New Jersey iGaming Revenue Climbs in September, but Growth Is Slowing

New Jersey’s online casinos generated almost $275 million in September, but slowing growth and continued aggressive promotional spending amid mounting competition paints a more complicated picture for the Garden State’s gaming industry. 

The 13% growth over September 2025’s $243 million continued a record setting pace, and marked yet another impressive month, with online casinos revenue through 2026 now over $2.4 billion.Growth for the year over all is also 13% higher than last year so far. 

Yet beneath those green numbers, signs continue to multiply that New Jersey’s online gaming industry is entering a more challenging phase. Annual growth in 2024 was more than 24% and even in 2025 was 21.8%, showing that the pace has slowed. 

Meanwhile some of the market's biggest operators are reporting even more modest gains, while those growing the most aggressively are spending heavily to do it. This comes at a time when the state’s broader gaming industry is also facing multiple challenges.

Fanatics and Hard Rock Bet Outpace Larger Competitors 

FanDuel retained the top position in September with more than $57 million in revenue, though that was good for only a 2% increase over the previous year. DraftKings was in its perennial second place spot with $53 million, up nearly 10%, and BetMGM Casino grew revenue by 16% to $35 million. 

But Fanatics was once again the standout, while only reporting nearly $15 million in for the month, they were up a whopping 187%for a year earlier.That nearly $10 million increase accounted for about 30% of the entire state’s additional iGaming  revenue for the month. Hard Rock Bet is also up more than 40% year to date, well ahead of the state's 13.2% average. 

That expansion hasn’t come without a pocket full of promotional investment. Fanatics Ceo recently told Bloomberg that the company might spend as much as $350 million this year nationwide on marketing investment and promotion, and perhaps a billion dollars by 2027, as they attempt to close in on FanDuel and DraftKings’s early lead. 

In January of 2026, Hard Rock Bet gave away ten million bonus spins to New Jersey players, in what it billed as its largest casino promotion ever. And in August gave away $150,000 to a lucky 5,000 players. While actual costs here weren’t disclosed they give a sense of the investment smaller operators are making to not only win market share but retain current customers. 

This begs the question, how much of New Jersey’s current iGaming growth is being paid for by increasingly expensive marketing and promotional campaigns, and whether those investments represent sustainable returns or are simply shifting existing customers between operators. 

Atlantic City Has Problems of its Own

While iGaming continues its upward climb, overall New Jersey gaming revenue increased just 2.8% in the month to almost $580 million. Atlantic City’s nine casinos reported nearly $230 million of that, down 1.3% from September 2025, while statewide sports betting nosedived a bit more than 14% to just 77 million.

The biggest problem with Atlantic City’s casino floors remains table games. While slot revenue eked out a 4.6% gain for the month, table win plunged more than 17% to under $50 million. The pearl of the boardwalk, The Borgata, accounted for much of that with table games falling a jaw dropping 48% year over year. 

The property is in the midst of a 100 million dollar renovation project that may have had some impact, but the more reasonable explanation might be the new table games offerings at Resorts World in Queens, just outside Manhattan, which by all accounts continues to siphon off players from both the Boardwalk and Eastern Pennsylvania, especially Baccarat whales. 

Bally’s also struggled with table games revenue down 50%, and Caesars saw revenue declines of 24%. Still, seven of nine AC properties saw a slot revenue increase, and both Caesar’s and the Trop saw increases in the low double digits. Slots generate nearly 80% of the revenue total, in this case more than $177 million to tables $50 million, so it continues to be  the largest driver of Atlantic City’s fortunes by far. 

Sportsbooks Also Struggle

New Jersey sportsbooks are also having a difficult year with wagering handle, or total amount bet, falling in seven of the nine months of 2026. The only exceptions were June and July , which coincided with the FIFA World Cup, which provided a boost to temporary sports betting activity. That meant that through the end of September total handle was down 4% for the year to date, though still an impressive 8.3 billion in total bets, while revenue declined 6% to $748 million.  

One possible explanation is the rapid expansion of prediction markets which are increasingly competing with more traditional sportsbooks. Platforms like Kalshi and NoVig continue to report triple digit growth nationwide, though those figures aren't directly comparable to traditional sportsbook handle.

While there is no reliable measure of just how much New Jersey wagering has shifted to prediction markets, the timing and continued slide is hard to ignore. The state has hardly welcomed the new untaxed competition, with its Attorney General and gaming regulators attempting to block prediction markets from operating there, though those efforts have been largely entangled in Federal litigation. New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport has even gone so far as asking the Supreme Court to step in and cut this Gordian knot of competing federal and state interests in the State’s Tenth amendment police powers vs the Supremacy clause. 

Growth Comes At a Price

Make no mistake, New Jersey continues to generate record revenue, but a quick look at the underlying numbers tells a much more complicated tale. Online casinos are continuing to expand, but much of that momentum might come from aggressive marketing from just a few of the state’s more than three dozen online operators.  

Meanwhile Atlantic City is facing growing regional pressure as well as the cost of goods and labor outpacing tepid growth leaving profits ever slimmer. And sportsbooks are facing a particularly dangerous rival that operates outside of both state regulation and  the current sports wagering revenue tax that costs traditional operators 19.75%.

For operators in all of these verticals, the challenge may be less about finding additional revenue, and more about how much they are willing to spend to generate it, and ultimately, how much of it they will be allowed to keep. Growth is one thing; profitable growth may prove to be something else entirely.