1 Introduction

In May 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), ending a near-nationwide federal prohibition on sports wagering and returning authority over sports betting policy to individual states. This decision opened the door for state governments to legalize, regulate, and tax sports betting within their borders.

Since the PASPA ruling, sports betting legalization has spread rapidly across the United States. As of 2025, at least 38 states, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico,Footnote 1 have enacted laws allowing legal sports wagering in some form, ranging from retail sportsbooks to fully operational online markets.

These state-level gambling legalizations could have an impact on the long-established hub of legalized wagering in the U.S., Las Vegas, Nevada. The city’s tourism economy is deeply intertwined with gaming activity. The proliferation of legal betting across the country has the potential to dilute Las Vegas’s appeal to sports bettors who no longer need to travel to Nevada to place wagers. This expanding access has raised concerns in the popular press in Las Vegas and Nevada more broadly (Henderson, 2018; Stutz, 2021). National media figures have also taken notice. For example, sports media personality Bill Simmons argued in a 2025 podcast that legalized sports betting had changed the tourist experience in Las Vegas, as sports betting has become less central to the city’s unique appeal and fewer sports bettors need to travel to Las Vegas to place wagers.Footnote 2 Expanded legal access could reduce the incentive for sports fans to visit Las Vegas; alternatively, the normalization of sports betting across states might boost interest in destination gaming and travel.

To shed light on these questions, this paper combines two complementary empirical strategies. First, we analyze time-series models to examine how the aggregate volume of sports betting outside of Nevada relates to key tourism outcomes—including total visitors, domestic airplane passenger arrivals, hotel occupancy rate, average hotel room rental rates, and total hotel room rental revenue—for Las Vegas. If legalized sports betting makes Las Vegas less attractive to tourists, then some, if not all, of these indicators should be negatively affected.

Second, we broaden our scope by leveraging a long monthly panel of hotel occupancy data spanning January 2010 through February 2025 across 25 large U.S. cities, including Las Vegas. Using synthetic control methods, we construct Vegas-specific counterfactuals to estimate the causal impact of the PASPA ruling on hotel occupancy in Las Vegas. While not all tourists stay in hotels, if legalized sports betting had a large effect on Las Vegas’s tourism it would show up in hotel occupancy data. The panel framework allows us to explore whether Las Vegas experienced differential changes relative to its synthetic counterpart made up of cities within the 25 large U.S. hotel markets.

Taken together, our time-series and synthetic control analyses provide no evidence that Las Vegas tourism has been disrupted by the expansion of legalized sports betting.

2 Background

For decades, Nevada was the only state in the United States where sports betting was legal, with Las Vegas serving as the epicenter. Nevada first legalized casino gaming in 1931 and extended this framework to sports betting in 1949. Initially confined to independent “turf clubs,” sports wagering became integrated into casinos after federal tax reforms in 1974 reduced taxes on wagers (Fielkow et al., 2017). From that point forward, Las Vegas sportsbooks became staples of major casinos.

In 1992, the federal government enacted PASPA, which restricted sports betting in most states but allowed Nevada to maintain full-scale operations. For more than two decades, this gave Nevada a de facto monopoly over legal sports wagering. That era ended in 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down PASPA in Murphy v. NCAA, allowing states across the country to legalize sports betting. Today, Las Vegas continues to host the largest concentration of brick-and-mortar sportsbooks—approximately 70 venues, the most of any U.S. cityFootnote 3—but it no longer enjoys exclusive access to legal betting.

The rapid spread of legalized sports betting across the country has sparked research on its fiscal, behavioral, and economic consequences. Hollenbeck et al. (2024) show that legalization negatively affects household financial health, increasing bankruptcies and reducing credit ratings, particularly when online betting is permitted. Other work has explored the impact of legalized sports betting on substitute gaming consumption. Humphreys (2021) finds evidence of substitution between sports betting and other gambling products, with lottery terminal spending declining after legalization in West Virginia. By contrast, Taylor et al. (2025) report that legalization increases online gambling expenditures without reducing offline casino spending.Footnote 4

The expansion of legal sports betting outside Nevada parallels an earlier wave of casino legalization and expansion, in which gambling opportunities spread from destination markets such as Las Vegas and Atlantic City to riverboats, tribal casinos, racetracks, and urban/suburban markets (Eadington, 1999). Scavette (2023) found that Atlantic City’s casino legalization from 1978 to 1992, and lack of casino competition, had positive impacts on the city’s employment, wages, and housing prices. But those benefits were reduced as casino legalization spread after 1992. Our paper asks whether a similar logic applies to Las Vegas after the national diffusion of legal sports betting.

