All aboard the monthly flight in this journey of discovery and education with a dusting of fun facts it’s time to head to yet another beautiful destination! In fact, we have carefully curated only the finest of locations to be included in this tour, just for you, dear reader.
This time our journey takes us to the Iberian peninsula, past Spain and we’ll keep going until we reach the Land of the Navigators. As a former naval superpower and arguably the first truly global empire, it is no surprise that gambling also has a long history in this coastal nation. Their influence was so far reaching that they are solely responsible for the only location in China which allows gambling.
Wait, how does this medium-sized European nation impact the gambling landscape over 10,000 nautical miles away, on the other side of the globe in one of the largest and most powerful countries in the world?
Don’t worry, we’ll tell you. Grab yourself a Francesinha, pastel de nata and an ice-cold Sagres because we are headed to sunny Portugal!
A true gambling empire
The Portuguese empire was at the height of its power in the 16th century and at one point they claimed nearly 7% of the global landmass as part of their domain. It was also the longest lasting of the European colonial powers, dating from the early 1400s all the way to 1999.
Like in many European nations at the time, the wealthy elite had to spend their money on something, and one of the activities they increasingly took a liking to was gambling. While informal and unofficial gambling almost certainly took place prior to this, the first year we can confidentially pinpoint is 1688 when King Pedro II held the first Royal Lottery in Portugal.
The second big historical year, in the gambling sense, was 1783 when the first “operator” outside the royal establishment held an early version of a gambling license. Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa was allowed to run the annual lottery with proceedings going into charity, marking the start of the National Lottery in Portugal and slowly introducing gambling to the masses.
Fast forward to the early 1900s and while gambling is not fully regulated yet, the first casino on Portuguese soil, Casino Estoril, opened its doors to the public in 1931. Well, public being used quite loosely here, it was certainly not a spot for the common man. It even served as an inspiration for the James Bond novel Casino Royale.
Online gambling was brought under the licensing system in 2015 with the Legal Regime of the online gambling and betting (RJO). The official body overseeing this is Serviço de Regulação e Inspeção de Jogos, (Gambling Regulation and Inspection Service), commonly known as SRIJ.
They issue licenses, take care of statistics and issue penalties for any breaches of the legislation.
So what about the empire we mentioned earlier? Before any casinos were built in the actual Portugal, the authorities decided to legalise gambling in their overseas territory Macau in 1849 to generate further revenue from the trading post. This area of mainland China was leased to Portugal in 1557 and stayed under their control until 1999 when it was handed back over to China. To this day, Macau is the only place in China where casinos are legal, making it the global leader when measured by gambling revenue.
Navigating the Portuguese waters
As far as single-market licenses go, 10 years is a decent time for the market to mature and it places them in the fairly early adopters of the licensing system within the European countries.
The prevailing legislation which came to power in 2015, Regime Jurídico dos Jogos e Apostas Online or RJO for short, still carries the same groovy name “Decree-Law No. 66/2015 of 29 April”. While it hasn’t been updated in 10 years, it has been amended seven times with the latest update coming in 2020.
What has also not changed in 10 years is that Portugal only offers B2C licensing, but four different types of it. The four types are: sports betting, horse racing, online casino and bingo with each license type being for 3 years and renewable after. The cheapest of the four, by quite some margin, is the bingo license which costs only 2,413.52 EUR while the other three cost 14,481.10 EUR each. So far a grand total of one (1) bingo license has been issued.
Alongside the initial fees, there is a fee of 21,721.65 EUR for the system homologation (one-time fee) and a cost of 2,413.52 EUR for each betting category or game type, depending if you have the sports betting or casino license. Or possibly both, in which case these costs could add up quite quickly. Additionally, there are a total of 600,000 EUR of guarantees needed to receive a license.
While the AML and player protection regulations are what you’d expect to find in Europe, what they are very particular about is everything to be located in Portugal. And when we say everything, this means a company needs to be incorporated (or a Portuguese branch of an existing company), a .pt URL for the site, all the technical infrastructure as well as the data storage need to be in Portugal.
