Massachusetts Has Two Casinos and a Slot Parlor. The Biggest Has Had a Picket Line Outside Since September.

Encore Boston Harbor's September 2026 revenue fell 22 percent to its lowest month since early 2021, because about 1,350 of its workers have been on strike since September 4. The casino is open. Whether to cross the line is one question; where else to play in Massachusetts is the other.

Published 2026-11-02.

That is the state of the biggest casino in New England's biggest state, and you should know it before you book. It is also a reminder of how small the Massachusetts casino market is: three licensed properties, one of them a slot parlor with no dealers, taxed at rates the rest of the country would call punitive, in a state that still bans online casino play and only got an online lottery in July.

The 2011 Expanded Gaming Act allowed up to three Category 1 resort casinos, one in each of three regions, and one Category 2 slots parlor. The resort licenses went to Wynn in Everett and MGM in Springfield; the slots license to Penn National at Plainridge. The third resort license, for southeastern Massachusetts, was never awarded: the Gaming Commission voted against a commercial casino in Region C, leaving the ground to the Mashpee Wampanoag, whose First Light site in Taunton opened a welcome center with ten slot machines in January 2025 and now advertises more than 200 games and a full casino resort with no date attached.

Taxes are high. The resorts pay 25 percent of gross gaming revenue; Plainridge pays 49 percent, a 40 percent tax plus a 9 percent levy for the horse racing fund, plus $600 a year per machine. Since 2015 the three have paid about $2.55 billion in casino taxes. Every licensee had to agree to a smoke-free building as a condition of the license, so there is no designated-area arrangement here as there is in Rhode Island until January 2027.

Sports betting arrived in January 2023 at the three casinos and in March 2023 on phones, with seven mobile operators as of September 2026 and a $773 million month of handle. Online casino play is not legal: the two bills filed for the 2025–26 session were sent to study in March and April 2026, which is how Beacon Hill says no. The Lottery launched online draw games and instant tickets on July 27, 2026 instead.

Encore opened June 23, 2019 on a remediated chemical plant site on the Mystic River: $2.6 billion, 671 rooms, 210,000 square feet of gaming. The floor today is 2,700-plus slots and 170-plus tables by the property's count, six private high-limit salons on the mezzanine, and a 36-table poker room, The Loft, open 24 hours with no-limit hold'em from $1/$3 to $10/$25 and pot-limit Omaha from $2/$2 to $25/$25; the Globe found nearly every seat taken on a visit in September. The sportsbook is an in-house Encore Sports Book, because WynnBET gave up its Massachusetts mobile license in early 2024; Caesars is the mobile operator attached to Encore's license.

Parking is free, valet included, for every guest, which is rare for a casino of this ambition and the result of a 2019 decision to drop the fees. The free boat from Long Wharf downtown runs in season, free shuttles run from South Station, Quincy and TD Garden on game days, and the 109 bus stops at the door. Restaurants have churned: Rare steakhouse, Fratelli, Frank & Nick's, Red 8 and Mystique remain, while the buffet, Sinatra, the Oyster Bar, On Deck Burger Bar and Seamark have all closed since 2024.

The card is Wynn Rewards. Red is the entry tier, Platinum starts at 7,000 tier credits and Black at 70,000; a slot point takes $5 of play and the points are good at Wynn Las Vegas as well. One line in the terms: comp dollars earned at Encore expire after six months, against twelve in Las Vegas.

Then the strike.

Revenue in September 2026 was $46.1 million against $59.1 million a year earlier, and the dispute, a $10 an hour raise over four years and a $25 starting minimum on the union side against Wynn's figure of nearly $96,000 in average pay and benefits, had no settlement as of late October. Encore's profit was already thinning before the walkout, from about $62 million a quarter two years ago to $56 million in the second quarter of 2026. Around it, Everett is being redrawn: the Kraft Group's 25,000-seat soccer stadium for the New England Revolution is approved for the old power plant site next door, and Wynn has an agreement with the city for up to two non-gaming hotels of about 800 rooms across Broadway with a new commuter rail stop attached. None of it has an opening date. For the building's history, our Encore story.

MGM Springfield opened August 24, 2018 in a downtown that needed it, a $960 million casino with about 250 hotel rooms and a floor that leans hard on slots: $230 million of its $283 million in 2025 revenue came from machines, and its September 2026 month was $22.0 million, flat on the year. Hartford is 24 miles south, which is the market, and Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun are the competition, which is why MGM Springfield has never been the 3,000-job operation it promised; it employed about 1,550 people in 2025.

What it has that the Connecticut giants do not is the card. MGM Rewards earned here counts at Borgata, National Harbor and the Las Vegas Strip, and for a New England player who flies west once a year that is the argument for driving to Springfield instead of Uncasville. The BetMGM retail sportsbook opened in January 2023. The MassMutual Center next door, which MGM manages, is a 6,000-plus-seat arena with the AHL Thunderbirds and a convention calendar. We could not confirm current slot, table or poker room counts from the property this autumn, so we are not printing the old ones.

Plainridge Park in Plainville, just off I-495 near the Rhode Island line, is a harness track that has raced since 1999 and a casino since June 2015. The law caps it at 1,250 slot machines and forbids table games; what you get are the slots, video poker and a bank of electronic blackjack, roulette and craps with no dealer. There are 110 live racing days planned for 2026.

It is also the Massachusetts casino whose revenue is going up: $178.4 million in 2025, up 5.8 percent, while Encore fell 1.9 percent, and $14.6 million in September 2026, up 2.4 percent in a month when Encore dropped 22. Its retail sportsbook, which carried ESPN BET's name from 2024 until PENN ended that partnership in December 2025 and moved to theScore Bet, took more handle in September than Encore's and MGM's books combined. Parking is free. The card is PENN Play, which earns at every Hollywood casino in the country, and the sister property down the road is Bally's Twin River Lincoln, 18 miles away in Rhode Island, which has the live tables Plainridge cannot.

The usual advice is that Encore is the only Massachusetts casino that matters, Springfield is a disappointment and Plainridge is a slot barn for Patriots fans on the way home from Foxborough. The first clause is true for a tourist and the other two are lazy.

Plainridge's 49 percent tax rate means the state, not PENN, takes most of what the machines hold, and the parlor still grew faster than anything else in Massachusetts last year, which says its customers are getting something they want: free parking, no dealers to tip, a card that works in Pennsylvania and Las Vegas, and a drive down Route 1 instead of a trip across the Mystic. MGM Springfield's disappointment is the city's and the operator's, not the player's; a slots-heavy casino with 250 rooms and a flat year is exactly the kind that mails offers. And Encore, right now, is a resort whose own host cities have asked you not to visit it. That is not a reason to play elsewhere forever. It is a reason to check the status before you drive.

For anyone weighing the whole region, the two Connecticut casinos are each bigger than Encore and under two hours from Boston, and Rhode Island's Twin River allows smoking until the end of this year and gambling at 18. Massachusetts' three are the smoke-free, 21-plus, close-to-home options, and that is the honest pitch. The list is on Massachusetts casinos.

Topics

• massachusetts
• boston
• encore
• mgm-springfield
• new-england

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