The French horse-racing betting market in 2024: the official figures

Most bettors know their own betting history, but rarely the real size of the market they're playing in. The IFCE (Institut Français du Cheval et de l'Équitation, France's national horse and riding institute) publishes a statistical yearbook every year that puts official figures on the table: how much France bets on horse racing, where that money goes, and across how many racecourses it is wagered. Here is what the 2024 data shows.

€9.678 billion wagered in 2024

In 2024, French bettors wagered €9.678 billion on horse racing, a 2% decline compared to 2023. This figure covers all stakes collected by the PMU, across every channel: traditional betting shops, internet, and racecourses.

As with all horse-race betting in France, these stakes feed a shared pool (pari-mutuel betting) rather than a bookmaker: the final odds depend on what every other bettor wagers, not on a price fixed in advance by an operator.

This decline follows several years of growth after the health crisis: stakes had fallen to around €7.8 billion in 2020 (the Covid year), before gradually climbing back to a peak close to €9.8 billion in 2023.

Betting shops still dominate by far

The breakdown of 2024 stakes often comes as a surprise: 83.0% still goes through the traditional PMU channel (betting shops, physical points of sale), against 16.2% wagered online and only 0.8% directly at racecourses.

Five operators are licensed by the Autorité Nationale des Jeux (France's national gambling authority) to offer online horse-race betting in France: PMU, ZEturf, Genybet, Betclic Enterprises Limited, and SPS Betting France Limited. All of them operate on a pari-mutuel (pooled betting) basis for horse racing, including Betclic, which only acts as a fixed-odds bookmaker for sports betting. French law does not allow fixed or guaranteed odds on horse-race betting, regardless of the operator.

664,000 active player accounts wagered online on races in 2024, for an average stake of €2,358 per player over the year. A figure to read with caution: it blends occasional bettors with very regular players, so the average doesn't represent any single person's actual behavior.

Where the market plays out: 233 racecourses, 2,245 meetings

France had 233 active racecourses in 2024, with a strong geographic concentration: 37% are located in Normandy and Pays de la Loire, the two historic regions for breeding racehorses.

2,245 race meetings were held over the year, but their distribution is far from even. 28% of meetings are concentrated on just ten racecourses. Vincennes, with its 152 annual meetings, dominates by far, ahead of Cagnes-sur-Mer (80), Lyon (69), and the two Marseille venues Borély and Vivaux (65 combined).

In total, 17,989 races were run in 2024, split between trot (143,150 runners across the year), flat racing (50,841 runners), and jump racing (17,595 runners). Trot remains, by a wide margin, the most-run discipline by number of runners, consistent with the weight Vincennes carries in the calendar.

What these figures tell us, and what they don't

These statistics describe the size and structure of the market, not the outcome for any given bettor. The PMU takes a margin of roughly 20 to 23% depending on the bet type before redistributing winnings, and the favorite (the lowest odds at post time) wins only about 33 to 35% of flat races in France. A €9.678 billion market changes nothing about these two structural realities: it only indicates how many people take part, not whether the game becomes any more favorable as a result.

The growing share of internet betting (16.2% in 2024) remains modest next to the weight of physical betting shops, a reminder that betting habits change more slowly than the number of available online operators might suggest.

In practice

These figures have no direct bearing on a race-by-race betting decision. What they mainly do is put an individual bet into context: in a €9.678 billion market where 83% of stakes still go through betting shops, where five operators share the same pari-mutuel principle, and where a small number of racecourses account for most meetings. Understanding this structure helps make sense of the odds differences between platforms, and avoids confusing the size of the market with a guarantee of results.