Alongside this, the whole platform needs to be certified by a laboratory which is certified by SRIJ, after which they have their own scrutineering. As one would expect, there are also tax and social security matters which must be handled, although you do not need to have a Portuguese bank account, an EU one will do. Operators are taxed 8% of the sports betting takes and 25% on the GGR on the casino side, with bingo and horse racing having their own particular taxation.
Once you have all these matters in order and the four stage process is complete, you can expect the calendar to have moved forward about 6 to 12 months. We understand this is a broad timeframe, but with this many checks to conduct and boxes to tick, one cannot assume that things move at a lightning fast pace.
Same same, but different
While Portugal does not supply specific B2B licenses, it doesn’t mean that suppliers, aggregators and providers can do business as they please. In fact, Portugal is peculiar also in this sense.
The same technical requirements apply to all types of companies working in the sector and the operator who uses their products and/or services is the one who is ultimately responsible that all the companies who they partner with are compliant with the regulations.
This means that while the suppliers do not need to apply for a license and therefore to pay a fee, they can be expected to contribute to the fees payable by the operator, especially when it comes to different types of games. How exactly these fees are split depends on the arrangement between the operator and the B2B supplier.
This is likely to make the partnership negotiations more extensive than at most markets, as there is a financial risk involved for the operator as well and the trust in the business relationship needs to be even higher than usual.
Growth on all verticals, the good and the bad ones
SRIJ releases quarterly statements and statistics of online gambling in Portugal and this gives great insights to how the market is performing. We can see that the GGR has gone up 14.4% year on year and it’s strongly led by the casino side which accounts for nearly two thirds of this volume. In the second quarter of 2026 the total
GGR reached 328.2m EUR with casino games bringing in 203.1m EUR and sports betting
125.1m EUR.
The player numbers would indicate that about 10% of the residents of Portugal take part in gambling at least sporadically with 1.2mil players having placed at least one bet in this time period. The total number of player accounts is 4.9 million which would cover nearly half of the population, but this an accumulated number and does not take the same person opening accounts with multiple operators into consideration.
The same has to be kept in mind when examining the self-exclusions percentage which stands at 8.4% of all accounts, or 413,700 closures in total. But since we do not know how many accounts each self-excluded individual held, we cannot derive numbers from this with absolute certainty. What we can however derive is that this number is growing at a significant 26.8% rate year on year and new self-exclusions were up 35.9% YoY.
When player accounts only grew at around 1% YoY, it is clear that players are either experiencing gambling related harm at a fairly alarming rate or they gamble very responsibly and take breaks in form of self-exclusion regularly. It’s of course likely to be a combination of both, but if I had to guess one or the other, my prediction would not be a super positive one.
On the enforcement side, SRIJ has been very active and issued a hefty total of 95 cease-and-desist notifications, requested 113 illegally operating gambling sites to be blocked and pursued 6 prosecutions in Q2 of 2026 alone. In total since they started in 2015, they have issued over 1800 notifications and requested over 3000 sites to be blocked by the local ISPs, so operating in Portugal without a local license is very likely to have consequences of some degree.
A storm-ish may be brewing?
The southwestern corner of the Iberian peninsula has certainly become a gambling stronghold with 17 licensed operators holding 30 licenses and the market growing nicely year on year, at least for now.
The player protection remains a hot topic, unsurprisingly, and operators must remain vigilant and adjust their processes accordingly depending on the direction SRIJ wants to take. It remains to be seen what changes SRIJ wishes to make in the light of the self-exclusion numbers, or if they have further data that suggests that people are simply just being responsible for once.
The Portuguese Parliament is however looking to give the industry a bit of a headache as they are looking to introduce a ban on daytime gambling adverts (which is not that outrageous), stricter rules for influencers (also a good thing), ban on sponsorships, personal income tax on gambling wins as well as an even stronger approach to self-exclusion and illegal operators.
So while it is smooth sailing as of right now, the prevailing winds from across Europe, which have been bringing increasing pressure and intervention from politicians, seem to have reached Portugal and slightly choppier waters may be ahead.
But if the Portuguese know something, it’s how to navigate stormy seas.
