What Hard Rock Is Building Where The Mirage Stood: a 42-Story Guitar, 3,700 Rooms, and an Opening That Has Drifted From Spring 2027 to 'Late 2027 or Early 2028'

The Mirage closed on July 17, 2024, with the volcano doing one last show. Twenty-two months later the final beam went onto a guitar-shaped tower. The one fact nobody will commit to in writing is the day the doors open.

Published 2026-11-09.

The final steel beam went onto the guitar-shaped hotel tower at 3400 Las Vegas Boulevard South on Friday, May 1, 2026. Jim Allen, chairman of Hard Rock International, used the occasion to thank the builders, PENTA and McCarthy, and the company said the resort would eventually employ about 6,000 people. What nobody at the ceremony said was when it would open.

That omission is the story of Hard Rock Las Vegas so far. The property has an owner, a name, a loyalty program, a county-approved design and a topped-out tower. Its opening date has been described, in order, as 2025, 2027, spring 2027, early fourth quarter 2027, fourth quarter 2027 and, in Allen's own most recent words, "late 2027 or early 2028." Our directory lists it with a target of 2027. Here is what is actually known.

Hard Rock announced on December 14, 2021 that it would buy "the operating assets of The Mirage" from MGM Resorts for $1.075 billion in cash, with "a long-term lease with VICI Properties Inc. for the property's real estate." The sale closed on December 19, 2022, three days after the Nevada Gaming Commission approved it. The arrangement is the standard one on the modern Strip: VICI, which took over the Mirage real estate when it absorbed MGM Growth Properties, owns the ground and the buildings; Hard Rock, owned by the Seminole Tribe of Florida, runs what is on them and pays rent reported at $90 million a year.

The first design, a 998-foot guitar, was too tall for Clark County. The one the commission approved unanimously on March 22, 2023 was 660 feet, "600 hotel rooms over 37 floors," and about 1.44 million square feet of new construction, replacing the volcano. A November 2023 design review nearly doubled the casino, from 94,000 to 174,000 square feet, expanded the theater to 6,265 seats, added 60,000 square feet of ballroom and took convention space to 283,000 square feet.

The Mirage opened on November 22, 1989 at a cost of $630 million, and our Mirage post is about why that mattered. It closed on Wednesday, July 17, 2024, after 34 years and eight months. Cirque du Soleil's Beatles LOVE had given its last performance on July 7; Siegfried and Roy's Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat had closed in September 2022, before Hard Rock took over. About 3,000 employees lost their jobs, and 137 who had been there on opening day attended the closing ceremony, after which the 54-foot volcano erupted one last time. Allen told the crowd that "by this time next week, we will be in a major demolition," and construction began the next day.

The volcano, the lagoon, the tropical atrium, the porte cochere and the dolphin pools were bulldozed. The Y-shaped hotel tower, with roughly 3,000 rooms, was not: Hard Rock stripped it of its gold glass and is reconfiguring and rebuilding the rooms inside the frame. The signs were not auctioned, a detail often misremembered. Hard Rock donated the 30-foot entrance arch sign, the 15-foot Siegfried and Roy sculpture and the 27-foot Volcano Lagoon neon to the Neon Museum on July 23, 2024, and the lagoon sign was relit there on June 5, 2026 with the resort's original architects present. The art inside, more than 300 pieces including Chihuly glass and the dolphin statues, went to a public auction in September 2024.

Allen's April remarks are the most recent on the record from anyone with authority over the answer. He said "a few technological things that have come into play that we recently signed" would "be the driver for the final opening date," and that "the technology that we're going to offer does not exist anywhere in Las Vegas." He did not say what it was. He also described the financing as about 30 percent debt against 60 percent equity, with the comment that "I don't believe in [being] overleveraged," and he has not confirmed a cost; his 2023 estimate was $4 billion to $5 billion, and 2025 reporting settled on $4.3 billion.

Read generously, the date has slipped by two or three quarters in two years, which is ordinary for a Strip project of this size. Read strictly, the company's own website has never published a date at all, and the only firm commitments are in county paperwork. Anyone planning a trip around the opening should plan around 2028 and be pleasantly surprised.

The numbers have moved as the design has. The tower was approved at 660 feet and has since been described as "just shy of 700 feet," "nearly 700" and "more than 700"; whichever it is, it is shorter than the 729-foot Fontainebleau and taller than Wynn, Palazzo and Resorts World. It is 42 stories, which Allen says is misleading because the guitar sits on top of an eight-story podium. The room count inside it went from 600 at approval to 675 in July 2025 reporting, 650 suites in the topping-out coverage and 646 in the county documents Fox5 read in July 2026. The total for the resort, guitar and renovated Mirage tower together, is "more than 3,700."

The casino will be about 175,000 square feet, roughly 80 percent larger than the Mirage's. A July 2026 submission to the county added a "West Theater" of 178,850 square feet on five levels with 2,000 seats and a karaoke room, alongside renderings of a guitar museum, a 15,000-square-foot guitar-shaped pool and an 88,650-square-foot sportsbook facing the Strip; the Review-Journal reported county approval on July 22. The main theater was expanded to 6,265 seats in the 2023 review, and the 5,000-seat Hard Rock Live arena that appears in many write-ups is in none of the primary documents we read. Each tower will have its own spa, with total spa space nearly tripled. Restaurant names, pool opening dates, a hiring start date and the fate of the tram to Treasure Island have not been announced.

The loyalty card is settled. The property's website links to "Join Unity by Hard Rock," the program that replaced Hard Rock's Wild Card in 2024 and runs at every Hard Rock casino from Atlantic City to Hollywood, Florida; our Unity explainer covers the tiers. For a Mirage regular who held an MGM Rewards card, nothing transfers. The Mirage left MGM Rewards in 2022 and its players were absorbed into Hard Rock's system then.

It is not the Florida guitar. The Guitar Hotel at Seminole Hard Rock Hollywood, which opened on October 24, 2019, is 450 feet and 638 rooms. The Las Vegas tower is roughly 200 feet taller with about the same number of keys, which tells you the rooms are bigger, and it sits inside a resort with six times the room count. The Florida building is the template, not the twin.

It is not a replacement Mirage. The usual lament is that Las Vegas traded a landmark for a gimmick. The honest version is that the Mirage's economics had stopped working for its last owner years before the sale, and that the guitar is the first ground-up casino tower on the center Strip since the Cosmopolitan in 2010; Fontainebleau and Resorts World were on the north end. Whether a 175,000-square-foot casino is good news for a player depends on what Hard Rock deals on it, and nobody knows that yet. Hard Rock's Atlantic City floor, as we noted in our Borgata comparison, skews toward table players; our Strip ranking will add the property when it has a floor to rank.

And it is not on any schedule that a player should book against. The one date we would put money on is the next one Allen gives in public.

Topics

• las-vegas
• hard-rock
• mirage
• strip
• industry

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