In the year that ended June 30, 2025, resorts on the Las Vegas Strip took in $21.1 billion, and $5.5 billion of it came from gaming. That 26.1% share marked the 27th straight year under half, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported from the Nevada Gaming Control Board’s annual abstract.
Anyone who has stayed at a few Las Vegas resorts notices the other three quarters before reading about it. It shows in suites graded as hotels of their own, dining rooms with Michelin stars, spas with independent ratings and sportsbooks designed around their screens. Most of the choices that shape a stay, from which room to book to how to reach the canyon west of town, have nothing to do with the tables.
Gaming Last Earned Most Of The Strip’s Revenue In Fiscal 1998
UNLV’s Center for Gaming Research has tracked that split back to 1984, using fiscal-year figures for every casino with more than $1 million in gaming revenue. In fiscal 1984, gaming produced 58.6% of Strip resort revenue and rooms produced 16.1%. Gaming kept its majority through fiscal 1998, fell to 48.1% the next year and has not regained it since.
UNLV attributes the decline chiefly to lodging, dining and nightlife growing into revenue centers of their own. Its departmental revenue series shows where the money moved.
| Fiscal year | Gaming | Rooms | Food and beverage | Other |
| 1984 | 58.6% | 16.1% | 19.1% | 6.1% |
| 1999 | 48.1% | 22.1% | 16.8% | 13.0% |
| 2008 | 39.7% | 25.8% | 19.9% | 14.6% |
| 2019 | 34.5% | 28.5% | 24.0% | 13.1% |
| 2024 | 34.8% | 30.1% | 23.0% | 12.3% |
The table follows UNLV’s method, which adds complimentary expenses back into gaming revenue from fiscal 2019 onward so the years stay comparable. The Control Board’s current reporting subtracts them, which largely explains why its 26.1% share for fiscal 2025 sits well below the percentages in UNLV’s series. On either measure, the rooms’ share has roughly doubled since 1984.
The sharpest reversal came in fiscal 2021, when Strip food revenue fell 65% from its fiscal 2019 level while gaming fell by about a quarter. Gaming’s share jumped back to 48.0% that year, then dropped below 38% the next.
Strip Rooms Took In $7.1 Billion In Fiscal 2025
By the Control Board’s count, rooms outearned gaming by $1.6 billion that year, with Strip hotels 89.06% occupied at an average daily rate of $250.72. Guests paying that rate notice how much effort the resorts put into separating the room from the casino floor.
Forbes Travel Guide rates several suite collections inside Strip resorts as hotels in their own right. Its 2026 awards gave Wynn Tower Suites a 20th consecutive Five-Star rating, which Wynn Resorts calls the longest-held in Las Vegas, while SKYLOFTS at MGM Grand earned its 17th and ARIA Sky Suites its 14th.
Air quality is the other change a returning guest picks up on. MGM Resorts announced in September 2020 that Park MGM would reopen smoke-free on September 30, making it the Strip’s first nonsmoking hotel-casino, and the Las Vegas Sun still described it as fully nonsmoking in August 2026.
Michelin Returned To Las Vegas After 17 Years
On August 26, the Michelin Guide presented its first Southwest edition, covering Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, at a ceremony at Fontainebleau Las Vegas. The guide had not had an official presence in the city since its 2008-09 edition, after which it dropped Las Vegas because of the global downturn.
All four Las Vegas restaurants that earned stars sit inside Strip resorts, according to Las Vegas Weekly’s list of honorees. The Bib Gourmand list, which marks high quality at strong value, added China Poblano at The Cosmopolitan and two places away from the resorts, Esther’s Kitchen in the Arts District and Yen Viet Kitchen in Chinatown.
Restaurant de Joël Robuchon at MGM Grand earned two stars, the top rating of the night, while L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon, Restaurant Guy Savoy at Caesars Palace and é by José Andrés at The Cosmopolitan earned one each. Three of the four had held stars in the old Las Vegas guide, while é had not yet opened the last time Michelin rated the city.
Food is also the largest department by headcount. At the 26 biggest Strip casinos by gaming revenue in fiscal 2024, food departments averaged 879 employees per property against 700 in the casino, according to UNLV.
