Massachusetts Casino Slot Payback, 2019-2022 Fiscal Years

As part of trying to surface overall trends in slot payback in various markets where reporting is available, today I take a look at the slot machine payback for the three casinos in Masschusetts.

Similar to Pennsylvania, reporting is done per casino on a monthly basis. This means that the reporting is not broken out by denomination, as it is in some states like Connecticut.

That said, you can still get some useful information in terms of knowing the overall slot machine payback by casino.

Massachusetts allows for one slot parlor, which is Plainridge Park Casino, as well as three full casinos, two of which have been built: MGM Springfield and Encore Boston Harbor.

Here’s each of the Massachusetts casinos and their overall payback for the fiscal years of 2019-2022, which ends on June 30 of each year.

A few things to be noted here:

• On the surface, Plainridge Park has the highest payback of the three casinos. However, due to the lack of table games, Plainridge Park only offers electronic table games. These games, with a lower house edge, may be pulling the average up moreso than they would at the other two casinos, where there’s a mix of electronic and live table games.
• All three are relatively consistent, within a percentage point or so overall. MGM is the most consistent, whereas Encore has slowly declined and Plainridge Park as slowly increased.
• All of the casinos are still within a pretty set range both before and after the casino shutdowns from the pandemic, indicating no major changes took place as a result of this. All three casinos were closed for a few months in 2020, so that year’s numbers were a truncated year accordingly.
• The overall paybacks are in line with neighbors such as Connecticut. So there’s no need to go traveling over state borders specifically to seek out better payback options.

Monthly breakdowns for each casino and other statistics can be found at the Massachusetts Gaming Commission website.