Ottawa · Ontario · Canada
One casino hotel, one city, and a river that changes the rules
Ottawa has a single casino inside its own municipal boundary, and since the summer of 2025 that casino has had a hotel attached to it. This guide is about that building on Albion Road — and, kept firmly separate, about the larger complex on the far bank of the Ottawa River, where the province changes and so does the legal age.
Start here
The venue, in brief
- Name
- Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Ottawa
- Address
- 4837 Albion Road, Ottawa, Ontario K1X 1A3
- Telephone
- 613-822-8668
- Website
- casino.hardrock.com/ottawa
- Rooms
- 150 guest rooms, including 22 suites
- Hotel opened
- 3 July 2025
- Opening hours
- Open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year
- Minimum age
- 19+ on the gaming floor
The address is real south-end Ottawa: fields and low-rise industry rather than government office towers. Travel listings put it at roughly 9.8 km and 14 minutes by car from the airport, and something like 18 to 19 km from Parliament Hill and the ByWard Market. Those are third-party measurements rather than the venue’s own, so treat them as a sense of scale rather than a timetable. The practical consequence is the same either way: this is a place you drive or ride to, and it sits much closer to the runway than to the Rideau Canal.
The sources behind this guide describe it as the only casino in the City of Ottawa. That is a negative claim, and negatives are hard to prove, so we put it the way our sources do rather than stating it flatly. What is not in doubt is that it is the only one with a hotel above it.
Read the full venue page, which covers the rooms, the gaming floor, the amenities that are published and the ones that are not.
Recently changed
What older write-ups get wrong
The second thing copied guides get wrong is the name. The site has been known, in turn, as Rideau Carleton Raceway, OLG Slots at Rideau Carleton Raceway and, later, Rideau Carleton Casino. None of those is the current name, and using one of them is a quick way to end up at a phone number nobody answers. The third is the hotel itself: it is new, opened on 3 July 2025, so anything written before that date describes a casino you could not sleep at.
Those three changes are why this guide exists in the form it does. The history page lays the sequence out on a timeline, from the first race meeting to the announcement that ended them.
Two provinces
The river is a legal boundary, not just water
Look north from Parliament Hill and you are looking at another province. The large casino hotel that Ottawa visitors hear about — the Lac-Leamy complex — is in Gatineau, Quebec. Different province, different operator, different minimum age: 18 there rather than Ontario’s 19.
This guide keeps that venue on its own page for a reason. Ontario’s helpline, Ontario’s self-exclusion programme and Ontario’s regulator have no authority on the Quebec bank, and we have not verified Quebec’s equivalents, so we do not name them. Where a reader needs Quebec-specific help, we point at the venue’s own published information instead of guessing. See the Gatineau page.
Contents
How the guide is organised
- The venue — address, rooms, gaming floor, amenities, and how to book directly with the hotel.
- From raceway to Hard Rock — an expandable timeline of the site, 1962 to the end of racing.
- Dining — the restaurants and bars the venue publishes, named without invented menus.
- Live music — the concert hall, its published size, and what a show night actually involves out there.
- Getting here — airport, O-Train, driving, seasons and what to carry.
- Across the river — the Gatineau complex, under Quebec rules.
- Responsible gambling — the Ontario age rule, warning signs, the helpline and how self-exclusion works.
- About — who writes this, how facts are chosen, and what we left out on purpose.
Before you go
Three things worth knowing tonight
First, the age. Ontario sets the gaming-floor minimum at 19+, and the rule comes from the provincial regulator rather than from the venue, so nobody on the door can waive it. Second, identification. Policies published by Ontario’s OLG-operated casinos say that only valid government-issued photo identification is accepted, that it is checked on anyone who appears under 30, and that people aged 21 or younger need two pieces. Carry something official even if you have not been asked in years.
Third, the number that matters more than any of the rest. ConnexOntario answers around the clock, free and confidential, on 1-866-531-2600, and you can also text “connex” to 247247. It is there for the person gambling and equally for the person worrying about them.