We extend the work on gaming substitutability to a key geographic question: whether the spread of sports betting beyond Nevada has reduced tourism to Las Vegas. If the ability to wager legally at home substitutes for the Las Vegas betting experience, tourism should decline as legalization expands. Alternatively, if legal sports betting heightens consumer interest or complements the unique attractions of Las Vegas, tourism could remain stable—or even rise.

3 Time series data and empirical framework

Our first analysis uses data from a four-year period running from July 2021 to June 2025. We choose July 2021 as the start date because of the Covid pandemic.

One potential concern with the post-COVID sample period is that changes in the composition of Las Vegas tourism, including convention and conference activity, could confound the analysis. Historical data from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority suggest that this concern is limited. Total visitation peaked in 2016, while convention attendance peaked in 2017 at roughly 6.5 million attendees. However, both measures have approached those earlier peaks in recent years, with convention attendance near 6 million annually from 2023 to 2025.Footnote 5 Hotel room inventory has also remained relatively stable since 2011, aside from a temporary decline during the pandemic.

We examine the relationship between the monthly U.S. sports betting handle (excluding NevadaFootnote 6) and multiple measures of Las Vegas tourism, including total visitor counts from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA), airline passenger arrivals at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas compiled by the U.S. Department of Transportation, and hotel occupancy and revenue data compiled by CoStar.

As a first look, Fig. 1 shows the relationship between the monthly total U.S. sports betting handle and the monthly number of tourists visiting Las Vegas as reported by LVCVA. There is no obvious relationship between the two series, in part because the sports betting handle displays strong seasonality. Sports betting tends to rise in the fall and early winter months, presumably indicating that much betting activity is related to football, and falls in the summer suggesting that sports gamblers are less interested in betting on professional baseball. That Nevada’s sports betting handle increased from $282.3 million in June 2018 to $496.6 million in June 2025 further suggests that legal sports betting was not harmful to sports betting in Las Vegas.

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
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Las Vegas tourists and total U.S. Betting handle (w/o Nevada)

To more formally explore how Las Vegas tourism has been impacted by the rise in legal sports betting across the country we estimate the following empirical model for several different indicators of Las Vegas tourism:

$${Y}_{t}=\alpha +\beta \hspace{0.17em}{\text{S}\text{p}\text{o}\text{r}\text{t}\text{s}\text{B}\text{e}\text{t}\text{H}\text{a}\text{n}\text{d}\text{l}\text{e}}_{t}+\sum_{m=2}^{12}{\gamma}_{m}{D}_{mt}+\delta t+{\varepsilon}_{t}.$$

\({Y}_{t}\) represents the various outcome measures we employ to gauge tourism in Las Vegas: total tourists in Las Vegas (as reported by LVCVA), total airline passenger arrivals, total domestic airline passenger arrivals (which might be more sensitive than international arrivals to legal sports betting in other U.S. states), Las Vegas’s hotel occupancy rate (i.e., the percentage of total rooms that are rented), average daily room rental rate (ADR), and total room rental revenue.

Here, \(\alpha \) is an intercept, \(\beta \) is the coefficient on sports betting handle, \({D}_{mt}\) denotes calendar-month indicators with January omitted, and \({\gamma}_{m}\) denotes their coefficients. The term \(\delta t\) captures a linear time trend, and \({\varepsilon}_{t}\) is the error term. Specifications differ in whether they include the month indicators and time trend, as indicated in the tables.

The explanatory variable of primary interest is the monthly total sports betting handle across the U.S., which is the total amount of money legally wagered on sporting events across the country. To isolate the impact of legalization across U.S. states on Las Vegas, we remove the amount of money bet in the state of Nevada. Tourism to Las Vegas also has seasonal elements, with lower levels of tourism occurring during the winter months. To control for these seasonal elements, the model includes month fixed effects. The model also includes a time trend to capture longer run changes in Las Vegas travel patterns beyond seasonality. All models are estimated in both logs and levels and use Newey-West corrected standard errors to control for serial correlation.

