Horse racing pays $78.4 million a year to police itself, with a national staff of 78

Until 2020, horse racing had no single national regulator — safety and doping rules were set state by state, unevenly enforced by dozens of separate racing commissions.▸ The Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act of 2020 changed that, charging a new private, non-governmental authority — HISA — with developing and enforcing national racetrack safety and anti-doping rules, while giving the Federal Trade Commission oversight power rather than funding responsibility. HISA runs on assessments paid by the industry it regulates, not tax dollars. Every racetrack and state racing commission running Thoroughbred races pays an annual assessment, and each year the FTC has to sign off on how much that assessment will be and where the money goes. It just did, for 2026.

The FTC's order approving HISA's 2026 budget, signed April 13, 2026, puts total 2026 spending at $78.4 million against $77.0 million in anticipated assessment revenue, Daily Racing Form reported the same day — a 4% reduction in total assessments from 2025.▸ Almost three-quarters of it, $57.4 million, is "directly attributable to the Anti-Doping and Medication Control Program," the FTC order states — the operation that collects and tests blood, urine, and hair samples from racehorses nationwide. HISA doesn't run that testing regime itself: it contracts it out to the Horseracing Integrity and Welfare Unit (HIWU), a division of the firm Drug Free Sport, which is paid a management fee of 8% of the costs it incurs directly and 4% of everything else, according to HISA's budget filing published in the Federal Register.

The remaining $21.0 million funds the Racetrack Safety Program (track accreditation, surface testing, jockey health monitoring), Veterinary Services, the technology systems that run both, and general administration.▸ Not every racetrack pays the same way: states can provide services in kind instead of cash, which is credited against their bill. HISA estimated $21.6 million in such credits for 2025; the final figure, once state agreements were settled, came in at $19.0 million, leaving a net $61.4 million actually charged through assessments that year, against an estimated $60.6 million for 2026 — both numbers straight from the FTC's order. Churchill Downs Incorporated, the industry's largest operator, told the FTC that HISA's assessment per start had risen 62% between 2023 and 2025; HISA disputed that comparison, arguing 2023 was only a partial year of the anti-doping program and understated its true annualized cost. Both sides of that dispute are on the public record, not resolved by it.

Set against a sport that runs races at more than 100 tracks and licensed 71,443 individual horses that either raced or trained under its rules in 2025, HISA's headcount is small.▸ Its own departments — Racetrack Safety, Veterinary Services, Technology, and Administration — were budgeted for 32 positions combined for 2026. HIWU, the contracted anti-doping unit, accounts for another 46 full-time employees working out of a 3,000-square-foot office in Kansas City, Missouri, covering everything from sample collection and lab-results management to investigations and litigation support.

That 78-person workforce is stretched thin by design: HISA's own Racetrack Safety accreditation team completed site visits at 21 racetracks in 2023 and 22 in 2024, according to the same filing — a handful of people, traveling in teams of three or four, evaluating whether tracks meet national safety standards one visit at a time.

The stated purpose of both programs is fewer catastrophic injuries.▸ Here the data comes from outside HISA entirely: The Jockey Club, a private breed registry that has run the Equine Injury Database since 2009 — years before HISA existed — reported 251 fatal injuries out of 235,625 Thoroughbred starts nationwide in 2025, a rate of 1.07 per 1,000 starts. That is the lowest rate the database has recorded in its 17 years of tracking, down from 2.00 per 1,000 in 2009.

The decline predates HISA by more than a decade, and the database covers all U.S. Thoroughbred racing, not just the tracks under HISA's authority — a handful of states, including Texas and Nebraska, aren't covered at all.▸ HISA's own 2025 Annual Metrics Report reports a narrower figure for horses under its own rules: 1.04 fatalities per 1,000 starts. Neither figure lets HISA claim sole credit for the trend, and neither number this piece uses comes from HISA itself checking its own homework — the fatality data is Jockey Club's, independent of the regulator whose budget the FTC just approved.

Fatality figures come from The Jockey Club's Equine Injury Database, which covers all U.S. Thoroughbred flat racing; HISA's own reported rate (1.04 per 1,000) covers only horses racing at tracks under its authority, a narrower and not directly comparable population.