Bipartisan FULL HOUSE Act Targets IRS Gambling Loss Deduction Rules
The bill's committee passage with support from both parties signals that the current tax treatment of gambling losses, which can produce tax liability on net-negative outcomes, has become...
The House Ways and Means Committee has advanced the Facilitating Useful Loss Limitations to Help Our Unique Service Economy Act, known as the FULL HOUSE Act, with bipartisan support, according to a Washington Examiner report published this week. The legislation would restore the ability of taxpayers to deduct 100 percent of gambling losses against gambling winnings for federal income tax purposes.
The bill was introduced in the House by Rep. Steven Horsford (D-NV) and Rep. Max Miller (R-OH). Companion legislation was introduced in the Senate by Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat from Nevada, according to the same Washington Examiner report. The names of additional Senate co-sponsors were not specified in the available source material. The full list of co-sponsors is publicly available in the congressional record via Congress.gov.
At issue is how the current tax code treats gambling winnings and losses. Under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, Congress modified the rules governing gambling loss deductions. The resulting framework, as described in the Washington Examiner report, can create circumstances in which a taxpayer owes federal income tax despite having experienced a net financial loss from gambling activity over the course of a tax year. Critics of the current structure have described this outcome as a tax on income that was never realized.
The mechanism works as follows. Federal tax law has long permitted gamblers to deduct losses up to the amount of their winnings, but only if they itemize deductions. The 2017 law altered how certain gambling-related expenses, including losses, are counted against gross gambling income, which can result in taxable income being reported even when a player's total outlays exceeded total receipts. The specific statutory language is found in 26 U.S.C. Section 165(d), as amended by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (Public Law 115-97).
The FULL HOUSE Act would amend that provision to allow a full offset of losses against winnings, returning the deduction to its pre-2017 functional equivalence for gamblers who itemize. The bill does not appear, based on available source material, to alter the itemization requirement itself. Whether the bill would apply to both casual and professional gamblers under the same terms is not specified in the source material reviewed. The bill text, which would clarify this, is available via Congress.gov.
Nevada, represented by both Horsford and Cortez Masto, holds the largest concentration of commercial casino gaming in the United States by revenue, according to data published annually by the American Gaming Association. Ohio, represented by Miller, legalized sports betting in January 2023 and has reported substantial tax revenue from that activity through the Ohio Casino Control Commission. The geographic distribution of the bill's lead sponsors reflects the expanding presence of legal gambling across multiple states.
The legal gambling market has grown substantially since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association (138 S. Ct. 1461, 2018), allowing states to individually authorize sports wagering. As of September 2026, more than 35 states have enacted some form of legal sports betting, according to the American Gaming Association's state tracker. This expansion has increased the number of taxpayers who report gambling income and losses on federal returns.
The committee's bipartisan vote sends the legislation to the full House floor, though a floor vote date had not been scheduled as of the publication of this article. The Senate companion bill's committee status is not specified in the available source material. The Senate Finance Committee's public calendar, available through finance.senate.gov, would reflect whether the Senate version has been referred for a hearing.
The fiscal cost of the proposed deduction change has not been cited in the available source material. The Joint Committee on Taxation would be the public body responsible for producing a revenue score, or cost estimate, for the legislation. That score, once produced, would be available via jct.gov and would quantify how much federal revenue the expanded deduction would reduce over a standard ten-year budget window.
What remains unknown is whether the full House leadership has committed to scheduling a floor vote, which members of the Senate Finance Committee have agreed to advance the companion bill, and what the Joint Committee on Taxation's revenue score will show. Those three documents, once public, would determine the bill's realistic path to enactment.