4 Time series analysis of betting and las vegas tourism

Table 1 reports the estimation results with Las Vegas tourists as the dependent variable. The results in column (1) include neither month fixed effects nor the time trend, the results in column (2) include month fixed effects but omit the time trend, and column (3) reports results with month fixed effects and the time trend included. The top panel of the table contains results from estimating the model in levels and the bottom panel has results from estimating the model in logs. In none of the six sets of results is there a negative relationship between Las Vegas tourism and the sports betting handle. The results in columns (1) and (2) are positive and statistically significant which suggests that legal sports betting and Las Vegas tourism could be complements, but the results could be an artifact of not including the time trend rather than a causal relationship.

Table 1 Las Vegas tourism and total sports betting handle
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Tables 2 and 3 report results using airline passenger arrivals as the dependent variable, with Table 2 using total arrivals and Table 3 using only arrivals on domestic flights. The tables are organized in the same manner as Table 1, with the three columns differing based on the inclusion or exclusion of the month fixed effects and/or time trend and the two panels differing based on whether estimation is done in logs or levels. As in Table 1, there is no indication of a negative relationship (i.e., substitution) between legalized sports betting and total Las Vegas airline passenger arrivals. Instead, there is a positive and statistically significant relationship in all 12 estimated models. These results could suggest a complementary relationship, but caution is warranted in concluding a causal relationship exists.

Table 2 Sports betting and total passenger arrivals in Las Vegas
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Table 3 Sports betting and total domestic passenger arrivals in Las Vegas
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Next, we examine the relationship between sports betting and conditions in the Las Vegas hotel market. If legalized sports betting reduces Las Vegas tourism, there should be a negative effect on Las Vegas hotels’ occupancy rate, ADR, and revenue. In our examination of effects of sports betting on Las Vegas hotels, we also include the national hotel occupancy rate, ADR, and revenue as an additional explanatory variable in addition to the time trend and month controls. The added variable accounts for overall market conditions in the U.S. hotel industry.

Table 4 presents the results for the models examining the occupancy rate. The first column contains results without including the US national occupancy rate, month fixed effects, or time trend. The second column contains results with the US occupancy rate added. Column (3) adds month fixed effects and column (4) adds the time trend. As with previous tables, the top panel of results is estimated in levels, and the bottom panel is estimated in logs. The results are comparable to previous tables. The estimated coefficients on total sports betting are positive and statistically significant in all specifications. As before, there is no evidence that legalized sports betting reduces Las Vegas tourism.

Table 4 U.S. Sports betting handle and Las Vegas hotel occupancy rates
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Table 5 reports estimates from similar models examining ADR in Las Vegas. If sports betting has reduced tourism in Las Vegas, then there should be a decrease in room rental rates. As before, there are no specifications in which there are negative and statistically significant coefficients on the sports betting variable, though they are not all positive and significant as with the occupancy rates results reported in Table 4.

Table 5 Total U.S. Sports betting handle and Las Vegas hotel ADR
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Table 6 reports estimates from similar models examining Las Vegas’s hotel revenue. If people travel less to Las Vegas because they can engage in sports betting in other states, then there should be a reduction in the revenue taken in by Las Vegas hotels. As with the ADR results reported in Table 5, there are no specifications in which there is a negative and statistically significant coefficient on the sports betting variable, though they are not all positive and significant as with the occupancy rates results reported in Table 4.

Table 6 Total U.S. Sports betting handle and Las Vegas hotel revenue
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In the next section, we turn to a synthetic control analysis of Las Vegas’s hotel market.

5 Synthetic control results

The second part of our empirical analysis employs the Synthetic Control Method (hereafter SCM) introduced by Abadie and Gardeazabal (2003). We use monthly data from January 2010 to February 2025 on hotel stays and expenditures. The objective is to create a formalized case study. SCM uses a set of predictor variables on a donor pool of units using other cities to construct a synthetic version of a treated unit (Las Vegas). We use 25 large and geographically representative hotel markets in the United States, as determined by CoStar, to make up our donor pool.Footnote 7 The Supreme Court struck down PASPA on May 14, 2018. We specify June 2018 as the first treatment month, with the pre-treatment period ending in May 2018. Prior to the treatment (i.e., legalized sports betting outside of Las Vegas), the synthetic unit is constructed to match the treated unit as closely as possible. The divergence between the synthetic and the actual unit in the years following the treatment provides a measure of the causal impact of sports betting legalization on Las Vegas.

