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I have spent the last three decades in the casino business, both in Las Vegas and Reno and even a couple of regional markets.
While it has been a few years since I dealt a card, I still work with over a hundred dealers every day and do my best to make sure they are taken care of.
While not the glamorous job it once was, a dealer can still earn over 100k without a college degree with only a few months of training.
They work indoors, not on a hot roof or the side of the road. They receive a break every hour or hour and 20 minutes to rest their minds, so while paid for eight hours, they seldom work for more than six.
But in return, they may have to face abuse from players, inhale second-hand smoke every minute of their working lives, and work nights, weekends, and holidays.
They will probably have to begin their career in some break-in casino making little money and put up with supervisors that border on the psychopathic.
So, let’s peel back the cover and take an inside look at what a dealer can make. I’ll go through how one becomes a casino dealer in the first place, what they should bring to the job, and most importantly, all of the crazy things they should be prepared to deal with when walking into a casino for the first time.
Key Takeaways
- Casino dealers can earn between $30,000 to over $120,000 per year.
- Base pay is often only around $5 per hour. The bulk of a dealer’s earnings comes from tips.
- A casino dealer’s salary is impacted by location, tip pools, and shift times, which is why the pay range is so wide.
- Most casinos hire dealers on a part-time or on-call basis, which impacts an individual’s earnings.
- There are different ways to train as a casino dealer, from in-house at a casino to dealer schools and even at community colleges.
- A degree is not required to become a casino dealer and you can be trained up in as little as six weeks.
How Much Do Casino Dealers Make?
Dealers across the US working 40 hours a week can earn anywhere from $30,000 to more than $100,000 annually in pay, plus tips. Dealer tips are known as ‘tokes’ – short for ‘tokens of appreciation’.
Base pay is often only $4 or $5 an hour, though some jurisdictions, hard pressed for help, offer up to $12.
The bulk of a casino dealer’s pay will be tokes, which is the money the guests bet or hand to the dealers.
In places like Bellagio or Aria, tokes will make up more than 90% of pay.
If you want big tips, you will need to be at a premiere property that has lots of business and keeps those tables full of lucrative players.
Location Impacts a Casino Dealer’s Salary
One of the reasons we list such a wide range in casino dealer salary is that there are slightly over 1,000 casinos in the US across 44 states, about equally split between commercial and tribal gaming.
So, while tribal gaming dealers in South Florida with the Seminole casinos might make between $60k and $80k, a dealer in Tonopah, Nevada, in the middle of nowhere, might make significantly less.
A dealer at one of the vast tribal casinos on the Oklahoma border near Dallas might also make 60k to 80k, but a tribal dealer in Ada, a long way from major population centers, may not be making very much.
Salary can also differ whether you work at one of the best live dealer casinos or at a land-based casino.
Not only can location impact how much a casino dealer makes but also how the casino decides to split up these tokes.
How Tip Pools Work
One might assume that each dealer keeps what they are tipped, but that is seldom the case.
The casinos that don’t split tips are called Go For Your Own houses, and they are few and far between. Most will pool the tips and then use some sort of template to divide them up.
The exception here is poker dealers. Poker dealers almost always go for their own.
There is no way to guess what a good poker dealer makes because if they are good with people and can hustle, they can make a lot of money. Poker dealers are generally separate from casino dealers, and the two don’t mix much.
Some casinos will take the entire tips for two weeks and divide them by the number of hours worked. Others will take the tokes from the days that you worked and divvy them up by the number of hours worked.
In some extreme cases, the casino may even take the tokes from the actual shift that you worked and then divvy those up by hours worked.
This can reward dealers who work the busy shifts on the weekends by paying them a portion of a much higher toke pool for those days or even shifts.
So even dealers at the same property may not make the same amount, sometimes not even close.
Closing Time Affects Pay
Another way dealers at the same property might not make anywhere near the same is the early out.
Both beloved and hated by dealers everywhere, an early out allows you to put your name on a list, and should the casino have overscheduled or when they start to close games at the end of the night, they will cut these dealers and let them go home.
This is especially common when working a swing shift, where it is seldom busy enough to need all of the dealers for their full eight hours. You may be able to go home after only working four or five hours a night on multiple occasions during the week.
This can cause serious havoc to your paycheck.
A dealer on the day shift, however, may work all their hours in a given week since there a fewer games closing. It varies massively.
If you work at one of the many live blackjack online casinos then hours will also vary.
Expect to be Permanent Part-Time
This same scheduling problem where casinos only have a window of four to six hours when they are super busy causes another hiccup in determining what casino dealers get paid.
Many, if not most, casinos hire people on a part-time or even on-call basis.
They do this because they have lots of business on the weekends and for a few hours on weeknights when they need to staff everything, but most of the time, they need far fewer people.
Also, by hiring dealers part-time, they can get a good look at a dealer, make sure they are a good fit for the casino, and that they deal quickly and without making too many mistakes before offering them all of the costly perks.
The perks include things like insurance and paid time off, which, because of the low base pay, may mean a total cost to the company several times as high as they were paying for wages alone.
Some dealers at high-end properties with little turnover may spend several years waiting for a full-time job to open, all the while living without insurance or benefits and seldom being allowed to work more than 30 hours a week.
How Much Do Casino Dealers In Las Vegas Make?
Some of the same issues that confused our look at what casino dealers make across the country are going to factor in here as well.
However, we can confidently say that Las Vegas dealers make somewhere between $30,000 and $120,000 a year and maybe a bit more in certain circumstances, depending on where they work and if they work full time.
