Kansas Owns Its Four Casinos. The State's Cut Is 22 Percent, Except in Dodge City, Where It Is 24.
Kansas's four commercial casinos won $431.6 million in the fiscal year to June 2026, and the state took 22 cents of every dollar because, under the 2007 Expanded Lottery Act, it owns the games. The two big ones are an hour from Kansas City and 15 minutes from Wichita. The two small ones are why western and southeastern Kansas are no longer casino deserts.
Published 2026-11-09.
The Kansas Racing and Gaming Commission's September 2026 revenue reports, which it marks unaudited, show Hollywood Casino at Kansas Speedway at $14.5 million for the month, Kansas Star at $13.0 million, Boot Hill at $3.7 million and Kansas Crossing at $3.2 million. For the fiscal year that ended in June the four won $431.6 million between them.
Each report has a line most states do not print: the state's share. Kansas does not license casinos; under the 2007 Expanded Lottery Act it owns them, and private companies run them as "lottery gaming facility managers" for a cut. The state takes 22 percent at three of them and, since December 15, 2024, 24 percent at Boot Hill, with 3 percent to local government and 2 percent to problem gambling everywhere. That structure, and the four zones the act drew, explain why the casinos are where they are. We covered the Kansas City metro in our Kansas City guide; this is the whole state, tribal casinos included.
Hollywood at the Speedway is PENN's half of a joint venture with NASCAR: 1,525 slots, 32 tables, a poker room, no hotel, in the Legends district 15 miles from downtown Kansas City. Kansas Star in Mulvane is Boyd's, 1,246 slots, 42 tables, a 300-room Hampton Inn next door, an arena and an equestrian center, 15 minutes south of Wichita. Boot Hill in Dodge City is about 500 slots and a dozen-plus tables with a new hotel going up. Kansas Crossing in Pittsburg is the small one with $5 blackjack and a 123-room Hampton. All four allow smoking on the floor. Prairie Band near Topeka is the tribal casino with a poker room and a hotel. Sports betting is legal and mostly on phones.
The two that matter: Hollywood and Kansas Star
Hollywood Casino at Kansas Speedway opened on February 3, 2012 at the Legends, beside the speedway, 15.5 miles and about 25 minutes from downtown Kansas City, Missouri by OpenStreetMap routing. PENN's annual report lists it as a 50 percent joint venture with NASCAR with 95,000 square feet of gaming, 1,525 slot machines, 32 table games, poker tables, a sportsbook and no hotel; a hotel has been "planned" for most of its 14 years. The card is PENN Play, and the sportsbook is theScore Bet since PENN ended its ESPN BET deal on December 1, 2025, which is what the Kansas Lottery's 2026 sports wagering reports list as its provider. It is the biggest floor in Kansas and the one with a poker room, and its competition is across the state line in Missouri, which our Kansas City guide covers in detail. The Chiefs' proposed stadium district next door would be financed by STAR bonds and would not include a casino.
Kansas Star is in Mulvane, 14.5 miles and about 25 minutes south of downtown Wichita on the turnpike. Boyd's annual report lists 70,010 square feet, 1,246 slots and 42 tables as of the end of 2025, a FanDuel sportsbook, an arena with 2,234 fixed seats that holds 6,000 for a concert, an event center and an equestrian pavilion with a practice arena and covered stalls. The 300-room Hampton Inn & Suites connected to the casino is owned by a third party, with Boyd holding an option to buy it. The card is Boyd Rewards, which travels to Boyd's Las Vegas locals casinos and its Louisiana and Mississippi properties. Boyd's documents list no poker room, and the fact sheet's amenities stop at the sportsbook, so Wichita's poker players drive to Kansas City or to Oklahoma. Under its management contract Boyd gives $1.5 million a year to local education.
In September the two were $1.5 million apart; over the fiscal year, $176.3 million to $169.5 million. Wichita, with no competing casino within an hour, has nearly caught a casino in a metro of two million that shares its market with four Missouri casinos.
The two that fill the map: Boot Hill and Kansas Crossing
Boot Hill Casino & Resort opened in Dodge City in December 2009 as the state's first, run by Butler National's subsidiary. Its site says about 500 slot machines and 14 to 16 live tables, depending on which page you read, a DraftKings Sportsbook, and a players club called Maverick Rewards with tiers Ranger, Trailblazer and Legend. A Hampton Inn is on the site, and in August 2025 Butler National and Best Western broke ground on a four-story, 102-room GLō hotel beside the casino, due in late 2026; we could not confirm whether it has opened. Dodge City is 154 miles and a little over three hours west of Wichita, and the Boot Hill Museum the casino is named for is 2.3 miles away on Wyatt Earp Boulevard, not next door. It is the only casino for 150 miles in any direction, and the state's decision to raise its cut to 24 percent in December 2024 tells you the contract was renegotiated, not that the casino is thriving.