To formalize, suppose there are J available control units that are not exposed to the intervention. These units comprise the donor pool. Let T₀ denote the final time period prior to the treatment. Thus, t = 1, …, T₀ are the pre-treatment periods and t = T₀ + 1, …, T are the post-treatment periods.

Let W = (w1,...,wj)′ be a J × 1 vector of nonnegative weights assigned to each control unit in the donor pool, where the weights sum to one. Suppose there are K predictor variables. Define X₁ as a K × 1 vector containing the values of these predictors for the treated unit, and X₀ as the K × J matrix containing the same predictors for the control units. The optimal synthetic control is obtained by choosing the weight vector W* that minimizes ‖X₁ − X₀W‖. In other words, the synthetic unit is a weighted combination of other large hotel markets that is constructed to match Las Vegas as closely as possible across the outcome variables and the full set of predictors in the pre-treatment period. The series of predictors used to determine synthetic weights include lagged values of the outcome variables averaged over the pre-treatment period, hotel revenue, occupancy, and ADR, and we also add the percentage of the city employment directly involved in tourism.Footnote 8

The goal of constructing the synthetic unit is to estimate the counterfactual time path of the outcome variable for the treated unit in the absence of the legalization of sports betting. Let \({Y}_{1,t}^{1}\) denote the observed outcome for the treated unit at time t, \({Y}_{1,t}^{0}\) be the counterfactual outcome for the treated unit, and \({Y}_{j,t}\) be the observed outcome for donor j. The SCM estimator of the counterfactual outcome is given by

$${Y}_{1,t}^{0}=\sum_{j=1}^{J}{w}_{j}^{*}{Y}_{j,t}.$$

The estimated treatment effect is then

$${\tau}_{t}={Y}_{1,t}^{1}-{Y}_{1,t}^{0}, \text{for }t>{T}_{0}.$$

Thus, the divergence between the actual treated unit and its synthetic counterpart in the post-treatment period represents the causal effect of the intervention. The Average Treatment effect on the Treated (ATT) is the average of \({\tau}_{t}\) over the post treatment period. See Abadie (2021) for further discussion of the method.

We evaluate the impact of the legalization of sports betting outside of Nevada on Las Vegas tourism outcomes using SCM. Panel A of Figs. 2, 3, 4 presents outcome and synthetic series for Las Vegas, while Panel B reports the corresponding in-space placebo tests for each of these estimates. The vertical dashed line marks the first treatment month, June 2018. May 2018 is the last pre-treatment month. Figure 2 compares the occupancy rate between actual and synthetic Las Vegas, Fig. 3 compares hotel ADR between actual Las Vegas and synthetic Las Vegas, and Fig. 4 compares hotel revenue between actual Las Vegas and synthetic Las Vegas. Across all three outcomes, we find little evidence that national sports betting legalization had a meaningful effect on Las Vegas hotel performance.Footnote 9 Consistent with this visual evidence, the estimated average treatment effects on the treated (ATTs) for occupancy rates (Fig. 2) and ADR (Fig. 3), reported in Table 7, are statistically indistinguishable from zero, and the joint permutation p-values from the placebo distributions fail to reject the null of no effect. For hotel revenue (Fig. 4), we estimate a positive post-treatment effect (Table 7), with an ATT that is marginally statistically significant at conventional levels (joint permutation p-value ≈ 0.08). The point estimate suggests an increase in revenue following legalization, although the statistical evidence is weak.

Fig. 2
Fig. 2
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Las Vegas hotel occupancy rate SCM results

Fig. 3
Fig. 3
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Las Vegas average daily rate SCM results

Fig. 4
Fig. 4
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Las Vegas hotel revenue SCM results

Table 7 Synthetic control estimates of the effects of sports betting legalization on Las Vegas hotel outcomes
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Overall, both the treated–synthetic comparisons and the in-space placebo tests provide little evidence that the expansion of sports betting outside of Nevada affected Las Vegas hotel demand, pricing, or occupancy. Any estimated post-treatment effects lack robust statistical support relative to the distribution of placebo effects.

