Some fresh EU/UK regulatory news – higher taxes, tighter rules, more offshore?

[Valge]

Hi all,
I’ve been following some of the recent regulatory/tax changes in Europe and thought I’d drop a short roundup here – curious how this looks from a player point of view.

UK – big tax hike on online gambling​

The UK government has now confirmed a pretty brutal increase in online gambling taxes:

• From April 2026, Remote Gaming Duty on online casino will jump from 21% to 40%.
• From April 2027, remote betting duty on sports will go up to 25%.
• At the same time, the 10% bingo duty will be scrapped.

The UK budget office expects this to raise around £1.1bn extra per year once it’s fully in place.

Unsurprisingly, the bigger UK-exposed groups (Entain, Evoke etc.) are already saying they’ll have to react: lower RTPs, fewer promos, trimming product, cutting jobs, that kind of thing.

Offshore share in Europe keeps growing​

At the same time, new estimates say roughly 27% of Europe’s online gambling GGR is now offshore, around €18bn, with a forecast of ~€23bn by 2030.

Reasons are pretty obvious:

• more aggressive bonuses and higher RTP/odds offshore
• stricter KYC/affordability checks on the licensed side
• Lots of casual players don’t even realise they’re on an offshore site

For example: In the Netherlands, the regulator now reckons less than half of online spend stays with licensed sites – the rest leaks to illegal ones.
In Germany, with the €1 slot spin cap and the 5.3% turnover tax, trade bodies put legal online slots channeling somewhere around 20–40%. The rest is going to .coms.

Do you think these kinds of measures genuinely protect players, or just make the licensed offer so unattractive that serious volume ends up offshore anyway?

 

[SpinUk]

The latter but they will be coming with player-side legislation for the offshores soon, mark my words.

 

[Eddyman55]

It will hit the slots in the bookies big time. Every bookies in UK have 4 FOB betting slots terminals. The bookies where opening different outlets just to get the machines in. They where making more money out off the slots than the horses . Lol. It's that bad entain who owns Ladbrokes are selling all their shops in Northern Ireland to a rival firm from southern Ireland. In happening in England too. Paddy power buying betfred outlets. They are trying to bring a law in that states you have to have a membership off a bookies to gamble on their premises. It's gonna steer punters to dodgey unlicensed casinos .