Kansas Crossing Casino + Hotel in Pittsburg, in the southeast corner near the Missouri and Oklahoma lines, opened on March 31, 2017. Its site lists 14 table games with $5 blackjack, a Caesars Sportsbook counter open 11am to 1:30am, a club called DynaMYte Club Rewards and a 123-room Hampton Inn & Suites; the casino itself closes from 4am to 8am. It does not publish a slot count; it opened with 625. Joplin, Missouri is 28 miles away, which is the market. It won $41.0 million last fiscal year, the least of the four, and that is roughly what it was built to do.
| Casino | City | Manager | Slots | Tables | Hotel | FY2026 revenue | State share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hollywood at Kansas Speedway | Kansas City | PENN / NASCAR | 1,525 | 32 + poker | none | $176.3M | 22% |
| Kansas Star | Mulvane | Boyd | 1,246 | 42 | 300 (third party) | $169.5M | 22% |
| Boot Hill | Dodge City | Butler National | ~500 | 14-16 | Hampton; GLō building | $44.8M | 24% |
| Kansas Crossing | Pittsburg | Kansas Crossing Casino LC | not published | 14 | 123 | $41.0M | 22% |
The tribal five
Northeast Kansas has had tribal casinos since the 1990s, and they are outside the state's ownership model and its smoking law alike. Prairie Band Casino & Resort in Mayetta, 24 miles and about 30 minutes north of the Topeka capitol, is the one that compares with the state casinos: 1,200 slots, 27 tables, a hotel in three towers plus a lodge, and the region's only tribal poker room, open Thursday through Sunday. The Potawatomi took it over from Harrah's in 2007; the club is simply The Players Club. Golden Eagle in Horton, the Kickapoo Tribe's, has more than 400 slots, blackjack and craps and closes overnight. Sac & Fox Casino in Powhattan lists more than 500 slots and RV hookups. 7th Street Casino in downtown Kansas City, Kansas, the Wyandotte Nation's, is about 600 slots and nothing else, 24 hours a day in a former Masonic temple, with a smoke-free first floor. Casino White Cloud, the Iowa Tribe's at the Nebraska line, has about 380 machines.
None of the five is in our directory yet, so we have no pages to send you to; for how their cards and rules differ from a commercial casino's, see our tribal gaming law and tribal comps pieces.
Smoking, sports betting and the 2027 question
Kansas's Indoor Clean Air Act has banned smoking in most workplaces since 2010 and exempts the gaming floors of state-owned casinos, so all four allow it. A bill to end the exemption passed the House 82 to 38 in February 2026 and died in conference; the Legislature's own status pages show both versions dead. Nothing changes until it is reintroduced. If you need a smoke-free floor, Nebraska's five casinos are the nearest, and our smoke-free list has the rest.
Sports betting launched on September 8, 2022 through the four casinos, each with up to three mobile partners, at a 10 percent tax of which 80 percent goes to a fund for attracting professional sports to Kansas, which is the Chiefs fund by another name. In the fiscal year to June 2025 Kansans settled $2.67 billion in wagers. The retail counters matter very little: through February 2026 the four casinos' windows had taken $39 million in the fiscal year against $1.87 billion online.
The thing to watch is August 2027. The law itself has no sunset; what expires then are the five-year manager and platform contracts. In 2025 the Legislature inserted a budget proviso barring the Lottery from spending money to negotiate, extend or renew those contracts through June 30, 2026, and overrode the governor's veto of it, as a bargaining chip for a restructured market with higher taxes. The 2026 session passed a bill authorising new rules but did not restructure anything, and we found no report of renewal talks since the proviso lapsed. Nobody we can cite says the apps will go dark in 2027. Nobody says they will not, either.
Where the usual advice is wrong
The usual advice is that Kansas is a Kansas City story with a Wichita outpost. It gets the hierarchy right and the character wrong. Hollywood is the biggest floor in the state and the only poker room among the four, but it has no hotel and sits in an outlet-mall district next to a racetrack, and on a Chiefs or NASCAR weekend it is a parking lot. Kansas Star has a hotel, an arena, horse shows, a Boyd card and a metro of 650,000 to itself, and it has nearly drawn level with Hollywood on revenue. For a weekend rather than an evening, Mulvane is the better Kansas casino.
The second mistake is to ignore the small ones. Boot Hill is 500 slots in a cattle town, but it is also the only casino between Wichita and Colorado, which our casino deserts piece would have counted as a gap a few years ago, and it is getting a second hotel. Kansas Crossing's $5 blackjack is a real $5 table, which is rarer than it should be. And Prairie Band has the poker room Wichita lacks.
Oklahoma's tribal casinos line the southern border and take a great deal of Wichita's business south down I-35; our Oklahoma guide covers them. The state list with distances is on Kansas casinos, and casinos near Wichita and near Kansas City rank them from each city. If gambling has stopped being something you decide the cost of in advance, 1-800-GAMBLER is free and confidential.
Topics
- kansas
- wichita
- dodge-city
- kansas-city
- midwest
Related guides
- Kansas City Casinos: The Mid-America Gaming Market Split Between Two States — Kansas City has casinos on both sides of the Missouri-Kansas state line. Five commercial properties generating
- Nebraska Had No Casinos in 2021. It Has Five Now, and Council Bluffs Has Lost 15 Percent of Its Business. — Nebraska's racetrack casinos won $261.9 million in 2025, up from $145.7 million the year before, and $240.9 mi
- Minnesota Has About Twenty Tribal Casinos, No Craps, No Roulette and No Sports Betting. Here Is How to Pick One. — Minnesota's 11 tribes signed their gaming compacts in 1989 and 1991, the compacts never expire, they allow slo
- How Many Casinos Are in Las Vegas? 28 on the Strip, 64 That Deal Blackjack, 217 Licenses, and Why the State Still Lists the Tropicana — Every answer to this question is a different definition. The Nevada Gaming Control Board's September 2026 repo