Although casino foot traffic sagged 4.6 percent from June 2024 to June 2025, Jefferies Equity Research analyst David Katz was still pleased with the outcome.
Visitation to United States casinos was also down 15.6 percent from the equivalent period in 2019, prior to the pandemic. Even so, Katz called it the third best month of 2025 to date, “which supports the stabilizing trends we’ve seen the last few months.”
Katz attributed the decline to June 2025 having one less Saturday than the year previous. “That said, we are overall impressed that the strength seen in May didn’t completely reverse in June, with many of the larger properties that have reported monthly AGR showing growth,” he wrote of average gaming revenue.
“This, in our view, exemplifies our positive near-term outlook for regional gaming,” Katz continued. He singled out Boyd Gaming, “given our belief that the company has growth opportunities and potential for increasing capital returns following last week’s sale of its 5% stake in FanDuel.”
Several critical markets showed growth. Pennsylvania foot traffic rose 2.5 percent, 22.2 percent higher than in 2019. Massachusetts was up 7.5 percent.
Conversely, Atlantic City visitation slumped 8.5 percent, down 19.5 percent from before the pandemic. Illinois dropped 13.1 percent from 2019 and two percent from 2024.
“Our take is that the monthly performance reflects the ongoing normalization of traffic trends post-COVID, where volatility remains, as well as from competition and renovations in specific locations and the one less Saturday in the month,” argued Katz. He pointed to Ohio, where foot traffic was off only a half-point from June 2024 and 1.1 percent from 2019.
Detroit’s foot traffic dropped 7.8 percent from the year previous and 33.5 percent from 2019. Visitation in Kentucky was off 4.2 percent from 2024, while a slew of gambling-parlor openings made comparisons with 2019 impossible.
In Colorado, casinos in Black Hawk soared 6.1 percent higher. “That said, we believe the comparisons provide limited insight, given the strength of the new entry in the market from Monarch in mid-2022, which continues to ramp and take share,” Katz conceded.
Katz expected Caesars Entertainment to benefit in particular from regional strength, since half of its cash flow is derived outside of Nevada. Also, the ramp-up of new assets in Kentucky and Virginia was anticipated to boost Churchill Downs.
“More specifically, we are focused on initial results from the opening of The Rose Gaming Resort which appears to be off to a moderately slow start,” Katz said of Churchill Downs’ Dumfries property. He also noted that Penn Entertainment’s regional casinos were lagging the larger gaming group.
“To accurately measure the recovery cadence for casino foot traffic, we are utilizing foot traffic data from Placer to capture movement around destinations and regional casinos across the country,” Katz explained. “Our methodology involves indexing the data to average daily visits for the respective casino or region during the entire month of Jan 2020 and normalizing them using a smoothing multiplier.”
