wheels or coin-operated machines. That single sentence is what keeps the state casino-free.
Not legal, retail or online. Mobile sports-wagering bills were filed in both chambers in 2025 — HB 145 and SB 194 — and each got a single hearing before dying when the legislature adjourned in May 2026. Neither ever received a committee vote.
Illegal. No licensed online casino or poker exists here and no bill has ever proposed one. Alaska’s law technically reaches the player too — though lightly: unlawful gambling is a violation for a first offence and a fine of up to 1,000 dollars after that. It is not a criminal misdemeanour, whatever older sources say.
Only at home. There are no card rooms, no commercial poker and no charity poker — playing cards are excluded from what a charitable permit can cover. A private home game is protected, but only as a defence: there can be no house player, no bank, no house odds and no income from running it. The moment anyone rakes the pot, that protection disappears.
Available but unregulated. Alaska has no fantasy-sports law and no Attorney General opinion on it, and DraftKings, FanDuel, PrizePicks and Underdog all accept Alaskan players. Nothing authorises it — it’s simply never been addressed.
None at all. Alaska has no racetracks, no pari-mutuel law and no racing commission, and the online horse-betting apps that operate in most states don’t accept Alaskan customers. The closest thing is betting on sled dogs.
A gray area. No Alaska law addresses online sweepstakes casinos, no bill has been introduced, and no enforcement action has been taken — so they operate here, unregulated rather than approved.
Tlingit & Haida opened Two Coppers on Douglas Island near Juneau in June, holding its grand opening on July 1. Meanwhile a bill to legalise electronic pull-tabs passed the Senate and reached House Finance before the legislature adjourned in May without passing it.
Eklutna’s Chin’an Gaming Hall opened to the public on February 3. The State of Alaska sued the federal government the very next day. In September the Interior Department revoked the legal opinion the hall was built on, and its re-evaluation still hasn’t concluded.
The Interior Department issued an Alaska-only legal opinion holding that tribes could exercise jurisdiction over Native allotments — reversing decades of practice, and unlocking two gaming projects almost immediately.
The Klawock Cooperative Association opened a small electronic bingo hall on Prince of Wales Island. The same year, lawmakers allowed raffles, classics and derbies to be sold over the internet — still the only legal online wagering in the state.
The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act conveyed land to Native corporations instead of creating reservations. Alaska ended up with around 230 federally recognised tribes but almost no tribal land — which is why federal Indian gaming law barely reached the state for decades.
Railroad surveyors wagered 800 dollars on when the Tanana River ice would go out. More than a century later it’s still running on three-dollar tickets — and its record of breakup dates is archived as genuine climate data.
Alaska is one of the most restrictive gambling states in the country, and also one of the strangest. There is no state lottery, no commercial casino, no sportsbook and no racetrack. But it is perfectly legal to bet on when the ice will go out on the Tanana River, when the first goose lands at Creamer’s Field, or how heavy the winning cabbage will be at the state fair in Palmer.
On the online question the answer is short: online casino and online poker are illegal in Alaska, no licensed site exists, and no bill has ever been introduced to create one. Alaska’s law technically reaches the player, not just the operator — though gently. Under state law, unlawful gambling is a violation for a first offence and a fine of up to 1,000 dollars after that; it is not a criminal misdemeanour, despite what a lot of older pages still claim. We found no record of any Alaskan ever being prosecuted for playing online. The real criminal exposure falls on people running games, where promoting gambling can be a felony. Full-iGaming states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and New Jersey license real online casinos; Alaska has never started that conversation.
For poker players, the honest position is that Alaska has no legal poker outside your own living room. There are no card rooms and no charity poker nights, because the charitable gaming law specifically excludes playing cards. A private home game is protected — but as a legal defence, not a licence: there must be no house player, no bank, no house odds and nobody making money from running it. Rake the pot and the protection is gone.
There is exactly one thing you can legally wager on over the internet here, and it’s charmingly Alaskan: since 2022, nonprofits have been allowed to sell raffle, derby and classic tickets online. So you can legally buy a Nenana Ice Classic ticket on your phone, and not much else. Anything more means unregulated offshore sites with no protection at all.
The honest bottom line: Alaska has no lottery, no casinos, no sports betting and no legal online casino or poker. Its legal gambling is charitable — pull-tabs and bingo in bars, plus the ice classics and derbies — along with four tribal electronic-bingo halls. Poker means a home game with no rake. We don’t point Alaskan readers to offshore sites; the law does reach players, even if only as a fine.
