Maryland Has Six Casinos. Two Take 79 Cents of Every Dollar, and the Other Four Are the Better Trips.
MGM National Harbor and Live! won $1.52 billion of Maryland's $1.93 billion in casino revenue last fiscal year. The other four, a Caesars casino next to the Ravens' stadium, a racino at the top of the Chesapeake, a harness track near Ocean City and a lakeside resort in the mountains, are where the state gets interesting.
Published 2026-11-09.
Maryland's six casinos won $159.7 million in October 2026, according to the Maryland Lottery and Gaming Control Agency's November 5 release, down 1.4 percent on the year. MGM National Harbor accounted for $66.2 million of it and Live! Casino & Hotel for $59.4 million. The other four shared $34.2 million.
Over the fiscal year that ended in June the split was the same: $816.3 million and $703.8 million for the two big ones, $1.93 billion for the state, so 79 cents of every casino dollar in Maryland goes through Oxon Hill or Arundel Mills. We compared those two in our MGM vs Live! guide. This is about all six, because the four small ones are different kinds of trips and at least two of them are better ones.
MGM National Harbor is the Washington resort, with a 308-room hotel and the state's biggest table pit. Live! at Arundel Mills has the most slots in the state, a two-floor poker room and a 310-room hotel. Horseshoe Baltimore is a Caesars casino two miles from the Inner Harbor with no hotel and a concert hall finally finishing next door. Hollywood Perryville was Maryland's first casino and is now its smallest PENN floor. Ocean Downs is a slots-and-harness racino seven miles from the Ocean City boardwalk. Rocky Gap is a 196-room lodge on a lake in a state park with a Jack Nicklaus course and 630 slot machines. Every floor is smoke-free by state law. Online casino play failed again in Annapolis in 2026.
What the regulator counts
Maryland publishes slot and table counts with every monthly release, which makes this an easy state to be honest about.
| Casino | Oct 2026 revenue | Change | Slots | Tables | FY2026 revenue |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MGM National Harbor | $66.2M | -2.6% | 2,209 | 214 | $816.3M |
| Live! Casino & Hotel | $59.4M | -0.4% | 3,531 | 181 | $703.8M |
| Horseshoe Baltimore | $14.0M | -9.8% | 1,397 | 104 | $176.2M |
| Ocean Downs | $8.4M | +2.9% | 900 | 17 | $97.1M |
| Hollywood Perryville | $7.1M | +9.8% | 711 | 18 | $84.3M |
| Rocky Gap | $4.7M | +7.4% | 630 | 12 | $53.8M |
Two things stand out. The three casinos that grew in October are the three smallest, and the one that shrank most is Horseshoe Baltimore, which has been losing ground for years. The state's casinos together were down 1.7 percent in fiscal 2026, and the Education Trust Fund still received $599.1 million from them.
The two big ones, briefly
MGM National Harbor opened on December 8, 2016 on the Potomac at Oxon Hill, 12 miles and about 23 minutes from downtown Washington by OpenStreetMap routing. It has a 308-room hotel, a 3,000-seat theater, a 4,800-car garage and the biggest table pit in Maryland at 214 games. It is the MGM Rewards property in the region, which matters if your other trips are to Las Vegas or Borgata; our Caesars vs MGM Rewards piece covers that trade.
Live! at Arundel Mills, 28 miles from Washington and 14 from Baltimore, is the volume casino: the most slots in the state by a thousand, a 310-room hotel with 52 suites, a FanDuel sportsbook, two high-limit rooms and a poker room on two floors that opened in 2013 with 52 tables. Live!'s own marketing says about 4,000 slots and more than 200 tables; the regulator's October count is 3,531 and 181, and we go with the regulator. Its Orchid patio is the one place to smoke with a drink and a machine, since Maryland bans smoking indoors. The card is Live! Rewards, which also works at Live! Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and the new Live! in Bossier City.
Horseshoe Baltimore: a good casino in a hard spot
Horseshoe opened on August 26, 2014 on Russell Street, next to M&T Bank Stadium and two miles south of the Inner Harbor. Caesars' 2025 annual report lists it at 133,300 square feet with 1,400 slots and 110 tables and no hotel, and files it among the properties Caesars owns rather than leases; the Baltimore Banner reported in December 2024 that Caesars had spent $121 million since 2021 buying out its local partners to take full ownership. It has a WSOP poker room, a Caesars Sportsbook, Caesars Rewards and, per the Banner, a workforce that fell from about 2,400 at opening to under 800.
