NJ Casino Revenues Growing, But Worrisome Trends Lurk

^{The Showboat Casino Resort on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, where casino revenues are still a bit shaky despite some promising recent numbers. (Image: Alamy)}

Q1 is in the books for the New Jersey casinos, and if you look at the top line, it feels as nice as the sunny, spring day outside here in the Garden State right now. 

“Total Gaming Revenue for the casinos, racetracks, and their partners was $546.1 million for March 2025, reflecting 3.7% growth when compared to $526.6 million reported for March 2024,” read the March earnings report, which the New Jersey Attorney General released last week. “Year-to-date Total Gaming Revenue was $1.58 billion through March 2025, reflecting 2.5% growth when compared to $1.55 billion reported for the prior year-to-date period.”

But, as the retiring College Football Gameday Legend Lee Corso always says, “not so fast ...” The calm, slow growth overall blots out some potentially worrisome trends beneath the surface. The nine land-based casino properties in New Jersey themselves had a gaming win of $230.9 million in March 2025 and $644.4 million for the quarter, declines of 3.7% and 1.8% compared to March and Q1 2024 respectively. That’s not a great trend as we had a somewhat cold but not snowy winter. 

The shortfall came from table games, as the net win dropped by just under $10,000 March vs. March. The Slots win actually lifted modestly.

Is it just an unlucky month? Probably not, as the drop was pretty broad based across the casinos. Only two of the nine properties, Borgata and Hard Rock, saw their overall casino win go up in March. And Hard Rock in Atlantic City saw just a 0.2% gain. Meanwhile three casinos saw double digit drops in March YoY revenue, led by Ocean Casino with a 14.8% plunge.

Cratering Handle in Sports Betting 

These shortfalls are nothing however compared to the erosion in Sports Wagering revenue. The handle in March 2025 was $1,107,191,055 down 16.7% from March 2024. That’s actually a slight uptick as the total Q1 handle of $3,248,218,639 marked a 21.3% dip. Yikes. The win improved slightly from 8% to 8.2%, so revenues dropped 18.6%. 

Roughly 95% of NJ sports betting revenue is online. The internet books need to pair up for either a casino or a racetrack. As you can probably guess, FanDuel and DraftKings dominate the space. In fact they accounted for 71.8% of NJ Q1 sports betting revenue. Each saw a decline from Q1 2024. FanDuel (affiliated with Meadowlands Racetrack) saw a 19.3% dip, while DraftKings (affiliated with Resorts Casino) weathered a 7.9% drop.

Perhaps New Jersey is losing some revenue to New York? Empire State sports wagering revenues lifted from $5,599,214,408 to $6,912,882,324, a whopping 19% gain. Its important to remember that New Jersey had a 3.5 year head start, so it also could indicate an extremely saturated market that might bode poorly for sports betting revenue growth nationwide, at least in locations where it is currently legal (California and Texas remain huge untapped markets). 

Online Casinos Still Booming

OK, that's the bad news. On the plus side (for the casinos), online gaming continues to grow The Win for the casinos was $243.9 million for March 2025, up 23.7% vs, March 2024, which itself was a 19% pop from March 2023. For Q1 overall, the Online Gaming Win was $673.3 million, up 19.6% vs. Q1 of 2024. And fwiw, Q1 2024 was 22% above Q1 of 2023. Cleary this represents the growth segment for the casinos.

FanDuel (affiliated in online gaming with Golden Nugget Casino) and DraftKings (affiliated with Resorts Casino) lead the pack in this segment as well, but they are not as dominant as they are in the sports betting space. They combined for 41.9% of NJ’s internet gaming revenue in Q1. BetMGM (affiliated with Borgata) and the Borgata online brand itself rank 3rd and 4th and account for 22.7% and both brands are growing faster than FanDuel and Dratkings on a monthly and quarterly basis.

Looming over it all, NJ has Sweeps Casinos trying to invade the growing space. They exist in kind of a gray area of quasi-legality. There was movement earlier in the year to at least regulate them. That has morphed into a bill that would outright illegalize them.  New Jersey currentlyhas 28 legal online casinos, all affiliated with one of the 9 casino hotels. Yes, it's a growing space, but it's enormously saturated.