Alaska’s ban isn’t constitutional — it’s just statute — so unlike Utah, changing it would take only an ordinary law. The state has simply never done it. Bills to create a lottery, legalise sports betting or authorise card rooms have all been filed over the years, and every one of them has died in committee.
The pattern held again in the 2025-2026 session. Mobile sports-betting bills were introduced in both chambers and each received a single informational hearing before expiring at adjournment — neither ever got so much as a committee vote. A more modest measure to let charities sell electronic pull-tabs got much further, passing the Senate comfortably and clearing a House committee, only to stall in House Finance when the legislature adjourned in May 2026. And no state-lottery bill was introduced at all.
What’s notable is that gambling isn’t really a partisan fight here. The electronic pull-tab bill came from a Republican senator; its sharpest critic was a Democrat worried about screens being more addictive than paper. Governor Mike Dunleavy, who is term-limited and leaves office at the end of 2026, has been the most expansion-minded governor Alaska has had on the revenue side — he introduced the lottery bill in 2020 and later backed electronic pull-tabs. Yet his administration has fought Alaska’s tribal gaming harder than any other, suing the federal government one day after the Eklutna hall opened. The contradiction is easier to understand once you see it isn’t about gambling at all — it’s about jurisdiction over Native land.
So Alaska stays where it is: a state with no lottery even though it mails every resident an oil dividend cheque, no casinos in the ordinary sense, and a body of gambling law mostly concerned with geese, cabbages and river ice. For a real casino floor or a legal sportsbook, Alaskans fly — most often to Nevada or Washington.
Pull-tabs in the bar, a classic ticket in spring, and — newly — a tribal bingo hall. Here’s the real picture.
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Alaska has no commercial casinos — and for most of the last forty years it had almost no tribal ones either, for a reason peculiar to the state. Alaska has around 230 federally recognised tribes, roughly 40% of all tribes in the United States, but the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 gave Native people land through corporations rather than reservations. Federal Indian gaming law requires Indian lands, and Alaska has almost none — Metlakatla’s Annette Islands Reserve is the state’s only reservation.
That changed in 2024, when the Interior Department issued an Alaska-only opinion holding that tribes could exercise jurisdiction over Native allotments — the individual parcels, some 17,000 of them, held in federal trust. Two tribes moved immediately. The Native Village of Eklutna opened Chin’an Gaming Hall near Chugiak, about 20 miles from Anchorage, in February 2025; it has since expanded twice and now runs 224 electronic gaming machines. In mid-2026 the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes opened Two Coppers on Douglas Island near Juneau, with about 100 machines. They join two long-standing small halls at Metlakatla and Klawock.
All four are Class II — electronic bingo machines and pull-tabs. There are no table games, no blackjack and no poker at any of them, and no sports betting; that would require a Class III compact with the state, which Eklutna says it is not pursuing. And the legal ground is genuinely unsettled: the State of Alaska sued the federal government the day after Chin’an opened, the Interior Department revoked the underlying legal opinion in September 2025, and a neighbours’ lawsuit is awaiting a decision from the Ninth Circuit. No court has ordered anything closed — the halls are open and expanding while the question of who governs Alaska Native allotments works its way through the federal courts. For a full casino floor or a real poker room, Alaskans still fly south to Nevada.
The Department of Revenue's Tax Division permits and audits every charitable game in Alaska, from pull-tabs to the ice classics, with statutory prize caps, age limits and rules on how proceeds are spent.
The four tribal halls operate under federal Indian gaming law with National Indian Gaming Commission oversight and tribal gaming commissions — though the underlying jurisdictional question is still in federal court.
No Alaska protection at all. Online casinos, poker rooms and sweepstakes sites are unlicensed here, the law reaches the individual player, and there is no fund segregation, dispute process or recourse if a site refuses to pay.
Our guidance: Alaska’s legal gambling is charitable gaming, the classics and derbies, and four tribal bingo halls — all overseen by someone. What it doesn’t have is any legal online casino or poker, and its law does technically reach the player, so we don’t suggest an offshore workaround here. Alaska also funds no problem-gambling program of its own, so the resources below are national ones.
Alaska funds no dedicated problem-gambling program and has no state gambling helpline of its own, so residents rely on national resources plus the statewide 211 line. If gambling has become a problem, free and confidential help is available 24/7.
Primary sources cited throughout this guide.
