Laughlin's Rooms Average $63 a Night and Its Casinos Won $492 Million Last Year. Here Is Who Should Go.
The LVCVA counts 8,864 hotel rooms in Laughlin at an average of $62.91 a night so far in 2026, with half of them empty on an average night. The Gaming Control Board counts $492 million in casino win for the fiscal year. Those two numbers are the whole case for the town, and the whole case against it.
Published 2026-11-09.
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority's Laughlin indicators for September 2026 list 8,864 hotel rooms, unchanged all year, at an average daily rate of $64.11 and an occupancy of 44 percent. For the first nine months of 2026 the rate averaged $62.91 and occupancy 49.7 percent, on 1.14 million visitors, up 3.1 percent. The Nevada Gaming Control Board's report for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2026 puts Laughlin's casino win at $492.0 million, up 1.2 percent; September 2026 alone was $33.8 million, down 16.8 percent on a strong month a year earlier.
Nine casinos share that. Eight line Casino Drive along the Colorado River below Davis Dam, with Bullhead City, Arizona across the water, and the ninth is a tribal resort 15 miles downstream. Here is what each is, who runs it, which card it takes, and the honest answer to the question people actually ask, which is whether Laughlin is worth two hours of driving when Las Vegas is right there.
Laughlin is the cheapest casino town in the West that still has full-size resorts: 1,400 to 1,900 rooms at Riverside, Aquarius, Harrah's and Tropicana, and a river you can swim in. Golden Entertainment's True Rewards covers Aquarius and Edgewater; Caesars Rewards covers Harrah's and Tropicana; the Riverside is still the Laughlin family's. The Colorado Belle has been dark since March 2020. It is 95 miles from the Strip, 34 from Kingman, and the airport across the river has no scheduled flights. Go for the price, the river and a quiet floor; do not go for the restaurants or the shows.
What the numbers say about the town
The visitor profile the LVCVA commissioned for 2024 is the most useful document about Laughlin anyone has published. The average visitor was 53.5 years old; 24 percent were 65 or over, down from 45 percent in 2017, and 27 percent were retired, down from 58 percent. A third came from Southern California, 27 percent from Arizona and 21 percent from greater Las Vegas; 94 percent drove. They stayed 3.4 days, budgeted $703 for gambling and paid about $67 a night for the room. Ninety-two percent gambled.
So the folklore that Laughlin is a retirement village with slot machines was true in 2017 and is less true every year, and the airport numbers show why it matters: Laughlin/Bullhead International has no scheduled passenger service, only casino charters, and passengers through it in the first nine months of 2026 were down 6.3 percent. The town lives on the car, and the car comes from Phoenix, the Inland Empire and Las Vegas. Our Reno vs Las Vegas and Wendover pieces are about the same question in other Nevada towns: what a secondary market offers that the Strip has priced out.
The two companies and the one family
Casino Drive used to have more owners than it does. Today it is mostly two companies.
Golden Entertainment runs Aquarius and Edgewater, and in 2025 it sold the real estate of both, with five other casinos, to VICI Properties in a $1.16 billion sale-leaseback while founder Blake Sartini took the company private; Golden pays $87 million a year in rent across the seven and keeps operating them. Aquarius is the biggest hotel in town at 1,906 rooms with a 69,750-square-foot casino by its own description; Edgewater is next door with a 67,600-square-foot floor and the Laughlin Event Center, a roughly 12,000-seat outdoor venue half a block away, which is where the town's big concerts happen. The card at both is True Rewards, in tiers from Solid to True, and it also works at Golden's Las Vegas casinos. Golden kept the Colorado Belle, the paddlewheeler-shaped casino between them that closed on March 17, 2020 and never reopened; it was excluded from the VICI deal, and Sartini has said he is considering uses for it that may not be gaming.
Caesars runs Harrah's and Tropicana. Harrah's, open since August 1988 at the south end of the Drive, is Caesars' own: 58,200 square feet, 710 slots, 30 tables and 1,510 rooms by the company's 2025 property table, with VICI owning the land. It has the only private sand beach among the Casino Drive resorts, two pools and the 5,000-seat Rio Vista outdoor amphitheater. Tropicana Laughlin is also Caesars-operated, with Gaming and Leisure Properties as landlord: 43,200 square feet, 620 slots, 20 tables and 1,490 rooms. Both are Caesars Rewards properties, and for a Caesars Diamond member Laughlin is where the tier's free rooms are easiest to get; our Caesars vs MGM Rewards piece covers the card.