6 Major sports betting events

If sports betting is an important part of what attracts tourists to Las Vegas, then there could be an uptick in Las Vegas tourism in conjunction with major sporting events such as the Super Bowl and the NCAA Final Four (March Madness) basketball championship. Even if people might otherwise be inclined to visit Las Vegas for other forms of entertainment, they might schedule their trips to coincide with prominent sports events if sports betting is a significant factor in their decision-making.Footnote 10

Recent popular press coverage highlights this connection. For example, McGreal (2026) describes Las Vegas resorts as promoting March Madness through large-scale watch parties, sportsbook events, themed experiences, and on-site betting opportunities as the city attempted to offset a broader tourism slowdown. Similarly, Belson (2026) discusses March Madness as an important source of demand for Las Vegas casinos and hotels during a period of weaker visitor activity. These accounts suggest that high-salience sports-betting periods may be especially useful for evaluating whether expanded sports betting outside Nevada substitutes for travel to Las Vegas or instead complements the city’s broader sports and entertainment tourism bundle.

Motivated by this possibility, we separately examine tourism outcomes around March Madness and the Super Bowl. We use daily hotel occupancy data for Las Vegas from 2016 to 2018, in which the Super Bowl and March Madness games were played before any states other than Nevada legalized sports betting, and the post-COVID legalized sports betting environment from 2021 to 2023. (We stop at 2023 because Las Vegas hosted the Super Bowl in 2024.) The estimation is similar to that used in papers such as Heller and Stephenson (2021) in which week of the year and day of the week fixed effects are included to control for hotel occupancy patterns.

Estimation results are reported in Table 8. If being able to wager on the Super Bowl and March Madness attracts tourists to Las Vegas, the estimated coefficients for the period before sports betting was legalized should be positive. However, the results reported in Panel A show no positive statistically significant effects and even have negative effects for the Sunday and Monday of the Final Four weekend. These results suggest that visitors to Las Vegas might enjoy sports betting, but that sports betting is not the primary motivation for many Las Vegas visitors.

Table 8 Major sporting events and Las Vegas hotel occupancy
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Conversely, if expanded legal sports betting outside Nevada reduces the value of traveling to Las Vegas for sports wagering, negative effects should be apparent during the 2021–2023 period. However, the results reported in Panel B show no statistically significant negative effects. Moreover, the estimated effects for Super Bowl Sunday are large and positive (though the occupancy rate coefficient is not precisely estimated). Taken together, the results in Panels A and B of Table 8 suggest that legal, often online, sports betting has not substituted for traveling to Las Vegas but may have instead expanded the pool of people traveling to Las Vegas for sports betting.

It should also be noted that sports betting appears to be a small, though meaningful, component of the Las Vegas tourism industry. The Nevada Gaming Control Board reported that, in 2024, sports and race book gaming in the Las Vegas Strip area generated $199,662,878 in revenue, equal to approximately 3.5 percent of total Strip gaming revenue.Footnote 11 These figures suggest that sports betting is unlikely to be a dominant source of direct gaming revenue. However, sportsbook revenue may understate the broader tourism value of sports betting if sports wagering helps attract visitors who also spend money on hotel rooms, restaurants, entertainment, nightlife, and other casino gaming. The Table 8 results for Super Bowl Sunday hotel revenue since 2021 provide suggestive evidence consistent with this interpretation. The positive estimates for Super Bowl Sunday hotel revenue in the post-legalization period are consistent with the possibility that sports betting remains part of the broader Las Vegas entertainment bundle after widespread sports betting legalization, but we interpret this evidence cautiously.

7 Discussion and conclusion

Our analysis finds no evidence that the expansion of legalized sports betting outside Nevada has reduced tourism to Las Vegas. Across multiple specifications, outcome measures, and empirical approaches, non-Nevada betting activity shows no systematic negative association with Las Vegas visitor counts, airline passenger arrivals, hotel occupancy, or hotel revenue. Although some specifications produce positive estimates, we interpret those results cautiously and do not view them as causal evidence that the expansion of sports betting increased Las Vegas tourism.

Taken together, the findings suggest that legalized sports betting in other states has not meaningfully substituted for the Las Vegas tourism experience. One plausible explanation is that Las Vegas offers a bundled entertainment product—including casinos, shows, dining, nightlife, sportsbooks, and large-scale events—that is not easily replicated by local or online sports betting markets. Las Vegas also continues to market itself as a destination for sports fans, particularly around major sporting events and sports-viewing weekends.Footnote 12