How much do casino dealers make?

After the pandemic of 2020, the gambling industry in the United States suddenly realized that it is short on qualified staff, and quickly sought to amend that by offering attractive salaries and hourly wages. But just how attractive are those remuneration packages, and indeed – how much do casino dealers make in 2024?

To answer this question, we would have to look at a whole vortex of information. There is no one answer. Casino dealer salaries are calculated differently. Multiple factors have an impact on a dealer’s hourly rates and overall salary.

Tips, bonuses, and the popularity of the venue where a dealer is stationed all play a determining role. Let’s take a look at how much money do casino dealers make.

What factors contribute to casino dealers' salaries?

Presently, there are more than 80,000 people employed as live dealers across the country, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Numerous factors come into determining their salary , as we have already mentioned. A casino dealer’s salary is not a fixed thing. It’s mutable and easily influenced by external circumstances as well as the dealer’s grasp of the subject matter.

Leading land-based casinos would overall pay higher wages and also allow for plenty of room for tips, meaning that the answer to how much do casino dealers make in Vegas would be different to how much do casino dealers make in Mississippi.

In other words, footfall on gaming floors matters a lot – how many people are visiting the casino and are they interested in table games in the first place? Are the dealers themselves trained to host multiple games, such as blackjack, baccarat, craps, poker, and roulette?

How are the tips split? For example, is a dealer going to hold onto their tips, giving the upper hand to dealers who get VIP clientele are more knowledgeable about managing games, or simply have better social skills, or are the tips pooled and then split?

Does the casino allow you to keep your tips in the first place, and are tips taxed? All of this is important in determining and answering the question – how much do casino dealers make? Understanding these practical considerations, we may now take a closer look at the hard facts, such as those that have been collated from job recruitment websites that tend to aggregate salary and hourly rates.

How much do casinos make at a casino – Hourly & Salary

According to Glassdoor, a website where current and former employees anonymously review employees in the United States, the median salary is put at $55,000 annually. This puts the overall range from $41,000 and $74,000, which includes tips, according to the website’s aggregation of job postings and employee feedback. This estimate tracks with the information presented by the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Offering a further breakdown, the average base pay a dealer can expect annually is between $33,000 and $58,000, and tips contribute to another $8,000 and $16,000, or about 20.6% of the total salary a dealer can expect to earn.

Yet, some job postings do cite a higher range of their salaries in 2024, with some casinos hiring and advertising anything between $46,000 and $84,000 as to how much do casino dealers make in a year. Other websites that aggregate data, such as ZipRecruiter, tend to agree with these estimates.

The average hourly wage is posted at anything between $20 and $40, although it's cited as slightly less by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, the rate gap could be much steeper between the bottom and top earners, with some dealers said to make as little as $8.81 based on ZipRecruiter data updated for July 2024.

Going back to Glassdoor’s data, the salaries, though, can easily inch up when focusing on specific states specifically. If you were to ask how much do casino dealers make in Las Vegas, Glassdoor will have a different answer for you.

According to the website, live dealers may expect to earn anything between $51,000 and $92,000, giving credence to the fact that where you work as a casino dealer will matter.

Following the pandemic, the majority of new properties that are arriving tend to be more selective and seek to cater to a high-end clientele, which means that dealers there could expect to break the $100,000 salary threshold with the caveats in mind that we have discussed.

Tips can make a third of a casino dealer’s salary

Estimating how much casino dealers make from tips will once again have to rely on a mix of official data aggregated by job websites, and word of mouth by industry insiders and people who have worked extensively as live dealers, or witnessed others work on the casino floor.

Based on the official data, live dealers can expect to earn 20% - 30 % of their total income from tips. Yet, the word on Reddit puts the rate slightly differently, but mostly in line with these estimates. One user said that Wynn Resorts Las Vegas has seen its live casino dealers earn as much as $400 to $700 a night in 2022, following pent-up demand after the pandemic.

This rate, though, seems to have been temporary, with the more traditional numbers suggesting between $200 and $300 a night. Full-time dealers earned $130,000 in 2022, according to the information imparted on Reddit. Similarly, users have suggested that location matters.

Are you at the Bellagio’s $10,000 table or at Arizona Charlie’s $1? Yet, other users commenting on dealer rates in 2022 have mostly agreed that anything between $30,000 to well north of $100,000 is an acceptable salary for a casino dealer.

But how much do casino dealers make in tips, really? The above estimates are accurate, but they do not paint the full picture. More chatter on social media forums by insiders suggests that tips of more than $1,000 are not uncommon in the industry.

Yet, there is a disagreement as to how much dealers are making in tips exactly. Although the average toke rates (live dealer speak for tips) are said to be around $200 to $300 a night at the Wynn Resort in Las Vegas, others suggest a much broader range at night from $160 to $400.

In other words, to know exactly how much you would earn in tips would require you to have an insider tell you, and their knowledge may be fairly limited to the property or properties they work or have worked at.

A closer look at hourly salary rates

The hourly rates are a little easier to dig for information about. ZipRecruiter cites the salary scissor at anything between $12 and $40. Yet, Glassdoor’s job postings at the time when we are preparing this article suggest that the gap is much smaller, at anything between $20 and $40. The trend is for these rates to be going up. Below, you can see the states with the highest employment levels in this profession based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

What stands out is that Nevada seems to have the most casino dealers, but the hourly mean wage and annual mean wage tend to be very low. Our independent research on websites such as Glassdoor and ZipRecruiter though suggests that Nevada is much more in line with New Jersey, California and Florida, however.

