How Much Does a Casino Make a Day? (Vegas Casinos Average Daily Profit)

When you spend a couple of hundred bucks chasing a big blackjack win, it’s normal to start to wonder how much a casino makes in a day. Unfortunately, these numbers aren’t easy to come by. You have to do a little basic math and a lot of internet searching to start to come up with average casino profit per day figures.

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In the United States, the average casino makes about $257,000 a day. In Las Vegas, the number is higher, with Strip casinos earning about $600k a day. And, in other parts of America, the figure is smaller.

The rest of this post offers specific details on how much a casino makes a year, as well as some additional information on casino employee pay. You might also be interested in my post about how much it costs to build or buy your own casino.

How Much Does an Average Casino Make in a Day?

Let’s start with the most obvious problem with answering this question – the word “casino” describes a really wide range of properties across the country. Some are tiny, others are massive.

Also, what do you consider a casino?

Does a liquor store with a dozen slot machines count?

If not, what’s the cutoff?

The Choctaw Casino chain owns big casinos but also operates gas stations with slot machines, too. And they’re just one example.

There’s also a lot of variation in terms of how much a casino earns. A big Vegas casino needs a higher average daily revenue than a slot and video poker room in a hotel in Mississippi. There’s also the question of the games available – slots and video poker games are more profitable than table games, and the limits available on those games also affect income.

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These are complicated questions that probably demand their own blog post.

For the sake of simplicity, let’s just look for the average daily casino revenue for the average US casino.

The most recent statistics available indicate that the US gambling industry brings in $43.6 billion in revenue. Some of that is in the form of online gambling, but to keep things simple, let’s say all of that money is funneled through casinos.

Divided among America’s 465 commercial casinos, that’s about $93 million in revenue per year per casino. Divide that figure by the 365 days of the year, and you can estimate that an American casino makes about $257,000 a day.

Take that figure with a grain of salt – larger casinos will typically make more, and smaller casinos will typically make less.

The rest of this post offers more specific numbers in terms of average daily theoretical casino revenues in America.

How Much Does Winstar World Casino Make in a Day?

Operated by the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, Winstar World Casino is the biggest in the world. The Winstar Casino is home to over 8500 slot machines, in fact.

It’d be interesting to know the average daily revenue for the biggest casino in the world.

The Chickasaw Nation doesn’t make all of their financial data available to the public, and why would they if they aren’t required to?

But we can come up with a general daily average revenue based on their reports of annual income.

For 2020, the most recent year for which we have extensive data, the Chickasaw Nation reported gaming revenue of just over $2.3 billion. Broken up by day, that’s a daily revenue of $6.3 million.

Not all of that comes from Winstar, though, as that figure is a total of their twenty-three casinos in Oklahoma. Let’s say conservatively that 25% of their revenue comes from Winstar. That would mean that Winstar is earning about $1.5 million every day from gaming.

It’s hard to say how accurate that number is, since Chickasaw is fairly secretive with specifics, making them available only to the required parties and not generally publicly available.

How Much Do Las Vegas Casinos Make in a Day?

I started digging around on the LVCVA’s statistics pages and came up with some great numbers about average casino revenue in Vegas.

Here’s a figure that’ll blow you away – the major corporations behind Las Vegas’ big casinos report anywhere from $3 to $11 billion in revenue every year.

Visitors are spending over $1,000 a day in Las Vegas – that’s not including gambling expenses. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority earns $300 million a year just from room occupancy taxes. Obviously, there’s a ton of money to be had in Sin City.

How much do Vegas casinos earn every day?

Strip Casinos and Average Daily Earnings

Vegas Strip casinos reported $6.5 billion in revenue in 2019. Dividing that revenue over 365 days gives you an average casino revenue of just over $18 million a day – and that’s just for the 30 casinos on the Strip.

If we want to get a general idea of how much every Vegas Strip casino makes in a year, just divide that daily revenue by 30, and you get $601,595.

Obviously, some casinos are going to make more, others are going to make less. But as a general figure, you should assume that the Wynn and Mirage are earning around $600k a day from gambling.

There’s some variation in how much a casino makes based on the time of year. April is a terrible month for Vegas, even for the big casinos on the Strip. June is often a really great month in terms of casino earnings. A casino’s revenue in April compared to June could be hundreds of thousands of dollars apart. That throws off the daily average a little bit.

The monthly revenue reports from Clark County in 2019 show some of the impact of the calendar on casino revenue. In April of 2019, Clark County reported barely over $800 million from all casinos in and around Vegas. The same number for December of that year was just under $1 billion – a nearly $200-million swing in revenue.

Off-Strip Casinos Average Daily Earnings

Let’s talk about how much Vegas casinos that aren’t on the Strip are earning every day.

Off-Strip casinos report another $1.5 billion in annual revenue. Again, dividing that number by 365 gives us an average daily income of around $4.2 million. There are 35 off-Strip casinos making up that total, giving us a per-day income of about $121,000 a day.

