Macau’s Golden Week Sets a Visitor Record After Four Months of Falling Casino Revenue

Data released by Macau’s Public Security Police Force and the Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO) confirms that National Day Golden Week generated a record single-day surge of 210,325 visitor arrivals on October 4, bringing six-day visitor volumes past 1.05 million.

However, equity analysts and gaming economists caution that record footfall fails to compensate for structural yield compression across the Special Administrative Region’s six licensed casino concessionaires.

The tourism surge follows four consecutive months of year-over-year gross gaming revenue (GGR) contractions reported by the Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau (DICJ). September’s gross gaming revenue, the money casinos keep after paying out winners, fell 1.2% from a year earlier to MOP18.06 billion, or $2.24 billion, the Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau (DICJ) reported on October 1. It was the fourth monthly drop in a row, and the banks that follow Macau don’t expect October to be much better.

Six Days Already Beat 2024

Police counted 750,988 arrivals from Thursday to Sunday, up 10.9% on the same four days last year, Macau Business reported. The daily tally climbed from 169,664 on October 1 to Sunday’s peak, then eased to about 169,600 on Monday and roughly 131,000 on Tuesday.

That works out to about 175,000 a day. Maria Helena de Senna Fernandes, director of the Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO), had said she hoped arrivals would meet the industry’s expectation of 150,000 a day.

Last year’s holiday ran eight days and drew 1.144 million visitors by the tourism office’s count, an average of 143,000 a day with a peak of 191,000. Both were National Day records at the time. The seven-day break in 2024 brought 993,117, so this year passed that total with a day to spare.

Still Short of the May Record

Sunday was not Macau’s busiest day ever. The tourism office counted about 248,000 arrivals on May 2, during the Labor Day holiday, the highest single-day figure since official statistics began.

Mainland China supplied most of the traffic. MGTO data for the first five days show 797,532 of 920,456 arrivals came from the mainland, about 87%, with another 85,716 from Hong Kong.

More Visitors, Less Spent Per Head

The DICJ’s monthly table shows revenue down 12.1% in June, 8.4% in July and 1.2% in both August and September. A strong start to the year keeps the nine-month total at MOP187.1 billion, up 3.2%, but September was the lowest monthly figure in two years.

Gaming spend per head is shrinking. Research firm CreditSights put it at MOP5,836 for the first eight months of 2026, down from MOP6,062 a year earlier and MOP7,224 in 2019, according to Macau Business. Analysts Nicholas Chen and David Bussey wrote: “We continue to see a difficult path for gaming spending per capita to meaningfully recover.”

Most of that money comes from one game. Baccarat brought in MOP107.2 billion of the MOP126.9 billion Macau’s casinos won in the first half of 2026, counting VIP and mass play together, DICJ figures show. That’s about 84%.

Shops Feel It Too

Macau Business found the same pattern outside the casinos on day two of the holiday. A souvenir seller near the Ruins of St. Paul’s, named only as Mr. Lei, told the outlet: “The crowds are much larger than last year, but the average spend has noticeably shrunk.”

Banks Expect a Weak October

Vitaly Umansky, an analyst at Seaport Research Partners, forecasts October revenue will fall 5% to about MOP22.9 billion, partly because the casinos’ win rate was high last October. He said the soft demand was “likely being caused by weaker China macroeconomic conditions and China government tax enforcement on offshore trusts.”

J.P. Morgan is gloomier, at a 6% fall to MOP22.6 billion. CLSA analyst Jeffrey Kiang kept his forecast flat at MOP24.1 billion after touring Cotai casinos on October 2, where the most common minimum bets at mass-market Table Games ran from HK$1,000-HK$3,000. His note said “tail-end strength post-Golden Week would be crucial.”

Arrivals Haven’t Fixed Revenue

The International Monetary Fund made a similar point in its latest report on Macau’s economy. Gaming revenue is still below its pre-pandemic peak, which the fund puts down to regulatory changes, stricter anti-money laundering rules and shifting visitor spending.

Macau set an all-time record of more than 40 million visitors in 2025. J.P. Morgan now expects its casinos to win MOP249 billion this year, a 1% rise that would leave them at 85% of what they made before the pandemic.