Atlantic City Top NY Casinos in 2025; Slots Dominate Revenue
The final results are in for calendar year 2025, and once again three Atlantic City casino properties far outperformed any of the four upstate New York casinos in terms of gross gaming revenue.
- Borgata Casino / A.C.
- Hard Rock Casino / A.C.
- Ocean Casino / A.C.
- Harrah’s / A.C.
- Rivers Casino & Resort Schenectady / N.Y.C
- Tropicana / A.C.
- Caesars / A.C.
- Resorts World Hudson Valley / N.Y.C
- Del Lago Resort / N.Y.C
- Resorts / A.C.
- Golden Nugget / A.C.
- Bally’s / A.C.
- Tioga Downs / N.Y.C
Detailed look at gross gaming revenue - New York vs AC casinos
Borgata, the Marina District casino that opened in 2003 with great fanfare as the so-called "first Las Vegas-quality casino located outside of Las Vegas," topped the Atlantic City rankings at $800.8 million last year.
Hard Rock and Ocean casinos, which opened on the same day on the Atlantic City Boardwalk in mid-2018, once again placed second and third with $550.8 million and $468.1 million in revenue, respectively.
After that, Rivers Casino & Resort Schenectady - the best performer in New York at $221.8 million - narrowly fell short of Harrah's in Atlantic City ($225 million) while topping Tropicana at $216.8 million and Caesars at $203.9 million.
(These figures follow the New Jersey format of not listing retail casino sportsbook revenue in the numbers. Those totals typically are under $2 million per property anyway, and Harrah's is just ahead of Rivers even if those small additional revenue figures are included.)
Two New York casinos then placed ahead of the three trailing Atlantic City counterparts. Resorts World Hudson Valley in Orange County took in $189.6 million compared to $164 million for Del Lago Resort and Casino in Seneca County.
In Atlantic City, Resorts ($159.9 million), Golden Nugget ($135.8 million), and Bally's ($133.8 million) filled out the industry’s bottom tier. The lowest casino revenue of the combined 13 properties in New York and New Jersey was $111.6 million for Tioga Downs in remote Nichols, N.Y.
Slot machines still the cash cow for NY and NJ casinos
Hollywood movies are far more likely to showcase casino scenes at the poker, craps, baccarat, or roulette tables than the less-glamorous slot machine section of the gaming floor.
But when it comes to the real-life bottom line, slots remain crucial to the overall profitability of casinos. In fact, of the New York and New Jersey commercial casinos, all but one of them reported at least 70% of their total casino gross gaming revenue as coming from slot machines.
Four Atlantic City properties actually cleared the 80% mark in 2025, led by 46-year-old Resorts casino at 84.3%. The numbers bear out the sense that mostly low-cost slots play is most popular at the more affordable casinos, along with lower hotel room rates and generally more affordable dining options.
The two biggest outliers not only are in New York, they in effect represent two sides of the same coin.
Resorts World Catskills ($99 million) and Tioga ($98.6 million) finished in a virtual dead heat in slot machine revenue. But the Catskills site declared nearly half of its revenue from table games - with a mark of $90.6 million - that was far ahead of all three of its rival New York casinos and all but the three leading properties in Atlantic City.
Tioga was at the other extreme, with nearly 90% of its revenue being taken in from slots. The commonality is the extremes of location.
Slots within easy reach for New Yorkers
Resorts World Catskills is fewer than 100 miles from Manhattan's Times Square, so it's a closer ride for New York City residents than Atlantic City, or Foxwoods or Mohegan Sun in Connecticut (each about 130 miles), and only about as far away as eastern Pennsylvania casinos such as Sands Bethlehem that may not be familiar to some New Yorkers.
So for a midtown Manhattan resident, or those a bit north in Westchester County, who are in the mood for table games action, Resorts World Catskills can be an appealing option.
That's not so much the case with slot machines, since thousands of those devices already are available for play at Empire City at Yonkers Raceway, just north of the New York City line.
This is why the Catskills site was a much-overlooked beneficiary of the surprise withdrawal of Yonkers Raceway from the New York City-area casino bidding. That site's expected upgrade from a "racino" to a full-fledged casino with a full suite of table games could have done real harm to the Catskills casino.
Tioga Downs, meanwhile, is known as a "locals casino," with not a lot of tourists coming to visit and with lower average annual incomes. That reality is reflected in the modest $13 million in table game play in 2025 - barely half of the next-lowest figure in the New York/New Jersey region.
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