ARIA’s Spa Kept Its Five Stars For An Eighth Year
Forbes Travel Guide named 118 Five-Star spas worldwide in 2026. Two sit inside MGM Resorts properties on the Strip: The Spa at ARIA, which MGM says is the largest spa to hold the rating, and The Spa at Four Seasons Hotel Las Vegas at Mandalay Bay, now rated Five-Star for six years running.
Forbes judges those spas on service from check-in to check-out and on how well the facilities are kept, by MGM’s summary of the standard. Wynn and Encore Las Vegas run two spas between them, and Hard Rock’s rebuild of The Mirage will include two of its own, according to Yogonet’s January report.
Circa Built Its Sportsbook For 1,000 Viewers
The casino floor went through its own change, and the sportsbook shows it most plainly. Circa Resort & Casino in downtown Las Vegas opened its casino in October 2020 around a three-story sportsbook with a 78-million-pixel screen and viewing capacity for 1,000 people, The Sporting Tribune recalled this month. Stadium Swim, its pool amphitheater upstairs, has room for 4,000.
This summer Circa scheduled every 2026 World Cup match, with full sound, for the sportsbook and Stadium Swim from June 11 to July 19. On the Strip, the betting counter is a small line in the accounts. At the 26 biggest casinos there in fiscal 2024, sportsbooks produced 0.9% of casino revenue, UNLV’s figures show.
Outside the resorts, the same kind of wager runs through phone apps in jurisdictions that license online sportsbooks. LineUps’ Betting sites hub covers that licensed online category, and location is what separates it from a resort counter: the apps check where a phone is before they accept a bet, so one that works in one market can stop working at the next border.
The next long stretch for those viewing rooms began this month. The NFL’s 2026 regular season opened on Wednesday, September 9, when the Seattle Seahawks hosted the New England Patriots in a rematch of Super Bowl LX, and LineUps is posting video coverage of the NFL and college football seasons on its YouTube channel.
A Pool Stage In 1998, A Guitar Tower In 2027
Some resorts built the show into the building. “O” by Cirque du Soleil opened with Bellagio in 1998, in a theater whose pool holds 1.5 million gallons of water and runs 25 feet deep. Nearly 100 performers, from high divers to artistic swimmers, work on, in and around that water over 90 minutes, Las Vegas Magazine reported in July.
A production that needs its own pool is hard to take on the road, so the audience has to come to the resort. “O” was still playing there in 2026, 28 years after it opened.
Hard Rock International is taking the idea to the skyline. It bought The Mirage from MGM Resorts for $1.075 billion in 2022, and after the old resort closed on July 17, 2024, it began raising a 42-story, 660-foot hotel tower shaped like a guitar on the site.
FOX5 Las Vegas filmed the tower on August 20 with one corner still waiting for its blue glass. Hard Rock plans six beams of light rising from the top to suggest guitar strings, and the resort is expected to open in late 2027.
The Art Starts At The Check-In Desk
Public art is the resort feature a guest can see without buying anything. Maya Lin’s Silver River, an 84-foot re-creation of the Colorado River made from 3,700 pounds of reclaimed silver, has hung above the registration desk at ARIA since 2009, and Alta Journal listed it among the Las Vegas hotel art anyone can see for free.
Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art works more like a small museum, with exhibitions that change. Its most recent show, Soulful Creatures: Animal Mummies in Ancient Egypt, was curated by the Brooklyn Museum’s Yekaterina Barbash and Edward Bleiberg, displayed about 36 animal mummies from as early as 760 B.C.E. and ran through September 13, so anyone visiting this fall should check what the gallery is showing next.
Red Rock Canyon Requires Timed Entry From October 1
The biggest change of scenery sits 17 miles west of the Strip, about 30 minutes by car. Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area draws more than three million visitors a year, according to the Bureau of Land Management, and its 13-mile one-way scenic loop takes about an hour without stops.
From October 1 through May 31, anyone entering the scenic drive between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. needs a timed-entry reservation from Recreation.gov. Public transportation does not reach the canyon, and ride-share passengers can use only the visitor center and the trails that start there, so a rental car or a booked tour decides how much of the loop a visitor sees.
Golf sits much closer to the rooms. Wynn closed its 18-hole course in 2017, then brought back Tom Fazio, who had designed the original 2005 layout, to rebuild it for a 2019 reopening as Wynn Golf Club. The ground beneath it once belonged to the Desert Inn course, which hosted the PGA Tour’s first Tournament of Champions in 1953.
