Accel Entertainment delivered a record $368.1 million of net revenue in the second quarter of fiscal 2026, up 9.6% year-over-year on a 6.9% increase in gaming terminals and a 5.6% increase in locations, and lifted adjusted EBITDA 10.8% to $58.9 million as same-store hold-per-day in Illinois, the company's largest market, climbed 9.0% to $992. The headline is that 72% net-income growth to $12.5 million is not a flash result: it reflects a routing model in which revenue is still expanding double digits three years after the COVID shock, Illinois - which alone produced 72% of consolidated net revenue - is still growing 7.8% on a same-store basis, and two of the three developing markets (Nebraska and Georgia) grew more than 47%. The read for the equity is that Accel is now generating trailing-twelve-month adjusted EBITDA of $220.1 million, the company ended the quarter with $255.5 million of cash, $317.9 million of net debt, and an undrawn $300 million revolver, and the buyback authorization still had $145.6 million of capacity after the company repurchased 477,598 shares for $5.6 million during the quarter at an average price of $11.68.
The thesis question that the next six months will answer is whether Chicago is the catalyst the bulls are pricing. The Illinois Gaming Board has begun issuing terminal-operator approvals, and 17 of 39 sites approved to date (44%) are Accel sites; the City of Chicago's Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection is now accepting video-gaming license applications. Each Chicago terminal that goes live is a recurring 32.5% statutory split on net gaming revenue, and Accel's existing installed base across Illinois is now entirely ticket-in, ticket-out, which the company has identified as the operational prerequisite for rapid rollout. The falsifiable signal is the rate of Chicago go-lives over the September and December quarters: a steady cadence of approvals turning into installed terminals would justify the company's current 6.0x EV-to-trailing-adjusted-EBITDA multiple expanding toward the 7-8x range that Boyd and Penn trade at; a stall would force the market to reframe Accel as a no-growth-co-location compounder and compress the multiple back into the high-fives.