Finland is finally opening its gambling market

[Valge]

Finland has been one of the last EU holdouts on the monopoly model, with Veikkaus as the only legal option for decades. That's now changing.

In March 2026, the Finnish regulator started accepting B2C licence applications from international operators. By early April, they already had 24 applications in — a mix of local names and major international brands who clearly see Finland as a premium market worth entering properly.

The official market launch isn't until July 2027, so there's still a transition period, but the direction is clear.

A few things worth knowing about what the new framework actually looks like. Licences run five years, the application fee is around €29,000, and the tax rate sits at 22% of GGR — comparable to Sweden, which gives you a sense of how seriously Finland is taking this. Crypto is banned outright, fiat only. BankID-style authentication is mandatory, which won't surprise anyone familiar with the Nordic approach to online identification. Players will also have mandatory deposit and loss limits from day one.

The interesting question for Finnish players is what this actually changes in practice. For years, Finnish players have been accessing offshore and EU-licensed operators freely — there was no real enforcement against players using foreign sites. The new framework brings legitimate operators in, but also tightens things up around player protections.

Curious whether any Finnish members here have thoughts on how this will change things on the ground.

 

[anddi32]

I'll write a couple of things as I live in Finland and have been following this gambling mess for a long time.

Here, a reform of the gambling law was carried out in the early 2020s which aimed to strengthen the monopoly. How funny, it's been less than 5 years since this legislative package and now we're in a situation where the market is opening up. How did this situation come about?

Maybe 4 years ago monopoly company Veikkaus began to complain about decreasing revenues, and soon all parliamentary parties were in favor of opening the market, even though for decades this monopoly company has been protected like a sacred cow. Situation has long been completely absurd: The basis of monopoly is to prevent gambling harms while at the same time, more and more money should be collected from players. When there is not enough money coming, politicians are in a hurry to break the monopoly. What a joke

I personally see the biggest reason for Veikkaus's revenue collapse that the government over-regulated, did not give Veikkaus the opportunity to compete with the international market causing more and more players to move to foreign casinos. Of course, the government must regulate because the conditions of a monopoly but Veikkaus is pretty high regulated including spin delays, lack of autoplay, poor game selection, poor returns, player can't even deposit to Veikkaus at night. There are no such restrictions under the MGA or Estonian license, and from a player's perspective it has been good that the government has not found ways to prevent gambling abroad.

In the reform of the gambling laws early 2020s, they tried everything they could to strengthen the monopoly. For example, they created a "block list" where casinos, that continue to advertise in Finland should to be banned and after that banks operating in Finland should have to block money transfers. Well, the system in question has been in use for about 4 years and in that time, not a single real casino has been blocked, even though marketing has continued largely as before perhaps the only visible change was changing the language to English.

Since Finnish players have had a good situation meaning freedom to choose when it comes to licenses, I don't see anything good in a national license. From a societal perspective, a gaming license is the only right solution in today's market economy but for those who play regularly, it brings very few benefits.

There is no problem with regulation if it is done smartly but unfortunately, Finland is a model country of overregulation and the upcoming license will regulate in much the same way as in Sweden, I guess even more. We can ask Swedish players which they would rather have, the current situation or go back to the time before the gaming license. I'm guessing many players answer the latter option.

Because Finland taxes heavily, RTPs will drop significantly under a national license compared to the current situation, where players have been able to choose the casinos with the best returns from different licenses.

The government is at least trying a trick where even the winnings of EU casinos outside the national license would become taxable and this is a bad stuff if you try to circumvent the upcoming license.
The view of the tax authorities in Finland is this: For example Curacao winnings, you should pay taxes on them even if you haven't withdrawn a single cent to your bank account. Winnings from a single game round are taxable income, losing rounds cannot be deducted. This is also a big joke and reflects the regulations in this country very well: These don't make any sense.

I haven't seen the contents of the gaming license, apparently the legal package is still being processed. But I wouldn't be surprised if there are completely absurd things in there that have nothing to do with common sense.

 

[ternur]

Not a huge fan of the Finnish gambling framework reform either.

As @anddi32 correctly stated above, this will likely have an overall negative impact for players (in form of reduced rtp to cover costs, enshittification of play mechanics in the name of reducing gambling related harm etc.).

The most troubling aspect of the reform imo is the broader scope of taxes on winnings. Gambling winnings from providers licensed within the EU/EEA are currently tax-free for the players. In principal, this will remain in effect after the reform. But with a caveat: if a game is “made playable” in Finland, then the players’ winnings will be taxable if the service provider doesn't have a license in Finland.

It also doesn't help, that the definition of “making a game playable” in Finland is not entirely clear based on the legislative drafting material of the gambling reform.

The taxation issue is a bad choice in its current form, and not completely problem free from the EU legislation stand point.

Also, the EU is seriously considering an EU iGaming tax on top of the national gambling taxation framework. This would be another step to drive traffic more to unlicensed markets. This kind of broader shift toward fiscal harmonisation in the online gambling sector would be no doubt a huge step backward in the EU market and have negative consequences for both players and operators.

One thing I find positive about the reform, is the reliance of modern ID verification systems for KYC.