The Wire602 words
How to read the monthly gaming report
One release, two industries, four tax treatments and a number that gets misquoted every single month. Fifteen minutes with the actual document and you will never need a headline about it again.
What is in this piece — 7 sections
Every month the Massachusetts Gaming Commission publishes what the Commonwealth's casinos and sportsbooks took in. Every month a round of coverage gets it slightly wrong, in one of three predictable ways. The document is short and the mistakes are avoidable.
What is in the release
Two different industries, reported side by side:
- Casino gross gaming revenue from the three licensed properties — Plainridge Park Casino, MGM Springfield and Encore Boston Harbor. Plainridge Park is a Category 2 slots facility; the other two are Category 1 resort casinos. They are taxed differently, which is why their numbers are never simply added.
- Taxable sports wagering revenue, split between retail operations and the mobile operators. Retail — Category 1 and 2 licensees — is taxed at 15% of gross sports wagering revenue. Mobile, Category 3, is taxed at 20%.
Each licensee also files its own monthly report, and those are posted alongside the release. If you want to know what one operator did rather than what the market did, that is where the answer is.
Mistake one: handle is not revenue
Handle is the total amount wagered. Taxable gaming revenue is what the operator kept after paying winnings. The gap between them is enormous — revenue is usually a single-digit percentage of handle, for reasons set out in what −110 both ways really costs. A sentence that treats a large handle as a large take is off by a factor of twenty or so. If a figure looks implausibly big, check which of the two it is before repeating it.
Mistake two: adding the two industries together
Casino gross gaming revenue and taxable sports wagering revenue are different quantities with different tax rates attached, drawn from different licence categories. Adding them produces a number that corresponds to nothing — not the industry's size, not the Commonwealth's income, not anyone's profit. In the Commission's release for July 2025, casino gross gaming revenue came to about $99.5 million and taxable sports wagering revenue to roughly $48.03 million. Those two figures each mean something. Their sum does not.
Mistake three: comparing a cumulative total to a month
The Commission's revenue page carries a running total of taxes and assessments collected since gaming began in the Commonwealth. It is a cumulative figure spanning years. It appears in the same place as the monthly numbers and gets quoted next to them, which produces the impression of an enormous month. Check whether the figure has a date range or a date.
A fourth thing, which is not a mistake but a habit
Month-to-month movement in sports wagering revenue is mostly the sporting calendar and mostly luck. A month with a heavily favoured team winning out carries a different hold than a month of upsets, on identical handle. December 2025, at roughly $98.47 million in casino gross gaming revenue, sits close to July's figure; reading a trend from two months of either series is reading noise. The series worth watching is the fiscal year, and the Commission publishes that too.
The four questions, in order
- Handle or revenue?
- Casino or sports wagering?
- One month or cumulative?
- Which licence category? It decides the tax rate, and therefore what the Commonwealth actually received.
What may be offered as a market in the first place is in the two collegiate bans, and the data that settles those markets is in the official league data rule. Donor material on the market desk: data deals decoded and the mechanics of bookmakers in the USA. Desk index: The Wire; full index: the archive.
What we read
Every figure above comes from one of these documents. If a number is not in them, it is not in this piece.