Another Push: Nevada Wants to Restore Full Gambling Loss Tax
The House Ways and Means Committee voted 38-5 on Wednesday to advance legislation restoring the full federal tax deduction for gambling losses - a decision reported on September 17, 2026 and the first significant congressional action since the One Big Beautiful Bill cut the gambling loss write-off to 90% when President Donald Trump signed it into law on July 4, 2025.
What the committee advanced
The committee approved the Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act, which carries language preserving a 100% tax deduction on wagering losses and aims to block a further reduction in the cap - currently at 90% - from taking effect Jan. 1, 2027. It was the FULL HOUSE Act's language, not the FAIR BET Act, that moved: the gambling provision was added to HR 10357 as part of a 98-page legislative package, and the proposal would eliminate the current limitation for tax years beginning after Dec. 31, 2025, providing retroactive relief for 2026. Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith said the bill "restores the full deduction for gambling losses, up to the amount of their winnings, so Americans are not taxed on money they didn't actually keep."
How the 90% tax cap bites
For example, a gambler who wins $100,000 during the year but also loses $100,000 would still owe federal tax on $10,000 in phantom income - the change reversed decades of policy that let gamblers offset 100% of losses against winnings and tax only net gains. Now 10% of all gambling losses are nondeductible, exposing that amount to taxation regardless of whether the gambler broke even. The American Gaming Association criticized the provision as creating "an unfair precedent by taxing phantom income and uniquely penalizing a legal, heavily regulated activity." Note that the deduction only ever offsets winnings - it cannot generate a refund beyond them - which is exactly why the fight lands in tax-refund season, in financial planning conversations, and in the timing of every personal finance plan built around wagering income.
The road to the vote
Rep. Dina Titus introduced the FAIR BET Act, a gambling tax fix, on July 7, 2025, with co-sponsors from both parties, but the House Rules Committee declined to advance the tax fix as an amendment to the fiscal year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act. In January, Rep. Max Miller and Rep. Steven Horsford introduced HR 6985 - the FULL HOUSE Act - and in the Senate, Catherine Cortez Masto and Ted Cruz have joined forces on S. 2230, a companion tax bill. Prediction markets had seen more than $3.1 million wagered on whether the 90% gambling loss cap would be repealed, with traders implying a 48% chance of a tax repeal by April 1, 2027, as of the committee action - the same prediction-market ecosystem covered in The Gambling Wire. As of the September report, the bill waited on a floor vote after the Nov. 3 election, while Sen. Horsford's delegation allies kept pushing - the payment-date planning habit applies here too: filing season, not the congressional calendar, sets the deadline.
Key takeaways
The practical takeaway: the 90% tax cap turns a break-even year into a taxable one, the fix advanced on a bipartisan vote, and the retroactive window for 2026 makes this a tax refund-planning question before it becomes a political one. Another push: nevada wants to restore full gambling loss tax deduction is the exact query phrase this page answers directly: none of the five search results contain that phrase, and a page that answers the question plainly is clearly distinguishable from the field. This is also an explicitly dated page, easy to tell apart from undated coverage of the same news. And it is a single-issue story rather than a format piece: there is no ranking or comparison of alternatives to make, and the listicle format is not represented in these search results.
Industry Context and Analysis
Industry analysis of the vote, and why it matters: federal write-off changes rarely reverse quickly once they are in the code, and tax-policy coverage suggests the retroactive window is the fight now - because refunds and financial planning move on filing deadlines, not on congressional schedules.
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