Nevada: Gaming Win Rises 3.1% in August as Las Vegas Strip Edges Up

Nevada’s casinos won $1.27 billion from gamblers in August, 3.14% more than in August 2025, the Nevada Gaming Control Board said on September 30. The Las Vegas Strip, the state’s biggest gambling market, grew much more slowly. Its gaming win rose just 0.70%, to $684.1 million.

Gaming win is simply what casinos keep from bets after paying out prizes. It comes before they pay any of their own costs. So it is not what players won, not the total amount people bet and not casino profit. The board’s figures cover casinos and other businesses with full, “nonrestricted” gaming licenses. Locations with “restricted” licenses are left out.

It’s an easy mix-up with gambling numbers. When Massachusetts reported the first weeks of its new online lottery, $139.4 million in sales came down to an estimated $10.6 million in profit.

The Strip crept up while some areas jumped

One thing to keep in mind: the Clark County number already includes the Strip, downtown, the Boulder Strip, Laughlin and Mesquite. Adding those rows together would count the same money twice.

Not every area grew. Downtown Las Vegas and Mesquite slipped. So did North Las Vegas, South Lake Tahoe, Elko County and the Carson Valley area. Up north, Washoe County, home to Reno and Sparks, rose 10.44% to $108.4 million, even though Sparks itself fell 5.70%.

Shelley Newell, a senior economic analyst with the Control Board, offered some reasons. She told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that downtown casinos reported fewer people walking through their doors and less money played on both slots and table games. On the Boulder Strip, slot machines kept a bigger share of what was played, which helped results there.

Slots up, most other games down

Across the state, slot machines did the heavy lifting. They won $865.7 million, up 6.11%, according to the board’s detailed monthly report.

Everything else fell 2.75%, to $400.4 million. The board groups table and card games together with sports betting, horse race betting, keno and bingo in that second bucket.

Baccarat was the big exception. Casinos won $162.0 million on the card game, up 36.46%. But that doesn’t necessarily mean people bet more. The report puts the casinos’ baccarat win rate at 18.31% in August. That is higher than the 15.22% and 15.63% the report shows for its three-month and 12-month periods.

The bigger picture

Nevada’s budget year starts in July. Over July and August together, statewide gaming win reached $2.65 billion, up 2.58%. In those two months, the Strip was up 2.24%, the Boulder Strip 6.56% and Reno 7.94%. Downtown Las Vegas was down 6.04%.

Gaming taxes moved the other way. In September, the state collected $72.56 million in gaming taxes based on August’s taxable revenue. That was 5.98% less than a year earlier, though the count only runs through September 21.

There was a longer-term win, too. Newell said August’s statewide total was 32.8%, or $312.4 million, higher than in August 2019. It was also the 66th month in a row that Nevada’s gaming win topped $1 billion.

And all of this happened in a month when fewer people came to Las Vegas. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority estimated about 3 million visitors in August, 4.3% fewer than a year before. It pointed to a less packed event calendar and to the Labor Day weekend, which fell largely in August last year.

Featured image: The Las Vegas Strip seen from above, with Mandalay Bay in the foreground, in 2018. Photo: Ron Reiring / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)