Nevada: Players leave $22M in unclaimed vouchers in FY22 as gaming rebounds

Nevada players let $22 million in unclaimed tickets expire in the fiscal year ended June 30, according to state data. Per a 2011 law, the state collects 75% of any expired wagering voucher, and the casino licensee can keep the rest.

Many tourists and locals often find it irritating that they are stuck with a ticket voucher worth a few cents, leaving them unclaimed. Players find it a hassle to go to the cashier’s cage to cash out tickets that can be worth a mere 30 or 40 cents.

In Nevada, players only have six months to use the vouchers, while in New Jersey and Pennsylvania they expire after one and three years respectively. In other jurisdictions, the unclaimed tickets do not expire at all.

Revenue collected from expired tickets has increased every year since 2012, the first year the state began collecting revenue from unclaimed tickets, reports Las Vegas Review-Journal. At that time, the state reported revenue of $3.1 million on $4.2 million of unclaimed vouchers. After casinos keep their 25% of the tickets, the remaining amount is remitted to the Nevada Gaming Commission, which adds the money into the state’s general fund.

While state revenue from these tickets saw a decline during the pandemic, as gaming started to pick up over the past year, so did the millions in unclaimed vouchers, jumping by 59% in 2022 to $16.5 million. According to experts, a number of reasons explain this hike.

“It has been pretty interesting to witness the growth recorded in the expired wagering voucher fee payments from $7.2 million in FY13 to what was collected in FY22,” Mike Lawton, senior economic analyst for the Nevada Gaming Control Board, told Review-Journal. “For the most part, the amount of expired wagering voucher fee payments has grown in tandem with the growth of slot win recorded by the state.”

Lawton sees this as a “logical” development, as the ratio between slot win and expired vouchers “has not fluctuated too greatly.” Given last year the state recorded all-time high slot wins of $9.8 billion, the increase in expired vouchers was an expected consequence. 

However, a law change in 2021 also contributed to this increasing trend as it expanded the collection sources of expired vouchers to include all games that issue wagering tickets, including some table games and sports wagering options. Additionally, changing operations and visitor behavior during the pandemic could also explain the increase in expired tickets: as many casinos limited coin operations after a coin shortage in 2020, more vouchers could be circulating with lower values.