We ranked the best casino sites accepting U.S. players. We have high standards and our ranking criteria are especially strict for the U.S. market. We also shed some light to all the confusion about U.S. gambling (constant changes with operators, payment processors and laws).

Our #1 Pick: Ignition Casino

See All of Our Casino Reviews

Best Online Casino in the USA for Real-Money

What kind of an internet casino is the right fit for U.S. players? Since there’s no perfect option with such a small pool of legitimate options within the U.S. market, we placed more weight on certain aspects while considering other aspects of the internet casino business to be less important.

Payout Speed
As with all of our reviews, we primarily focused on safety. There’s no sense playing real-money casino games if the two possible outcomes are either losing or not being able to withdraw your winnings?

Safe U.S. casinos deliver customer payouts in a timely manner. When you read complaints and problems related to U.S. gambling sites, it’s almost never the sites that process payouts fast. However, go to a site that takes forever to deliver its payouts, and you’ll find out that other aspects of its service match the quality of their payment-processing.

Effectively, this page is a list of the best online casinos that payout fast. Any online casino slow-paying their customers is either in trouble or lacks respect for its customers (with the exception of momentary payout delays which happen from time to time).

In fact, dishonest internet casinos use tricks like delaying payments so that you would end-up playing (and losing) your winnings before they process the payment. The good news is that in many of these cases, the payment actually gets delivered eventually; the bad news is many casino gamblers fall for this trick by not being able to resist the urge of playing when the money is sitting on their casino accounts.

Customer Service
Customer service is extremely important in the U.S. market. If you play for any significant period of time, you’ll run into problems with either your deposits or withdrawals, and that’s when you need top-class customer service. We need fast, helpful and detailed answers.

Jurisdiction
It makes little difference from a safety perspective what jurisdiction the casino has received its license from. Rogue gambling sites have operated in just about every gambling jurisdiction, and even more alarmingly, they’ve been allowed to continue operations while being rogue.

Software
The U.S. market lacks high-quality casino software. None of the biggest software providers – such as Microgaming, Playtech and NetEntertainment – work with U.S. casino websites, so the market is left with lower-quality providers like Realtime Gaming and Betsoft.

The quality is decent — I mean, it works for millions of people — but it’s far from the quality of what non-US software providers come up with.

So software was one of the ”not-that-big-of-a-deal” type of criteria since pretty much all the biggest U.S. casinos have the same software, and the software is not that amazing to begin with. The same goes for mobile gaming software. We all like to have lots of games and big jackpots, too, but the differences in those areas between US gambling sites are small.

Bonuses
A generous bonus offer (or another type of a promotion) is nice to have but it’s also not that important. The USA casino should be able fulfill all the other criteria even if its bonus offer was average. We give gambling sites some points for having a good bonus, but not a lot.

Are Online Casino Sites in the USA Legal?

There’s a lot of grey area regarding laws around internet gambling in the United States. Is it legal, or is it not? Like with many answers, ”it depends.”

If we focus solely on casino gambling, there seems to be no federal law that prohibits it, but every state has its own gambling laws, and most of those laws may indirectly prohibit online gambling (they prohibit gambling in general or every form of gambling that hasn’t specifically been approved).

Only three states – namely New Jersey, Nevada and Delaware – have legalized some forms of online gambling. None of the other states have specifically approved gambling on the internet and some of them still have century-old gambling laws.

A lot of the confusion was caused by the UIGEA (Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act) in 2006 and ”Poker’s Black Friday” in 2011. The UIGEA makes it illegal for payment processors to handle internet gambling-related transactions. It was never the gamblers who got into trouble, but the people behind payment processors and USA gambling sites. Because of all the headlines, though, many got the wrong impression. We don’t know of a single case where someone in the US has been prosecuted for gambling online —- it’s always been the people involved in the business side of things.