The revenue trend explains the layoffs. Horseshoe is the second-biggest floor in the state and the third-biggest casino by revenue, a long way behind the two leaders, and October's 9.8 percent drop was the worst in the state. MGM opened two years after it did and took its Washington business; Live! sits between it and the suburbs.
What may change the equation is the building next door. The concert hall that stalled in 2023 when the contractor sued resumed construction in August 2025, reverted to the Paramount Baltimore name, and was reported in October 2026 to be aiming for first shows by December. If that happens, Horseshoe gets the one thing it has lacked, a reason to be there after the game. For now it is the right casino for a Caesars Rewards member in Baltimore, a decent one for anyone at a Ravens or Orioles game, and not a destination.
Perryville, Ocean Downs, Rocky Gap: three small ones that pay
Hollywood Casino Perryville opened in September 2010 as the first casino in Maryland, near where I-95 crosses the Susquehanna in Cecil County, 41 miles from Baltimore's Inner Harbor and 34 from Wilmington. PENN's annual report lists 34,500 square feet, 654 machines, 13 tables plus a poker room and no hotel; the regulator counts 711 slots and 18 tables in October. PENN bought the operating business back from Gaming and Leisure Properties for $31 million in July 2021, mostly for the Maryland online license, and the card is PENN Play. Since ESPN BET ended on December 1, 2025, PENN's sportsbook brand is theScore Bet. It is a locals' casino that competes with Delaware Park and Pennsylvania, covered in our Delaware guide, and it was up 9.8 percent in October, which is the sort of number a small floor posts when it is treating its players well.
Ocean Downs is in Berlin, 6.8 miles and 15 minutes from the Ocean City boardwalk. Churchill Downs Incorporated owns it. There is no hotel; the casino runs a free shuttle from partner hotels in Ocean City. The floor is 900 slots and 17 tables, the club is Club Ocean, and there is a sportsbook. The harness meet in 2026 ran 48 programs from May 18 to September 7, mostly Sunday, Monday and Wednesday evenings. It is a beach-week casino, and a summer-evening harness card with a $2 bet and a beer is one of the better cheap nights at the shore.
Rocky Gap is the odd one. It is a 196-room lodge on a lake inside Rocky Gap State Park near Cumberland, with an 18-hole Jack Nicklaus signature course and a 25,000-square-foot casino of 630 slots and 12 tables. The state built the resort in 1998, lost money on it for a decade, and licensed a casino to rescue it; Lakes Entertainment opened the casino in May 2013, Golden Entertainment inherited it, and in July 2023 Century Casinos bought the operations for $56.1 million while VICI took the real estate for about $204 million. It is 127 miles and about two and a half hours from Washington, roughly the same from Pittsburgh, and it is the only casino in Maryland you would book for the lake rather than the floor. Century's site would not load for us, so we cannot tell you the current name of its players club.
The rules that cover all six
Smoking: Maryland's Clean Indoor Air Act predates every casino in the state, so there are no designated smoking floors. The casinos built outdoor terraces instead, Horseshoe's, Live!'s Orchid patio and Rocky Gap's smoking deck with slots among them. Our smoke-free casino list has the national picture.
Online casino play is not legal. Senator Ron Watson withdrew his 2026 referendum bill after the Senate Budget and Taxation Committee cancelled its hearing in March, the implementation bill died with it, and the session ended on April 13, 2026 with nothing passed. Sports betting is legal and almost entirely mobile: $6.9 billion of handle in fiscal 2026, of which the six casinos' retail windows took $120 million.
Where this leaves the trip: MGM for the resort and the Washington visitor, Live! for the player who wants the most machines and a poker room, Horseshoe for the Caesars member on game day, Perryville for the I-95 corridor local, Ocean Downs for beach week and Rocky Gap for the weekend that is mostly not about gambling. The state list with distances is on Maryland casinos, and casinos near Washington and near Baltimore 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
- maryland
- baltimore
- ocean-city
- rocky-gap
- mid-atlantic
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