Las Vegas Strip gambling revenue statistics: how much casinos actually win each year

Nevada's casinos do not publish how much gamblers lose. What they publish, every month, is "win" — the amount that flows from players to the house — and it adds up to one of the most closely watched revenue series in American business. For the Las Vegas Strip alone, that figure topped $6.5 billion in 2018, on its own account for roughly 55% of everything won across the entire state.

What "win" actually measures

Every nonrestricted casino in Nevada — roughly 450 of them reported to the Board around the turn of 2019 — files a monthly gross revenue statement with the Nevada Gaming Control Board. The headline figure in that filing is win: the amount of money a casino keeps from a game after paying out winners. For table games and slots this is calculated from the drop (cash and markers exchanged for chips or credits) minus fills and payouts. Crucially, win is already a net number — it already accounts for whatever the casino paid back to winners. It is not the total amount wagered, or "handle."

How much the Strip actually won

Gaming win on the Las Vegas Strip reached about $6.56 billion in calendar year 2018, up roughly 2% on 2017's total of around $6.4–6.5 billion, according to Board data reported at the time. That made 2018 one of the strongest years for the Strip specifically, even as the wider Las Vegas visitor market was already showing early signs of the softening that would continue into 2019, when Strip win fell against a tougher table-games comparison.

The win figure already IS what players lost as a group — there is no further "amount returned" left to subtract from it.

The state picture

Zoom out to all of Nevada and the state's casinos won about $11.9 billion in 2018 — a 3% increase on 2017 and the state's third-largest calendar year on record, behind only 2007 ($12.8 billion) and 2006 ($12.6 billion), the peak years before the 2008 financial crisis hit Las Vegas hard. The Strip's $6.56 billion made up a little over half of that statewide figure; the rest came from Downtown Las Vegas, Boulder Strip, Reno, Lake Tahoe and dozens of smaller reporting areas across the state.

Where the money actually comes from

Slot machines dominate. In the Board's Gaming Abstract for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2018, slots produced about $7.73 billion of statewide win — roughly two-thirds of the total — against $3.41 billion from table games (a category that also folds in keno and bingo), $253.3 million from sports pools, $153.4 million from card rooms and $49.7 million from race books. The Las Vegas Strip skews further toward table games than that statewide split, largely because of baccarat: high-stakes baccarat play, much of it tied to international visitors, has repeatedly been credited with keeping Strip win afloat in years when slot and general table volumes were flat.

Sports betting's first full year

2018 was also the first calendar year of legal sports betting outside Nevada, following the U.S. Supreme Court's May 2018 decision striking down the federal ban. Nevada's own books still had a strong year in the new landscape: they took in about $5.3 billion in wagers and kept roughly $329.1 million of it as revenue, a hold of about 6%. It was a record for the state's books at the time — but even at that record level, sports betting remained a small fraction of the Strip and statewide win totals, dwarfed by slots and table games.

Correcting the "$5.5 billion" headline

A widely repeated figure for this period put Strip losses at "$5.5 billion" over a rolling 12-month window. That number does not reconcile with the Board's published win data, which puts Strip win for 2018 at about $6.56 billion, not $5.5 billion. The likely source of the error is treating win as if it were the total amount wagered (handle), then subtracting a separate "amount returned to players" figure from it. Because win is already net of payouts, that second subtraction double-counts money the casino never kept in the first place. The corrected, source-checked figure for the Strip's 2018 gaming win is $6.56 billion, cited to the Nevada Gaming Control Board.

• Nevada statewide gaming win, 2018: $11.9 billion (3rd-largest calendar year on record).
• Las Vegas Strip gaming win, 2018: $6.56 billion (about 55% of the state total).
• Nevada sports betting, 2018: $5.3 billion wagered for $329.1 million in revenue.
• Nonrestricted gaming licensees reporting statewide, early 2019: roughly 450.

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