AC Casino Smoking Ban Debate Reopened: Concerns over Health and Revenue
The years-long dispute over whether Atlantic City's nine casinos should be permitted to offer smoking on their premises is back in play, now that a panel of state appellate judges on Monday overturned one aspect of a July 2024 lower-court ruling that upheld the right to the activity.
The judges did not offer an opinion on the constitutionality of the casino exemption. Instead, the panel ordered further review of the validity of the casino industry's claim that a smoking ban would cause catastrophic economic harm if implemented.
The issue is a particularly sensitive one based on the fact that, in the wake of neighboring Pennsylvania and New York opening its own casinos, four Atlantic City casinos closed in 2014 and a fifth property shuttered in 2016.
The resulting loss of tens of thousands of jobs sent the South Jersey economy into such a tailspin that for several months, Atlantic County reported the highest home foreclosure rates in the nation.
However, a majority of state lawmakers in recent years have endorsed an end to the smoking exemption for casinos based on concerns about the health of casino employees. Former Governor Phil Murphy, who left office in January 2026, expressed repeatedly that he would sign a bill to end the smoking exemption.
But so far, the powerful Casino Association of New Jersey has lobbied legislative leaders to prevent such a bill from coming to a vote.
How much harm for casinos if smoking is banned?
The court's ruling zeroed in on the claim that many gamblers would stop visiting Atlantic City casinos if a full smoking ban was mandated.
Still to be determined is if the state Supreme Court would affirm that the health and safety of casino workers is "a fundamental stand-alone right" that cannot be set aside by any law.
Judge Jack Sabatino, who wrote the three-judge panel's opinion, directed that a record should be "developed and litigated to address the hotly contested projections of revenue loss, and for the court to make appropriate findings of fact concerning the reliability and credibility of the competing expert projections."
Sabatino also found that a judge in 2024 improperly deferred to a report from 2021 funded by the casino industry that concluded that a smoking ban would severely impact casino revenues.
The law in question is the New Jersey Smoke-Free Air Act of 2006, which banned smoking in almost all public places and was signed into law by then-Gov. Richard Codey.
"Restaurants complained their businesses would suffer, but in fact, the opposite happened - customers loved the smokefree environment," Codey said in 2025 as he co-sponsored a state Senate bill to end the casino smoking exemption. "The same will happen with the casinos."
Codey died on Jan. 11, 2026 at the age of 79.
What are the next steps?
In response to the ruling, an attorney for the casino workers announced an intention to take the issue to the New Jersey Supreme Court.
“For years, the casino industry has hidden behind paid-for ‘studies’ to justify poisoning its employees," said attorney Nancy Erika Smith in a statement. "A hearing in court will finally expose those economic arguments for what they are: baseless myths designed to scare legislators and delay justice."
Nicole Vitola, a co-founder of Casino Employees Against Smoking Effects (CEASE) and a longtime table games dealer in Atlantic City, said: “We have a new Governor [Mikie Sherrill], who has said she will make workers’ health and safety a priority in her administration. She could take a first step towards this goal by instructing her Attorney General to stop defending this loophole in court and finally protect the health and safety of 6,000 casino workers instead of the industry's greed.”
The judicial panel remanded the dispute to a lower court, and it would take months – if not years – before an analysis of competing claims about whether banning smoking in casinos would cause major economic harm.
Alternative solutions forward
But the issue could be resolved sooner in either of two ways.
One would be for the state Supreme Court to declare that casino employees have a fundamental right of health and safety to be able to avoid the effects of cigarette smoke just as employees at most public facilities in the state already do.
The other would be for lawmakers to vote on the issue, with a likely approval of banning smoking in casinos and then a signing of such a bill into law by the new Governor rendering the court case null and void.
The effort to erase smoking from casinos across the U.S. comes as cultural trends indicate an ever-shrinking interest in the activity. The Gallup organization, which first polled Americans in 1944 and found that 41% of adults were smokers, by mid-2024 found that number had declined to 11%.
Only 6% of adults under age 30 reported that they had smoked a cigarette in the past week - down from 35% just two decades earlier.
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