Mississippi’s Revenue Slide Stands Out as U.S. Gaming Sets Another Record
Published 7:40 pm Monday, December 29, 2025
U.S. commercial gaming kept climbing in 2025, finishing the year at roughly 72 billion dollars. The American Gaming Association’s (AGA)2025 “State of the States” figures show a 7.5 percent jump from 2023, marking the fourth straight year the industry has set a record. Much of that movement was a result of states opening up to igaming and mobile sports betting. Twenty-eight of the thirty-eight commercial markets registered their respective record highs, and the state and local gaming tax collections were approximately 15.9 billion dollars, which increased by over 8%. These changes did not occur in a short period and demonstrate how the national landscape is still being redefined through the added access and the application of mobile technology.
Though the general trend is good, the trend in Mississippi has been going the other way. According to the data of the Mississippi Gaming Commission, adjusted gross casino revenue demonstrates a downward trend in the last three years, dropping from 2.57 billion dollars in 2022 to about 2.48 billion in 2023 and then dropping further to 2.43 billion in 2024. The trend is observed in the coastal, central, and northern areas. The latest collapse of the monthly figures indicates that the overall casino revenue in 2025 was approximately 10 percent below the year before, signifying a weakened market when the nationwide numbers are trending in an upward direction.
Across states with established mobile gaming markets, fast-withdrawal casinos attract steady attention because users have grown accustomed to quick processing and fewer hurdles when cashing out. Consistency in handling payouts has quietly become just as important as game selection. As this expectation spreads, players chasing fast payouts choose platforms that can deliver those faster turnarounds, which helps push annual revenue higher in places that allow full online access.
Since national commercial gaming revenue is close to 72 billion dollars, and Mississippi remains within the 2.4 billion-dollar bracket, the state will automatically have a smaller share of the total market. Combined with AGA national tables, MGC data reveal that Mississippi now occupies just a small single-digit portion of American commercial GGR. This is a drastic difference from its status in the 1990s and early 2000s, where it was among the top three commercial casino states and had a far more significant contribution to the national total. That gap has been reduced substantially by growth in other places and a gradual decline in Mississippi.
A look at Mississippi’s rules helps explain the distance between its results and those of faster-growing states. Mississippi permits in-person casino gambling and retail sports betting, and on-property mobile betting is allowed as long as players remain inside a licensed casino’s geofence. Online casino gambling is not legal, and requests to extend mobile sports betting have gone nowhere during past sessions. Those that achieved record revenue earlier are other states that have implemented broad mobile access earlier, which points to the idea that the broader access still affects the overall performance. The national reports suggest that these patterns will continue to shape the gap between fast-growing online markets and states that maintain more limited gaming models.