EU Illegal Gambling Hit €91.6bn — €23bn in Tax Lost

⏱ 3 min read

Illegal online gambling targeting consumers across the European Union generated an estimated €91.6 billion in 2025, according to data presented at the European Parliament this week. That figure — up from €80.6 billion in 2024 — represents growth of roughly 14% in a single year and confirms that unlicensed operators now account for the majority of online gambling revenue inside the EU-27.

The numbers, compiled by Gambling Compliance International (GCI) for the European Casino Association (ECA), also reveal a direct fiscal cost: EU member states missed out on an estimated €22.9 billion in tax revenue in 2025 alone — money that licensed operators would have generated and remitted under national frameworks. More than 6,200 unlicensed operators are currently targeting European consumers, and researchers found that most online gambling content viewed by EU citizens promotes sites operating outside any regulatory licence.

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Parliament Roundtable Brings Regulators Together

The findings were unveiled on 6 July 2026 at a high-level roundtable hosted by MEP Lukas Mandl at the European Parliament in Brussels. The event was organised by the ECA and conducted under the Chatham House Rule, bringing together an unusually broad coalition: officials from the European Commission, the Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA), Eurojust, the Joint Parliamentary Scrutiny Group on Europol, national gambling regulators, and private-sector stakeholders.

ECA Chair Erwin van Lambaart presented the annual impact study, noting that the headline figure had risen sharply since the event was first scheduled — earlier data had placed the 2024 illegal market at €80 billion, but newly released 2025 numbers pushed that higher still.

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Scale of the Illegal Market

The GCI study puts the illegal market's growth in stark relief. Unlicensed operators generated the majority of all online gambling revenue within the EU-27 in 2025 — meaning legal, regulated sites are now the minority by revenue share. Key data points from the report include:

• Illegal online gambling revenue: €91.6 billion in 2025 (up 14% year-on-year)
• Estimated EU government tax loss: €22.9 billion in 2025
• Number of unlicensed operators actively targeting EU consumers: 6,200+
• Illegal operators' share of total EU online gambling in 2024: approximately 71%

The prior year's report from YieldSec, also commissioned by the ECA, estimated that 81 million Europeans used unregulated platforms in 2024 — platforms lacking standard consumer safeguards such as age verification, deposit limits, or self-exclusion tools.

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Licensed vs Unlicensed: What It Means for Players

The ECA drew a clear line at the roundtable between the two tiers of the market. Under all existing EU member-state frameworks, an operator is either fully licensed within a jurisdiction or it is operating illegally — there is no recognised middle category.

Factor	Licensed Operator	Illegal/Unlicensed Operator
Age & ID Verification	Mandatory KYC checks required	Frequently bypassed or absent
Responsible Gambling Tools	Deposit limits, self-exclusion, affordability checks	Typically none; aggressive promotion instead
AML Compliance	Full transaction monitoring under EU AML rules	No oversight; linked to money laundering risk
Tax Contribution	GGR taxes remitted to member state (rates vary: ~20–25%+)	Zero tax paid; revenue extracted from market
Dispute Resolution	Regulated complaints process; ADR access	No recourse for players
Player Fund Protection	Required in most EU jurisdictions	No segregation; funds at risk

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Why Enforcement Is So Hard

The core problem, repeated by multiple speakers at the roundtable, is structural: illegal gambling sites operate across multiple jurisdictions simultaneously, while enforcement powers remain fragmented along national lines. A regulator in Germany or the Netherlands can issue a blocking order or pursue payment processing interventions inside its own borders, but has no direct authority over a server based outside the EU.

Recent joint action has made inroads. In November 2025, seven major European regulators — including those of Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Portugal, and Spain — signed a joint statement committing to coordinated enforcement. The UK's Gambling Commission has pioneered payment processing interventions, making its first referral to Visa in January 2025 before expanding the scheme to Mastercard and digital wallets. Search engine de-indexing has proved the most scalable tool: 205,351 actions were taken by British authorities in 2024–25, accounting for 98.7% of all enforcement activity recorded that year.

Germany faces particular difficulty. Despite years of restrictive licensing under the Interstate Treaty on Gambling (GlüStV 2021), channelisation into the legal online casino market remains weak, with illegal sites still commanding a large share of slots play. Draft amendments to the GlüStV aim to extend blocking powers to cover the full internet stack — including internet access providers — by referencing the EU Digital Services Act's concept of intermediary services, though the reform has not yet entered into force.

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What Comes Next: Europol, AMLA and Coordinated Action

The July roundtable took place as the European Commission actively reviews Europol's mandate, with a view to giving the agency stronger tools for cross-border organised crime investigations — a category that illegal gambling increasingly falls into. The ECA and MEP Mandl both called explicitly for Europol to be given a clearer role in tackling unlicensed gambling networks.

Meanwhile, Regulation (EU) 2024/1624 — the new EU Anti-Money Laundering Regulation — became applicable in mid-2026, introducing a directly-applicable AML rulebook across the bloc and potentially strengthening the hand of AMLA when pursuing illicit financial flows linked to illegal gambling. Separately, an EU-level 1% gambling levy proposed by Romanian MEP Victor Negrescu — which could generate an estimated €2–4 billion per year for education and addiction services — remains under negotiation as part of the Multiannual Financial Framework 2028–2034, though the European Gaming and Betting Association (EGBA) has described it as "fundamentally unworkable" given the absence of EU-wide licensing harmonisation.

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Sources

Primary sources are listed first. The ECA press release and GCI study are the authoritative basis for all figures cited in this article.

Illegal online gambling is a fast-growing, cross-border problem that puts players at high risk, deprives societies of much-needed tax revenues, and undermines trust in the regulated market. If we fail to act now, the illegal online market will continue to grow at the expense of players, public finances and legitimate businesses.

— Erwin van Lambaart, Chair, European Casino Association · European Parliament Roundtable, 6 July 2026