NJ iGaming Industry Still Booming: Another $228 Million For The House In December

There will come a day when online casino gaming operators in New Jersey will regularly experience mere modest increases or decreases in monthly and annual revenue — but clearly, that day is not yet here.

The state Division of Gaming Enforcement on Wednesday announced that licensed iGaming operators in December yielded $228 million in gross revenue — a boost of a robust 26.5% versus December 2023. For the year, operators took in $2.39 billion, a jump of 24.1% over calendar year 2023.

All seven online casino operators saw a double-digit rise in revenue in 2024, led by the market leaders:

• Golden Nugget ($688.9 million, up 31.3%)
• Resorts ($604.9 million, up 19.1%), and
• Borgata ($549.6 million, up an industry-low 12.2%)

Key partners for each include FanDuel and BetRivers with Golden Nugget, while DraftKings and ESPNBet are partnered with Resorts, and BetMGM is the flagship online brand for Borgata alongside its self-named platform.

Hard Rock, which has Bet365 as a partner, saw the biggest rise of 65.4% in 2024, to a still relatively modest $133.4 million.

Online casino revenue in the state has risen five-fold in just five years, in part because Atlantic City casino closures in the state in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic made it the “only game in town” as countless state residents became accustomed to gambling from within their own homes.

The question of whether and to what extent online casino play pulls from or augments brick-and-mortar casino revenue cannot be answered to a high degree of certainty.

But growth in the Atlantic City retail casino sector remains virtually flat – down 0.3% in December to $2.82 billion, and down 1.1% compared to 2023. That came after the same nine casinos achieved 2.2% growth from 2022 to 2023.

The year 2019, the last before COVID, produced $2.69 billion for the brick-and-mortar casinos — another indicator that the revenue figures have leveled off. 

The good news for the casinos is that they collect somewhere around one-quarter and one-third of that healthy online casino gaming revenue from those operators. But the concern among Atlantic City officials is that if the retail casino numbers go down significantly, thousands of jobs could be lost – a potential reprise of the dire economic straits suffered by the region from the closure of five casinos in the city from 2014 to 2016.

NJ sportsbooks report solid year

Almost ever since its grand opening in 2003, the Borgata casino in the Marina District has set the pace in the city. In 2024, it took in $738.1 million, while runner-up Hard Rock ($544.9) million widened its lead over third-place Ocean Casino ($409.7 million). The latter two properties opened on the same day in mid-2018, rising from the ashes of the former Trump Taj Mahal and Revel casino sites, respectively.

Hard Rock easily led the way with a jump of 6.3% in revenue in 2024, while Borgata (1.2%) and Golden Nugget (0.7%) eked out tiny gains. All of the other casinos experienced single-digit drops in revenue year-over-year except Harrah’s – which was down 11.9%.

The gain in revenue for retail casino operators from 2019 to 2024 was far more modest than that experienced by their online casino counterparts, rising from $2.69 billion to $2.82 billion. 

One consolation for the retail casino executives is that their properties reclaimed a monthly lead after losing out in November, taking in $238.1 million last month to the online operators’ $228 million. But based on the economic trends, it’s possible that 2024 could mark the last time that the brick-and-mortar sites will finish ahead at the end of a calendar year.

While casino operators have been sharing in the dollars with their iGaming counterparts since late 2013, another new source of revenue – deals with mobile sportsbooks companies – has been in play only since mid-2018. But growth on that front in 2024 come near that earned by online casino operators.

The $1.09 billion in sportsbook revenue in 2024 was up 8.7% over 2023 – in spite of a brutal 42.6% decrease in revenue (to $62.8 million) in December compared to December 2023. Industry experts have pointed to an unusually large number of college and professional football betting favorites winning during the months of October and November especially, temporarily eroding the operators’ bottom lines in the more volatile sportsbook business.

The sportsbooks earned only $299.4 million in pre-COVID 2019, so the jump to just over $1 billion in 2023 and 2024 is impressive.

FanDuel’s partnership with the Meadowlands Racetrack, with a focus on heavily promoting lucrative long-shot, multi-leg parlay bets, continues to pay off. In fact, the Meadowlands’ total sportsbook revenue, including all its partners, produced $569.4 million in revenue in 2024 – marking the first time that its market share rose to more than 50%.

Almost $300 million more was achieved by Resorts in 2024, largely fueled by DraftKings, the other half of the U.S. sportsbook duopoly.

The state took in just over $600 million in taxes from non-horse racing gambling in 2024, including $358.3 million from online casino operators — a number that may catch the eyes of lawmakers in the states considering adding the gambling — as well as $180.1 million from the retail casinos and a little more than $64 million from sports betting.