Win City: Americans wagered a robust $8.83 billion in Las Vegas last year.
gettyAmerican casinos continued their winning ways in 2023, smashing the record set a year earlier. Total revenue generated from slot machines, table games, sports betting and iGaming (mobile casino games) hit $66.5 billion in 2023, a 10% increase over 2022, according to a new report published by the American Gaming Association.
The new tally also marks the third consecutive year U.S. casinos brought in a record amount of money. The growth has been fueled by more states legalizing more forms of gambling—Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Nebraska and Ohio launched new sports betting markets in 2023—and the number of people going to casinos increased. Forty-one percent of American adults, or 102 million people, entered a casino last year, up from 34% in 2022. (Visitation is still below pre-Covid-19 levels when 44% of American adults went to a casino in 2019.) Gamblers are also getting younger: the average age of a casino visitor dropped to 42 years old, down from 50 years old in 2019.
Brendan Bussmann, managing partner of B Global, a consulting firm focused on gaming and hospitality, says the new revenue record is a testament to the strength of the gambling industry. “It shows gaming is a mainstream form of entertainment across the country and continues to grow and persevere through various economic forces,” says Bussmann.
Sports betting, which is legal in 38 states (plus Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.), had another winning year with $10.92 billion in revenue, a 44.5% increase over the record set in 2022. Sports bettors wagered $119.84 billion on games, a 27.8% jump from the year before.
New York claims the title as America’s sports betting capital with $1.69 billion in revenue. (New York is also home to the highest-grossing casino property outside of Nevada—Resorts World in Queens, which generated just under $1 billion in revenue last year.) New Jersey and Illinois, which each had a little over $1 billion in sports betting revenue, rank second and third, respectively. Nevada is in 10th place when it comes to sports gambling with a meager $481.3 billion in 2023.
Meanwhile, mobile casino games—or iGaming in industry parlance—are legal in only six states but generated $6.7 billion in revenue, a 22.9% increase over 2022.
While sports betting is perhaps the newest and sexiest form of gambling, slot machines continue to be the industry’s cash cow. Americans lost $35.5 billion to one-armed bandits in 2023. In-person gambling made up more than 75% of all gaming revenue, or $50 billion. Online gaming—mobile casino games and sports betting—made up a nearly 25% of the market with $16.43 billion.
David Forman, vice president of research at AGA, says gaming revenue in the U.S. is up 50% since before the pandemic, thanks in large part to the expansion of legal sports betting since 2018. Sports betting has attracted a younger demographic to the nation’s 1,000 casinos and once inside, these new customers end up spending money on slots, in restaurants and going to shows.
“Gaming revenue growth has been on an incredible run,” says Forman.
The 2023 numbers do not include revenue generated at Native American casinos. Native-owned establishments generate close to an estimated $45 billion, according to the AGA. Last year’s record also doesn’t include how much money Americans spend on state and national lotteries, which is another $100 billion. (Last week, DraftKings announced it would acquire Jackpocket, a mobile lottery company, for $750 million.)
The Las Vegas Strip is still the country’s beating heart of gambling. Gamblers spent $8.83 billion on The Strip in 2023, a 7.2% increase over 2022. Atlantic City is in second place with $2.85 billion last year and Chicagoland (including Indiana) is in third with $2.19 billion in gaming revenue.
But American gamblers proved they were willing to lose money across the country. Out of 35 gaming jurisdictions, 31 generated more revenue in 2023 than 2022. And of those 31 jurisdictions, 28 hit new records.
Bussmann adds that new and old casino properties across the country have seen their revenues continue to grow. “Gambling,” he says, “is having a renaissance.”
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