The Riverside Resort is the one Don Laughlin built, opened in 1966, and it is still owned by his family; he died on October 22, 2023 at 92, and the resort marked its 60th anniversary in August 2026. It has 1,405 rooms, a free classic car collection, a six-screen cinema, a 34-lane bowling alley and a 740-space RV park, and its card is the King of Clubs. Nothing about it travels, and nothing about it needs to.
The other four
| Casino | Operator | Rooms | Card |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aquarius | Golden Entertainment | 1,906 | True Rewards |
| Harrah's | Caesars | 1,510 | Caesars Rewards |
| Tropicana | Caesars | 1,490 | Caesars Rewards |
| Riverside | Laughlin family | 1,405 | King of Clubs |
| Edgewater | Golden Entertainment | 1,053 | True Rewards |
| Laughlin River Lodge | Nevada Restaurant Services | 1,000 | own club |
| Avi | Fort Mojave Tribe / Warner | 465 | own club |
| Pioneer | The New Pioneer LLC | 416 | own club |
| Golden Nugget | Landry's | 300 | 24K Select (unconfirmed) |
Room counts are from Caesars' 2025 filing for its two, Aquarius's own site, and Wikipedia for the rest.
Getting there, and getting around
From the Strip, Laughlin is 95 miles and about an hour and 50 minutes by OpenStreetMap routing: I-11 and US-95 south past Boulder City and Searchlight, then NV-163 down to the river. From Phoenix it is 216 miles, about four and a half hours. From downtown Los Angeles 280 miles, five and a quarter hours, on I-15 and I-40 through Barstow and Needles, which is the route the Inland Empire drives on a Friday. Kingman, Arizona, on I-40, is 34 miles and 44 minutes. A second bridge, Silver Copper Crossing, opened in June 2024 and eased the one real traffic problem, the crossing to Bullhead City where most of the town's workers live.
Once you are there the Riverwalk runs along the Nevada bank behind most of the casinos, and the River Passage water taxi connects the docks when it is running, which is seasonal; its own page says the season ends November 28 and depends on the weather and the water level. The Laughlin River Run, the motorcycle rally that filled every room each April from 1983, last ran in 2019 and has been listed as "TBA" since, so do not plan around it. Smoking is permitted on casino floors here as everywhere in Nevada. The river itself is the attraction the casinos cannot replicate: Davis Dam, finished in 1951, holds Lake Mohave just upstream, and the water below it is cold, fast and swimmable off the beaches at Harrah's and Avi.
Where the usual advice is wrong
The usual advice is that Laughlin is a cheaper Las Vegas. It is not, and treating it as one leads to disappointment. It has rooms at a fraction of the Strip's rate, but it also has no restaurant anyone would drive two hours for, no production shows, and a casino win per room that tells you the floors are quiet. If you want Las Vegas for less, our no-resort-fee list and budget Vegas piece are the honest answers, and the I-15 stops cover Primm and Jean on the way.
Laughlin is a different thing: a river town where the point is to sit by the water, play low-limit blackjack in a room with no line, and sleep in a 1,500-room tower for the price of a highway motel. It suits a Caesars or True Rewards member who wants tier benefits without competition for them, a Phoenix or Inland Empire family with a boat, a snowbird couple in January, when occupancy this year was under 40 percent and the rates reflected it, and anyone who finds the Strip exhausting. It does not suit a poker player, a diner, or anyone who needs a flight. The September revenue drop and the half-empty rooms are the market's problem, not yours; a casino town running at 50 percent occupancy is a town where the host answers the phone. The list with distances is on Laughlin casinos, and casinos near Las Vegas ranks it against the Strip. If gambling has stopped being something you decide the cost of in advance, 1-800-GAMBLER is free and confidential.
Topics
- laughlin
- nevada
- colorado-river
- las-vegas
- arizona
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