This is not another “Vegas is dead” piece.
I am getting so tired of seeing that “narrative.” I was in Houston and had to see a dentist the other day. I was wearing a VGK shirt and hat, and the whole time I had to listen to him talk about how Vegas is dead because no one is going anymore and that the videos are everywhere… Hard to argue while someone is shoving needles and drills in your mouth… Even if they are spitting stupidity.
The actual numbers? Let’s do a short review..
Las Vegas drew about 38.5 million visitors in 2025, down 7.5% from 2024. That’s roughly 3.1 million fewer people. It was the sharpest drop outside the pandemic years.
That’s real.
It is not the whole story.
Gaming held up. The average visitor reported a gambling budget of about $849 in 2025. The Strip’s gaming business remained remarkably resilient despite the decline in visitation. Occupancy and room rates softened, but they were still historically high. And through the first half of 2026, overall visitation stopped collapsing. It was roughly flat, even slightly up.
So no, Vegas did not vanish.
The more interesting question is who disappeared, and who replaced them.
Who Left
One trend I’ve noticed is that there is less and less of the younger 20s crowd in Las Vegas.
The LVCVA’s 2025 Visitor Profile is the clearest look we have.
Visitors in their 20s fell to 9% of the mix. Historically that group sat closer to 15-20%. Kevin Bagger, the LVCVA’s research chief, called it “uniquely low.”
First-time visitors dropped to 10%. For decades that number lived in the 15–25% range. In 1975 it was around 30%.
The decline was concentrated among middle- and lower-income travelers, with especially noticeable weakness among people in their 20s and retirees on fixed incomes.
This completely justifies my thoughts and what I have personally been seeing.