Catawba Two Kings Resort Tower Climbs as Kings Mountain Build Advances
Steel is climbing on the 24-story hotel at the Catawba Nation's billion-dollar Kings Mountain resort, the largest tribal build on the East Coast.
Construction of the permanent Catawba Two Kings Casino Resort in Kings Mountain, North Carolina has passed a structural milestone that developers describe as the point of no return for a project of its size: the casino complex has reached full vertical height and is now expanding horizontally, while steel continues to rise on the 24-story hotel tower that will anchor the property. Publicly released construction updates place the tower roughly ten floors into its planned frame, a little more than a year after crews broke ground on the site.
The project, developed by the Catawba Nation with Delaware North as its gaming partner, sits on a parcel off Interstate 85 about 35 miles west of Charlotte and within a short drive of the South Carolina line. That geography has driven the economics from the outset. The site is positioned to draw from one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the Southeast while remaining the only tribal Class III gaming facility of scale between the Cherokee properties in the western North Carolina mountains and the coastal markets to the south.
What the finished resort is designed to hold
Plans that the Catawba Nation and its partners have described publicly call for roughly 4,300 slot machines, about 100 live table games, eleven dining outlets, eleven bars and a 385-room hotel. Those figures would place the completed property among the largest tribal gaming facilities on the Atlantic seaboard by device count, and comfortably the largest in the Carolinas. The scale is a marked step up from the pre-launch facility that has operated on the site since 2021, which introduced the market to Catawba gaming with a far smaller footprint while the permanent build proceeded.
The phased approach — open something modest, hold the market, then deliver the permanent asset — has become a standard pattern in tribal development, and one we have examined in detail in our analysis of temporary and phase-one market entry strategy. It carries a specific advantage in a competitive corridor: the incumbent operator establishes a database and a local employment base years before its permanent competitor could respond.
A build that has not been uncomplicated
The Kings Mountain project has advanced against a backdrop of litigation and land-status questions that have followed Catawba gaming since federal officials placed the parcel into trust. Neighboring tribal governments in the Carolinas contested the eligibility determination, and separate commercial disputes have surfaced between the Nation and parties involved in the earlier phases of the development — including the trespass litigation involving the site's original developer that has run in parallel with construction.
Vertical progress on a tribal resort of this scale is a signal that financing, land status and regulatory approvals have all cleared. Steel does not rise on contested ground.
None of the outstanding disputes has halted work, and the structural milestone is meaningful for exactly that reason. Institutional lenders and equipment vendors read topping-out progress as evidence that the remaining risk on a project is execution risk rather than entitlement risk — a distinction that materially affects the cost of the capital still to be drawn. We covered the initial construction start in our report on the permanent resort groundbreaking.
The Southeast's changing tribal gaming map
Kings Mountain is the most visible piece of a broader shift. The Catawba Nation has publicly discussed additional gaming development in North Carolina, and the Lumbee Tribe has spent 2026 working through the internal governance steps that would precede any gaming enterprise of its own, including a series of ordinance hearings held in September. Meanwhile the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians continues to invest in its two Harrah's-branded properties in the western part of the state.
The result is a region that spent decades as a near-blank space on the tribal gaming map and now supports genuine competitive dynamics. Our regional analysis of the Southeast as tribal gaming's next frontier laid out the demand case: large, growing metropolitan populations, limited commercial casino supply, and long drive times to established markets in Mississippi, Louisiana and the Midwest.
For Charlotte specifically, the arithmetic is straightforward. A metropolitan area of roughly 2.8 million people currently has no full-scale casino within an hour's drive. Kings Mountain will have one. Whether that translates into the revenue performance the project's billion-dollar cost implies depends on questions that construction milestones cannot answer: the mix of local repeat play against destination stays, how much of the hotel inventory is filled at rate versus comped, and how effectively the property converts a regional day-trip market into overnight business.
What to watch next
The near-term markers are the tower topping out, the enclosure of the casino envelope ahead of winter, and the hiring ramp that typically begins six to nine months before a resort of this size opens its doors. Staffing has become the binding constraint on new tribal resorts nationally, an issue we have tracked in our reporting on the tribal gaming staffing squeeze, and a property requiring both a full table games complement and a 385-room hotel will need to recruit at a scale the Kings Mountain labor shed has not previously absorbed.
Catawba officials have not published a firm opening date for the completed resort beyond indicating a target in 2027. Given where the steel currently stands and the typical eighteen-month lag between structural topping-out and a hotel opening, that timeline appears achievable, though the sequencing of casino and hotel deliveries may not be simultaneous. Additional context on the region's properties is available through our tribal casino directory.