Sawdust Joints
I have recently seen some small North Las Vegas break-in joints, like Jerry’s Nugget Casino, offering up to $12 an hour base pay.
This would seem to indicate that even with only $25 or $30 a day in tips, you could make $600 a week.
If one casino is paying that, the others will have to match it, either in base pay or better tokes.
I’d work at Jerry’s Nugget if they paid me in their Prime Rib.
Bright Neon Lights
$120,000 sounds like a lot, but if you are putting in 40 hours a week, you only need around $58 an hour.
It is totally doable if your base pay is in the $6-$8 an hour range, and you can average $50 an hour in tips.
Self-reported income on Reddit and other boards shows that many dealers at places like Wynn and Caesars claimed income around $120,000.
Some reported even higher back in 2021 as people revenge gambled to make up for lost time during the pandemic.
People still gambled at online gambling sites while the casino doors were shuttered, though.
How Do I Become a Casino Dealer?
You have lots of options to learn to become a casino dealer in this day and age.
Before so many dealing jobs became available, the typical route to becoming a casino dealer was to pay several thousand dollars to go to a dealing school, then beat the pavement looking for a break-in job to get some experience.
But with so many dealing jobs going wanting, depending on your skills and the number of games you know when you are done with training, you could score a good job just out of school.
One thing they won’t be able to teach you is customer service and patience, so make sure you understand that you need both in abundance before you even start learning how to deal.
Learning to Deal: The Different Options
A casino dealer training program may only take a few short months, perhaps less if you only want to learn blackjack at first.
Many casinos now have in-house training, especially in regional markets; some will even pay you your base salary or more while you are in school.
For instance, Station Casinos in Las Vegas is currently offering up to $15 while you learn to become a dealer.
They promise to teach you blackjack and have you on the casino floor making good money in less than 30 days. But then you must agree to work at that property for a specific time frame to receive the paid training.
Given that some dealing schools like Crescent can charge 10k or more to teach you all the games and then can’t guarantee you a job, paid training does sound attractive.
Another option is community college. Many community colleges have started offering job training in casino dealing, and sometimes, this training is tied in with actual casinos looking to hire break-in dealers.
Your real training will, of course, be on the job.
No matter where you are taught, you won’t be ready for that first time dealing with real, live casino customers.
They just aren’t something that you can replicate in a training room. Players are often angry, drunk, and confused, and it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish which players are going to be which.
The players can often be nothing compared to the supervisors behind you.
You might think that since supervisors are normally made up almost exclusively of past dealers, they would understand and be on your side. That would be a huge mischaracterization.
So hemmed in at all sides by perturbed players and sociopathic supervisors, dealers often develop a gallows sense of humor that one only sees in people just trying desperately to get through their day.
Once you’ve acquired the thick skin and sarcastic demeanor necessary to the profession and made sure to learn as many games as you can, including at least roulette, craps, or baccarat, you are ready to venture on to your next casino.
If you don’t even know how the games work yet, start by reading our guides covering how to play roulette and how to play craps to get a basic understanding.
Jumping Ship
Another challenging aspect of casino dealer life is that the only way to make more money is to move to a better casino.
A 3% raise on $5 in base pay every year isn’t going to help pay the bills, and toke rates at casinos only change if casino management does something to bring in more and better players — and that isn’t likely to happen.
So, our intrepid dealer will have to seek their fortune at a better casino that might require several years of experience and a list of required games before they will even audition you.
If you are lucky, this second job will take you from 30 or 40k a year to something like 60k to 80k a year, though you may spend six months or so only working part-time while you wait for a full-time spot to open.
Once you settle into this new job, you can start working on your resume and stalking job openings at major players like Bellagio.
When I was in Vegas in the early 90s, they would say that if the obituary said that the deceased had been a dealer at Caesars, there would be 20 prospective dealers waiting in the pit the next morning, dealing aprons and resumes in hand.
Eventually, you will get your chance if you’re patient enough.
That’s how casino dealers can make a six-figure income. It is certainly not a path for everyone, though, which is probably why it pays so well to begin with.
We’ve summarized the pros and cons of working as a casino dealer below.
Pros 
- Learn in just 6 weeks.
- No degree needed.
- High potential earnings.
- Plenty of breaks.
- Many different time starts available.
Cons 
- Work nights, weekends, and holidays.
- Occasional angry, drunk and abusive guests.
- Smoking allowed at many casinos.
- Some supervisors are psychopaths.
- May be part-time for a long time.
Is a Casino Dealer Job Right For Me?
I’ve had drinks thrown at me by angry customers. I’ve had angry pit bosses kick me in the leg or punt a trash can down the length of the pit.
I’ve seen people drop dead of a heart attack in the middle of a crap game. I’ve heard the same jokes about 10 thousand times and been called every name in the book.
But I wouldn’t trade it away for anything.
I’ve made lifelong friends with both players and coworkers. I married a dealer, which is honestly a very common thing, and probably goes back to working in a pressure cooker environment.
I’ve dealt craps games that, when you are tapped off of, you would swear that you’d been in a foxhole dodging bullets. I’ve seen the highest highs and lowest lows of the human condition and learned from it, and honestly, every day is different.
It seems like a monotonous job, an assembly line of dealing cards, spinning balls, and retrieving dice, and it can feel like that, too. But all you have to do is start talking with your guests.
There aren’t too many jobs where you get to spend hours with your customers and learn everything about them. It’s only monotonous if you don’t want to learn.
So, if you think that sounds interesting, we are always hiring.
