Texas Sweepstakes Casinos Not in Gambling Loopholes Charge

No interim charge in either chamber of the Texas legislature directs a committee to study sweepstakes casinos before the 2027 session. Texas senators took testimony on September 15 under a charge called "Closing Gambling Loopholes", and the charge they were working from names prediction markets and federally regulated derivatives, not the dual-currency model. We read both hearing notices, all 25 Senate committee pages, the 53-page House interim-charge document and the last Texas gambling bill that actually passed a chamber. The word "sweepstakes" appears in none of them.

Texas is the largest state in the country where the dual-currency model operates without a statute against it, and none of the 33 brands in our database excludes it. So when headlines this week said Texas lawmakers were moving on gambling loopholes, the question a Texas player actually has is whether their account is in scope. Based on the documents the legislature itself published, it is not, at least not in the work the 2027 session is being prepared on.

What did the Texas Senate hearing on September 15 actually cover?

The official notice of public hearing puts the Senate Committee on State Affairs in room E1.012 at 9:00 AM on Tuesday, September 15, 2026, chaired by Senator Bryan Hughes, to hear public and invited testimony on four interim charges. The gambling one reads, in full:

"Closing Gambling Loopholes: Study the sudden inundation of prediction market gambling and the exploitation of federal law to circumvent Texas gambling prohibitions by allowing users to place bets on the outcome of elections and other events. Examine the relationship between federally regulated derivative markets and state-prohibited gambling. Make recommendations to ensure the integrity of Texas elections and Texas sports."

Every element of that charge points at event contracts: federal law being used to get around state prohibitions, derivative markets, elections and sports. It is the same fight playing out in Missouri, where the attorney general gave six prediction-market operators 30 days, in Connecticut, where Underdog sued the attorney general, and in Montana, where an enforcement action was paused by stipulation. A sweepstakes casino is not a derivative market and does not run on federal commodities law, which is why it sits outside the framing. The CFTC drew the same line in August, when a staff advisory told prediction-market exchanges to stay away from sweepstakes-style rewards and did not reach sweepstakes casinos themselves.

The other three charges heard that morning were "Guaranteeing Fair Banking for All Texans", "Protecting the Integrity of the Judiciary" and "Ensuring Consumer Protection in Alcohol Sales".

The committee also sat the day before. A separate notice puts State Affairs in the same room at 9:00 AM on Monday, September 14, 2026 for three more charges: "Protecting Minors Online", "Protecting Texas Families" and the monitoring charge covering Senate Bill 3070, the law abolishing the Texas Lottery Commission. That matters for scope. Across the two days the committee worked through every charge on its list that touches gambling in any form, and the word "sweepstakes" appears in none of them.

One limit worth stating plainly: for both September dates the legislature has so far published only the hearing notices. The minutes and the witness list, which the committee's own June 23 meeting has on file, are not posted yet. We can tell you what the committee was convened to study. We cannot yet tell you who walked in and what they said.

Does any Texas committee charge mention sweepstakes casinos?

No, in either chamber. Four document sets, one result:

1. The 25 Texas Senate committee pages. Fifteen publish interim charges. Not one page contains the string "sweepstakes", and only State Affairs contains "gambling" at all. Neither "casino" nor "wager" appears on any of them.
2. The 11 Senate State Affairs charges. The three that come nearest the subject are in the table below. None of them names the model.
3. The 53-page House interim-charge document. Zero occurrences of "gambling", "casino", "gaming", "wager", "sweepstakes", "bingo" or "eight-liner".
4. House Licensing and Administrative Procedures, where Texas gambling bills go. Three charges, none of them a gambling study.

We pulled all 25 committee pages listed on senate.texas.gov. The ten that publish no charges are explained by the directory's own footnotes for most of them: four were dissolved on September 4, 2025, including Jurisprudence, which would be a natural home for a Penal Code study. Two more are procedural, Administration and Nominations, and the last four are select and investigating committees seated for redistricting, flooding, campus speech and disaster preparedness.

Inside State Affairs, the three items that come nearest the subject are these:

The House side is emptier still. Speaker Dustin Burrows published the House interim charges in March 2026, in a 53-page document whose own cover page reads "Interim Committee Charges, Texas House of Representatives, 89th Legislature". We extracted the full text and checked the extraction against control words before trusting it: zero occurrences of "gambling", "casino", "gaming", "wager", "sweepstakes", "bingo" or "eight-liner" in the entire document. The only gambling-adjacent strings anywhere in it are two agency names, "The Texas Racing Commission" and "The Texas Lottery Commission", and they appear in the same bullet list of bodies under the Licensing and Administrative Procedures Committee's oversight jurisdiction. Neither carries a charge of its own.

That committee matters, because it is the one that gambling bills go to in the Texas House. Its three charges for this interim are monitoring two bills administered by the Department of Licensing and Regulation, a study of occupational licensing reform, and general agency oversight. There is no gambling study on its list.

What happened to Texas SB 517, the gambling bill that nearly passed?

This is where our own Texas page has been loose, and we are correcting it here. SB 517 in the 89th Regular Session was authored by Senator Middleton with Senators Hall and King as coauthors. Its history, from the legislature's own bill lookup:

So it did not simply stall. It cleared the Senate and died in the House with no committee referral recorded. Its identical companion, HB 487 by Representative Tepper, was referred to Licensing and Administrative Procedures on February 28, 2025 and its status is still "In committee".

