No state income tax means no state gambling tax. The federal 90% loss cap applies exactly as it does everywhere else.
These states impose no individual income tax, so there is no state-level gambling tax to plan around. Your entire exposure is federal — and since 2026 that exposure includes phantom income even for a break-even year.
Nevada: Nevada has no state income tax, but the federal 90% loss cap still applies. Since 2026, a break-even gambler owes federal tax on 10% of winnings even in Nevada.
New Hampshire: New Hampshire fully repealed its interest and dividends tax as of January 2025.
This is your gross-reporting number. It is not your session number.
The IRS measures gambling by session, not by individual bet. Reported correctly, your winnings figure is usually smaller than the gross totals above — sometimes much smaller. We can't tell you what your session number is from two inputs. It takes your actual transaction history.
Run my transactionsIt is a structural quirk, not a decision most legislatures made on purpose. Gambling winnings enter your return above the line — they land on Schedule 1 and flow straight into your adjusted gross income. Losses come off below the line, as an itemized deduction on Schedule A.
Most states start their own calculation from your federal AGI and then apply their own rules about deductions. The winnings arrive automatically. The losses only arrive if the state chooses to let them. Ten states decoupled from the federal code in a way that means they never do.
The result has a name in the tax literature: phantom income. Money you are taxed on that you never kept.
Under IRS guidance, a casual gambler measures gain and loss by session, not by individual wager. You report the net result of each session. Losing sessions don't become a deduction you have to itemize — they reduce the winnings figure you report in the first place.
That distinction matters most in states like these, because a smaller reported winnings figure flows through every downstream calculation.
The catch is records. The session method requires contemporaneous, transaction-level detail — which is exactly what your operator exports contain and what almost nobody reconciles by hand.
Upload your operator history. We reconstruct your sessions, compute the reported figure, and produce the supporting worksheets.
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