Vegas casinos on the strip earn about 5 times the revenue of off-Strip casinos.

How Much Do Atlantic City Casinos Make in a Day?

I was a little surprised to read that Atlantic City casinos are turning in $3-$4 billion in revenue every year. No judgment on Atlantic City – I love gambling in South Jersey.

But the city has fallen on what seem like harder times. Many casinos I used to visit to play cheap blackjack aren’t open anymore. Maybe the dilation of the gaming industry on the Boardwalk has helped the situation for the time being.

It turns out that online gambling and sports betting are big moneymakers for AC now. These new options are easier to access than the touristy downtown casinos, and they’re available to bettors all over the state. The year they opened these new forms of gambling, casino incomes shot up 15%, and they’ve gone up about that same amount every year since.

With only nine casinos splitting up that pot of $3 billion, average daily casino revenues in Jersey must be pretty big. Dividing $3 billion by nine gives you each casino’s average annual take – about $333 million. Divide that number by the casinos’ 365 days of operation and you get an average daily revenue of about $913,000.

We have some more specific figures broken down by casino thanks to New Jersey’s meticulous financial reports. In 2019 and 2020, Tropicana reported profits of $349.5 and $348.7 million respectively. That means they were above-average compared to their competitors, earning about $956k every day from gambling. At the other end, Ocean Casino’s income of $238 million represents daily revenue of about $652,000 every day.

How Much Money Do Casino Owners Make?

This one’s tough to answer.

For one thing, the title “casino owner” is vague. Modern casinos range from sprawling resorts operated by multinational entertainment conglomerates to tiny roadside slot parlors in rural Mississippi.

Another problem is a lack of well-sourced data on casino owner income. These guys employ teams of people much smarter than me to tweak and obscure financial details. I’m not sure we can totally trust any figures that are reported.

The salary comparison site Comparably says that the average casino owner in America reports $219,846 in salary every year, with a total range between $41,887 and $1.13 million. I’m not sure how accurate these numbers are. The site doesn’t give a lot of details about the source of their information. It seems to be based entirely on reports, which may not be totally accurate.

If you’d like to know what prominent Vegas CEOs are earning daily, we can dig a little deeper into that.

MGM’s CEO made $13.1 million in 2019, with a $2 million base salary and the rest made up of rewards and stock compensation. Let’s say he works 250 days a year – that’s $52,400 a day. The median salary of an MGM employee in 2019 was about $39,000. Not only does the CEO make more in a day than his typical employee earns in a year and a half, he out-earned his average employee overall by a factor of 335:1.

At the opposite end of the big US casino corporation pay scale is Red Rock Resorts Chairman & CEO Frank Fertitta III, who earned about $2 million, or about $8,000 a day. Red Rock Resort’s average employee pay is just over $31k a year. Fertitta III out-earns his average employee by a factor of 64:1.

How Much Money Do Casino Dealers Make in Tips?

Researching for this post, I came across other people’s searches and forum posts on related topics. I found lots of interest in things like how much money dealers are making in tips and how much other casino employees make.

The range of general casino employee salaries is so wide and so dependent on experience that it’s meaningless to give a number. Some casino employees, think bus boys and dishwashers, are no doubt working under the table for tip-share only. Other employees on the gaming floor are salaried with full benefits and tidy 401(k) accounts. We’re talking millionaire-level income with all the trappings.

The question of how much money casino game dealers make is easier to address.

Can You Live on $15/Hour?

I’ve been reading through blog posts, job postings, and Vegas forums.

And the consensus is that dealers expect to make at least $15 an hour in tips. Dealer at higher limit games or VIP tables can expect about three times that.

Beginning dealers, whose salary may be just $8 an hour, survive on players’ generosity. $1,280 a month is a barely survivable wage in most cities with a gambling industry. A dealer earning $15 an hour in tips for every 40 hours of work is looking at an additional $2,400 a month, almost double what they earn on their paycheck.

Are there dealers in Vegas who specialize in VIP blackjack and high roller craps and earn hundreds of dollars an hour in tips? No doubt. I think it’s fair to say most dealers aren’t operating at that level.

Tip your dealer, because $15 an hour isn’t enough.

It’s especially not enough considered against the mountains of income some of these big casinos are taking in. A typical dealer working a 6-hour shift will earn $48 in wages and $90 in tips. That’s a total of $138.

If they’re working at a casino bringing in $600,000 a day, that dealer is earning $1 for every $4,300 they help their bosses make.

Surely a table game dealer is worth more than that.

Conclusion

American gaming law and financial reporting requirements are a patchwork quilt. That makes the job of coming up with average revenue reports for casinos difficult.

The numbers above are mostly averages and inferences based on what scant data you’ll find publicly available regarding casino revenues.