The substance is the part worth reading closely. The engrossed text of SB 517 never uses the words "sweepstakes", "dual currency", "online", "internet", "virtual" or "coin". What it does is add one definition to Chapter 47 of the Penal Code and rewrite two. It adds that a "Device" includes "all or part of an electronic, electromechanical, or mechanical contrivance, machine, or apparatus". It strikes Paragraph (B) from the definition of "gambling device", the bona fide amusement carve-out that had excluded machines paying out only noncash merchandise worth no more than $5 or ten times the cost of a play. And it redefines "Thing of value" as "any property, money, right, privilege, or other benefit, including a gift card or any other representation of value redeemable for any property, money, right, privilege, or other benefit". It then raises four Chapter 47 offenses from Class A misdemeanor to third-degree felony, and in its final operative section it repeals Penal Code 47.02(e).

That repeal is the line to sit with, and it is the one summaries of this bill leave out. The legislature's own analysis describes 47.02(e) as the provision "providing that it is a defense to prosecution that a person played for something other than money using certain devices excluded from the definition of 'gambling device'". So the engrossed bill removes the carve-out and then removes the defense that depended on it.

Comparing the two versions of the bill shows how it got there. The introduced text was captioned "relating to criminal offenses applicable to and authorized uses of gambling devices, including eight-liners", it defined an eight-liner outright, and it repealed 47.02(e) only because it replaced it: a new Section 47.091, "Defenses for Certain Amusement Devices", rebuilt the carve-out as an affirmative defense with the $5 and $50 caps written in. The Senate substitute kept the broadened definitions and the repeal and deleted the replacement. It also dropped the eight-liner definition and the word itself from the caption. What passed the Senate was a bill aimed at physical game rooms that had lost the language limiting it to them, with "thing of value" wide enough that gift-card redemption sits inside it and no amusement defense left standing.

Our Texas state page currently describes SB 517 as "a bill targeting sweepstakes-style dual-currency platforms" and says we lacked confirmed detail on how far it got. Both halves need fixing: the bill text never names the model, and it passed the Senate. We have flagged that page for correction rather than editing it here.

What does this mean for Texas sweepstakes players right now?

Nothing about your account changes today. Texas has no sweepstakes statute, no regulator treating the model as illegal gambling, and no interim charge in either chamber directing a committee to study it before the 2027 session. Interim charges are how session bills get pre-baked in Texas, so their contents are a reasonable read on what is being prepared, and this one has been prepared without you in it.

Two honest limits on that. An interim charge is not a fence: any member can file any bill in January regardless of what was studied, and SB 517 shows how a bill aimed at game rooms can end up with definitions wide enough to touch gift-card prizes and no amusement defense left to argue. And the prediction-market work itself produces recommendations about what counts as gambling under Texas law, which is the same Chapter 47 that any future sweepstakes argument would run through.

The state to watch in the meantime is Oklahoma, next door. Oklahoma's SB 1589 takes effect on November 1, 2026, and as of our last count eight operators still named Oklahoma as an open state in their own help pages. If you play from the Texas panhandle or travel, that deadline is 43 days out and it is the one with a date on it. Our state-by-state legality guide tracks where each line currently sits, our Texas sweepstakes casino rankings cover which brands accept the state, and the full 30-brand ranking covers the rest of the country.

Sources & documents

• Senate Notice of Public Hearing, Committee on State Affairs, September 15, 2026, Texas Legislature Online, read September 19, 2026: time, place, chair and the four interim charges heard, with the gambling charge quoted in full.
• Senate Notice of Public Hearing, Committee on State Affairs, September 14, 2026, read September 19, 2026: the three charges heard the previous day, including "Protecting Minors Online" and the SB 3070 monitoring item.
• State Affairs meetings index, 89th Legislature, read September 19, 2026: the document set filed per meeting, showing notices only for September 14 and 15 and minutes plus witness list for June 23.
• Senate Committee on State Affairs committee page, Texas Senate, read September 19, 2026: the full text of all 11 interim charges, including "Closing Gambling Loopholes", "Protecting Minors Online" and the SB 3070 monitoring item.
• Texas Senate committee directory, read September 19, 2026: the list of 25 committees we pulled and searched, and the footnotes dating four dissolutions to September 4, 2025.
• Interim Committee Charges, Texas House of Representatives, 89th Legislature, Speaker Dustin Burrows, March 2026, read September 19, 2026: the Licensing and Administrative Procedures charges and the absence of any gambling charge.
• SB 517 bill history, 89th Regular Session, Texas Legislature Online, read September 19, 2026: authors, subjects, committee vote and every dated action.
• SB 517 engrossed text, read September 19, 2026: the amended Penal Code 47.01 definitions, the struck Paragraph (B) amusement carve-out, the four felony penalty changes and the SECTION 6 repeal of 47.02(e).
• SB 517 introduced text, read September 19, 2026: the eight-liner definition and caption the substitute removed, and the Section 47.091 amusement-device defense it did not carry over.
• SB 517 bill analysis, introduced version, Senate Research Center, read September 19, 2026: the legislature's own description of Penal Code 47.02(e) as a defense to prosecution, quoted above.
• HB 487 bill history, 89th Regular Session, read September 19, 2026: the identical companion, referred February 28, 2025 and still in committee.

21+. Sweepstakes play is void where prohibited. If gambling stops being fun, call or text 1-800-GAMBLER. Responsible gaming resources.