How much does an NBA player prop cost you?

The question every bettor asks about a new season’s props is whether the books charge more for them. For the NBA we can answer it with a count, because our board stores both sides of a line from every book that quotes them.

The short version: a median of 6.93%, against 4.76% for a standard -110 / -110 side. That is over 14,270 lines on the morning boards of 21 and 22 October 2026.

How this was counted

The overround is one book’s margin on its own two prices: convert the over and the under to implied probability, add them, and subtract 100%. Both prices come from the same book, on the same player and the same number.

We took the last board saved before noon Toronto on each morning, NBA games on that day’s slate only: 11 games on 21 October and 2 games on 22 October, 181 players between them. We counted a line when a book flagged it as its main line and quoted both sides. Alternate numbers and ladders are left out, because those carry their own margins and would make the comparison about which ladders a book hangs.

The plan was three mornings. No board was saved on the morning of 20 October, and the last one before that noon, from late on 19 October, had no NBA games on it, so this count is two mornings. Two mornings are what these numbers describe, not a season.

What it costs, against something you already know

The mean over every line is 7.71%, higher than the median because a minority of lines carry very wide margins: of the 1,222 lines over 10%, 1,157 were on the exchanges described below. Over the 11,025 sportsbook lines alone the mean is 7.07%.

The two mornings looked alike: the median was 6.93% on each, over 11,547 lines on 21 October and 2,723 on 22 October.

By market

The five big markets sit within a tenth of a point of each other. The two thin defensive markets, steals and blocks, cost most of a point more. That matches the September count on MLB and NFL lines, where thin markets carried more margin than main ones.

First basket is not in the table: it is a yes-only bet with no under to pair.

By sportsbook

Fanatics quoted fewer than 20 points lines with both sides, so it has no points-only figure.

One end held, the other did not. Fliff had the widest median in both counts, 9.04%. The cheap end moved: over every market BetOnline was lowest at 6.41%, and on points alone DraftKings was at 6.05%. Books hang different menus (Bovada had 2,990 lines, Fanatics 58), so a book’s every-market figure partly reflects which markets it quotes. Holding the market to points reorders the middle of the table too, so we read the twelve books other than Fliff as one band, between 6.05% and 7.74% in either count, not as a ranking.

bet365 is not in the table. It is on our board from its Ontario app, but on these two mornings it showed the over side of NBA props only, so there was no pair of its own prices to measure. Bally Bet had no line with both sides of a main line either.

The exchanges, kept apart

NoVig, ProphetX and Polymarket are exchanges or a prediction market: the two prices are offers from other users, not one house’s margin, and a thin market shows a wide gap. We keep them out of the sportsbook figures above.

The gap between median and mean on each is the thin-market effect: most lines are tight, a few are very wide.

What the margin costs over 100 bets

Take 100 bets of $100 on evenly priced sides and win exactly half of them. Whatever you lose is the margin, nothing else:

The sum is 100 x $100 x V / (1 + V) for an overround V. It says what the price asks of you before any stat comes into it; it says nothing about whether a given bet wins. The arithmetic is worked through in why your player props keep losing, and the September MLB and NFL count, with the same method, is how much a player prop costs you.

The margin is one book’s price against itself. Whether another book has a better number on the same prop is a separate question, counted in is line shopping worth it.

Where to find these

The Lab board, with NBA chosen, shows both sides from every book on one row for each NBA prop, so you can see the pair a margin comes from. For one line of your own, put both prices into the no vig calculator and it returns the overround. The NBA defence table is the matchup side of the same board.