Mostly, hourly pay for dealers is more or less standardized across the commercial and tribal casino sectors in the United States. Yet, the hourly rates for dealers are not too big, especially at Vegas Casinos, or at least they weren’t before the pandemic, because casinos would let dealers keep the tips, which themselves could add up to a substantial rate per hour.

They still do, but the base salaries have also increased. To sum up, official aggregation services such as ZipRecruiter tend to post the hourly rates at the lower end, but forum discussions and Glassdoor note that the rates are inching up closer to $50.

Factors to consider if you wish to pursue a live dealer career

We will also use this opportunity to impart to you a few things that you ought to know if you are seriously considering looking into a position as a live casino dealer. There are some positives to starting in a position like this right now.

Demand for workers who are qualified or willing to learn the ropes and work is high right now, and this is reflected in the base salaries. Many casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City are hosting casino dealer schools which require commitment and may even offer paid training.

Yet, for many dealers, starting in this career could mean working in much smaller properties. If you are willing to push yourself, you could soon move to other locations and keep growing your salary and experience, but smaller casinos are usually somewhat less ambitious when it comes to offering the best training and local casino dealers could be content with what they know about their trade.

To progress and make sure you are in the top percentile of how much money casino dealers make, you would have to train, study, and be willing to move for your job, until you land a gig at one of the main casinos. The good news is that because of the hunger for workers right now, any experience will make you shine on your portfolio.

To impact your chances of earning higher rates, mostly through tips from patrons, most dealers agree that you need to be friendly let slightly aloof, to ensure that players do not shift the blame onto the dealer if they are dealt a bad hand or the outcome of the roulette wheel is not what they expected it to be.

Yet, potential job seekers need also be aware of the other downsides – casino dealers work long hours, and it’s a repetitive job. Patrons may smoke at the table, and you may develop a range of illnesses, the most common of which is carpal tunnel syndrome, and you are often dealing cards for ten hours a day multiple days a week.

How much do live casino dealers make in California?

Other than word of mouth, the best way to get an idea of how much live dealers make in California is to look at one of the job aggregation websites. In this case, we cross-referenced data with Indeed.com.

The hourly rates posted there range from $15.95 to $30.86. ZipRecruiter calibrates this range between $9.32 and $45.33, but this data seems to be now considered old as of January 1, 2024, and cities are raising the minimum wage above that. In other words, we can be fairly certain that casino dealers in the state earn at least $16 per hour.

Other than that, there aren’t too many deviations from what we have earned about the hourly, salary, and tip ranges for Californian live dealers compared to places such as Las Vegas or Atlantic City.

How much do casino card dealers make?

Casino card dealers are no unicorns, and they will mostly fall in the general definition of how much do casino live dealers make – this is to say that you can expect anything aligned with the numbers cited before.

Glassdoor tends to agree that the average casino dealer makes less than the dedicated poker dealer. A poker casino dealer makes an average between $57,000 and $102,000, putting the median salary at $75,000, higher than that of average casino dealers.

According to the website’s job aggregation, the base salary is set at $40,000 and $70,000 a year, with additional pay, most likely from tips, set at $17,000 to $32,000.

Tipping is an important part of the poker ritual and custom, which means that as one of the most played table games in brick-and-mortar properties, dealers who deal cards tend to get access to generous patrons in general.

A quick look through the top job postings on Glassdoor shows that casinos have standardized rates. We took a look at poker dealer postings by Caesars Entertainment , Hard Rock International, Wynn Resorts, and Live! Casino&Hotel along with other major casinos.

The job postings seem to include the tips that card dealers can expect to get as extra money.

How much do online casino dealers make?

When people ask how much do casino dealers make, they don’t normally mean the live dealers or croupiers in online casinos. Yet, live online casinos have become a bit of a staple of the iGaming experience, and they are streamed in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere across the United States.

Now, what we found out about online casino dealers pegs their average salary between $40,000 and $71,000, according to Glassdoor again. This is pretty much aligned with the rates casino dealers at brick-and-mortar properties earn, although arguably there are some crucial differences.

Tipping live dealers is not common when playing online, so the croupiers have to rely on the base salary they are offered. Yet, it will also depend on where the live studio is based. Some studios are now starting to stream directly from the United States, which puts their average salary more or less in line with that of land-based dealers.

However, some studios stream from places such as Malta in Europe, and the salaries may be just a bit lower.

The good news for online live casino dealers is that based on feedback from former and existing employees, they are entitled to bonuses and company benefits that are generally considered good.

Bottom line: how much money do casino dealers make and is it worth it?

Taking all of this in aggregate, it’s easy to see that a live casino dealer is not a particularly bad job nor a particularly great job. Most live dealers make a comfortable living, although whether they break the median salary will depend on multiple factors, as we have outlined earlier.

Overall, though, just like in most other careers, individuals who wish to stand out and secure a higher wage or salary, can do so by showing commitment, dedication, and a good degree of social charm.

So, is becoming a live dealer worth it? The answer will depend on whom you ask. The purely financial evidence would suggest that it is a good career opportunity to at least entertain.

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