Gambling licences, explained

Terms you will meet

Grey market

Industry shorthand for gambling offered into a country by an operator licensed somewhere else, where the target country has no licensing regime for that product or has not clearly banned it or acted against it. It sits between a 'white' (locally licensed) market and a 'black' market where the activity is plainly illegal and enforced against. In Great Britain there is no grey market in law: offering remote gambling used in Great Britain without a Gambling Commission licence is a criminal offence under sections 33 and 36 of the Gambling Act 2005.

White-label arrangement

A white label is a branded gambling website run under someone else's licence: the licensed operator provides the games, accounts and payments, and the partner supplies the brand and marketing. In Great Britain, the Gambling Commission says the licensee is always the party offering the gambling, stays fully responsible for compliance on every white-label site, and cannot pass that responsibility on; the partner cannot offer gambling itself without its own licence. The Commission has warned that unlicensed businesses may use white labels to reach British customers, and expects licensees to check partners carefully and keep a single view of each customer across all their brands. In some offshore systems the term instead describes brands trading under another company's licence or sub-licence with much less direct regulatory scrutiny.

B2C and B2B licences

A B2C (business-to-consumer) licence covers a company that takes bets or stakes from the public, while a B2B (business-to-business) licence covers suppliers whose games, platforms or software are used by those consumer-facing operators. In Great Britain, operators hold, for example, a remote casino or betting operating licence, and suppliers of gambling software need a separate gambling software operating licence. Malta's equivalents are the Gaming Service licence (B2C) and the Critical Gaming Supply licence (B2B). Other regulators, such as Kahnawake (Casino Software Provider Authorization) and Tobique, make the same split.

Master licence and sub-licence

In a master-licence system the government licenses a small number of companies, which then grant 'sub-licences' to other operators to run gambling sites under their umbrella. Curaçao worked this way under its 1993 offshore gaming ordinance (the LBH): a handful of master licence holders issued hundreds of sub-licences, a practice critics said had no explicit legal basis and left the operators behind sites largely unidentified. The new National Ordinance on Games of Chance (LOK) came into force on 24 December 2024 and replaced this with direct licensing by the Curaçao Gaming Authority, with transitional provisional licences for existing holders.

Point-of-consumption tax

A point-of-consumption tax charges gambling duty according to where the customer lives rather than where the operator is based. The UK moved Remote Gaming Duty, General Betting Duty and Pool Betting Duty to this basis from 1 December 2014 under the Finance Act 2014, so any operator anywhere in the world pays UK duty on profits from customers who usually live in the UK. Remote Gaming Duty rose from 21% to 40% of profits from 1 April 2026, as announced at Budget 2025, and a new 25% remote betting rate within General Betting Duty is due from 1 April 2027.

National self-exclusion scheme

A national self-exclusion scheme lets a person block themselves from many or all licensed gambling operators in a country with one request, instead of contacting each operator separately. Great Britain's online scheme is GAMSTOP: every online operator licensed by the Gambling Commission has had to take part since 31 March 2020, and registered users are kept out of all GB-licensed gambling websites and apps for the period they choose. Other countries run their own schemes, such as Spelpaus (Sweden), ROFUS (Denmark), CRUKS (Netherlands), OASIS (Germany) and RGIAJ (Spain). A scheme only covers operators licensed in that country.