How Much Money Should I Take to Vegas?
Daily spending money, tier by tier
Tight budget: $75-$125 per person per day gets you casual meals, happy-hour drinks, the Deuce or Monorail, and free attractions. Comfortable: $150-$300 adds rideshares, a good dinner, and a show or attraction. High roller: $500+ once nightclubs, dayclubs, steakhouses and premium tickets enter the picture.
These are planning rules of thumb rather than measurements - see the last section for exactly which numbers on this page are measured and which are not. All three tiers assume your room is already paid for.
What that comes to for a whole trip
Rules of thumb are per-day; you are packing a wallet for a trip. First fix the unit, because this is where most budgets go wrong: count SPENDING DAYS, not hotel nights. A three-night trip normally means four days on the ground - you eat and drink the evening you land and the morning you leave. So multiply by four, not three.
Multiplying the comfortable tier ($150-$300 per person per day): one person, three spending days, $450-$900. Two people, three spending days, $900-$1,800. Two people on a three-night trip - four spending days - $1,200-$2,400. Two people, five spending days, $1,500-$3,000.
On the tight tier ($75-$125), two people over a three-night trip is $600-$1,000. On the high-roller tier the same trip starts at $4,000 and has no ceiling.
Add the room on top of all of those, and keep the gambling bankroll separate again - it is not spending money and should not be budgeted as though it is.
The room costs more than the advertised rate - here is the actual arithmetic
Start from what rooms actually cost, not a guess. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority publishes the citywide average nightly rate every month. In June 2026 the average Strip room went for $165.45 a night and the citywide average was $156.32; over January to June 2026 the Strip average was $208.02.
The advertised rate is not what you pay. Across the 25 Las Vegas hotels we track in our resort-fee comparison, the median resort fee is $44.22 a night - the pre-tax nightly charge, as the hotels quote it. Nevada then taxes the resort fee as well as the room, at the Clark County Strip rate of 13.38%. So a June 2026 average Strip room at $165.45, plus the median fee, plus tax on both, really costs about $238 a night - roughly $72 more than the advertised number, or about $217 over three nights.
Because the fee is flat rather than a percentage, it punishes a cheap room hardest. A $45 fee on a $200 room adds under a quarter to the bill; the same $45 on a $60 room adds three quarters to it, before any tax. Cheap rooms are where resort fees do the most damage, which is the opposite of what most people assume.
The single biggest lever is where you stay. In June 2026 the average Downtown room was $84.92 against $165.45 on the Strip - about 49% less - and the same gap held in September 2025 ($98.83 vs $206.54, 52% less). Moving Downtown saves more per night than any amount of care about meals.
When you go moves the number more than how you spend
The daily tiers above are season-blind, and Las Vegas is not. In June 2026 the citywide average nightly rate was $156.32 - about 19% below the $193.49 average for January to June. On the Strip specifically the gap between June 2026 ($165.45) and September 2025 ($206.54) was $41.09 a night. Over a three-night stay that is about $123 on the room alone, decided entirely by which month you booked and nothing else.
Midweek is the other free lever. In September 2025 weekend occupancy ran 90.3% against 74.4% midweek - a 15.9-point gap - and hotels price into that. Shifting a Friday-Saturday trip to Tuesday-Wednesday changes what you need to bring more than any tier boundary.
All of the figures in this section come from the LVCVA's monthly tourism report, which is the same source the local press and hotel analysts use. They are averages across the whole city, so your own dates and hotel will differ - the calculator takes both.
Your gambling bankroll is a separate number
Decide it before you leave, keep it separate from your spending money, and treat it as the price of entertainment - the house has the long-run edge in every game, so plan for the money to be spent, not returned. Many casual players bring $100-$300 per gambling day; what matters is that losing all of it wouldn't hurt.
How long it lasts depends almost entirely on which game you play and your bet size, and that part is not a rule of thumb - it is arithmetic. Our bankroll calculator uses published per-game house edges (roughly 0.5% on blackjack with basic strategy, 1.06% on baccarat banker, 1.41% on a craps pass line before odds, and far more on most slots) to compute expected loss per hour from your own bet size and pace. The same $200 lasts hours at a $5 blackjack table and minutes at $15 slot spins, and the calculator shows you which.
Cash vs card in Vegas
Cards and phone wallets are accepted essentially everywhere, so you don't need a wad of cash for normal spending. Carry some small bills anyway - tips for dealers, cocktail servers, valets and housekeeping run on cash, and some taxis and small vendors still prefer it. Scale it to your tier rather than using a flat number: roughly $20-$40 a day on the tight tier and $50-$100 on the comfortable one. Either way that cash comes OUT of your daily spending money, not on top of it.
Avoid casino-floor ATMs where you can - fees of $8-$10 per withdrawal are common, and they are the most expensive money in the building. Pull cash before you fly or at a bank branch off the floor, and never chase losses with an ATM trip.
Where these numbers come from
Measured, from published data: every room-rate figure above is transcribed from the LVCVA Executive Summary of Southern Nevada Tourism Indicators - the June 2026 and September 2025 editions - which is the official tourism report for Clark County. The resort-fee figures are computed from our own comparison table of 25 Las Vegas hotels, and the 13.38% room-tax rate is the Clark County Strip rate our calculators use. The per-game house edges behind the bankroll math are published figures.
Rules of thumb, not measurements: the $75-$125 / $150-$300 / $500+ daily tiers, the $100-$300 casual bankroll, the $50-$100 a day in small bills, and the $8-$10 ATM fee. These are planning bands drawn from how the costs on this site add up, not from a price survey - we do not run one, and we would rather say so than dress a guess up as data.
That distinction matters for exactly one reason: the measured numbers you can hold us to, and the rules of thumb you should replace with your own inputs. The trip-cost calculator does that with your dates, your hotel and your bet size.
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Independent Las Vegas visitor guide — not affiliated with any hotel, casino, show, or the city. Prices, fees, shows, and hours change constantly; verify current details before you book.