The Netherlands’ licensed gambling market shrank to €4.1bn in 2025, down from an inflation-adjusted €4.5bn the previous year, as online casino and sports betting revenue fell sharply under new player-protection rules. The figures, published by regulator Kansspelautoriteit (KSA) in its annual market scan alongside a half-yearly monitoring report for the first six months of 2026, mark one of the clearest signs yet that the Dutch online channel is contracting under the weight of deposit limits and higher taxation.
What happened
The Dutch regulator released the figures on Thursday 29 October in an update on the state of the Dutch gambling market, alongside its half-yearly monitoring report on remote gambling covering the first six months of 2026.
Gross gaming revenue across land-based and online products came to €4.1bn last year, down from an inflation-adjusted €4.5bn in 2024.
The online segment absorbed the bulk of the decline.
Total online GGR fell to €1.20bn for 2025, compared with €1.52bn a year earlier, a fall of 21%, with online casino revenue dropping 18.2% to €947m, while online sports betting fell 30.2% to €254m against €364m in 2024.
Land-based gambling proved more resilient by comparison.
KSA attributed the overall decline chiefly to the drop in online GGR, with sports betting falling 30.2 per cent and land-based venue GGR down 4.7 per cent, while Holland Casino bucked the trend by growing GGR 2.8 per cent, mainly through slots rather than table games.
Tax policy compounded the squeeze on operator margins.
Gambling tax rose from 30.5% to 34.2% in 2025, which explains why total tax receipts of €1.05bn fell less sharply than revenue.
The regulator also flagged a worrying side effect of its own deposit-limit policy.
In its view, one possible explanation for shifting account numbers is that some players open several accounts to get around per-account deposit limits.
Treatment data cited in the report also show that over 14% more people were in care for gambling addiction in 2025 than in 2024.
The monitoring report painted a more mixed picture for early 2026. Online account numbers rose through the first half of the year, which KSA linked partly to the men’s football World Cup rather than genuine market growth. The channelisation rate, measuring the share of gambling spend captured by licensed operators, improved
from 54% to 59%
over the same period, though that still leaves a substantial share of online spend flowing to unlicensed sites.
Why it matters
The scale of the contraction confirms that the Netherlands’ 2024 reforms have done more than trim excess from the Dutch gambling market; they have reshaped it. A 21% drop in online GGR in a single year is a material shift for any regulated European jurisdiction, and it puts licensed operators’ commercial models under sustained pressure at the same time as their tax burden has risen.
For affiliates and performance marketers, the KSA’s own channelisation data is the more telling number. A legal market capturing only around 54-59% of online spend in the period under review means a significant volume of Dutch searches and traffic are still being satisfied by unlicensed operators outside the regulated ecosystem. That creates a narrower addressable market for licensed-brand affiliate campaigns, even as it underlines the commercial logic for channel partners to steer clear of unlicensed listings that carry compliance and reputational risk.
The bigger picture
The Netherlands joins a growing list of European markets where tighter consumer-protection rules are visibly denting reported GGR, even as regulators maintain that the measures are working as intended on player numbers. KSA’s own data shows that participation has not collapsed;
approximately 94 per cent of people who gamble do so exclusively through legal providers,
but those who remain in the regulated channel appear to be spending markedly less per head. That dynamic echoes concerns raised elsewhere in Europe about the gap between deposit-limit policy intentions and measurable displacement to the black market.
The timing is notable too, landing in the same week that Dutch authorities handed a record €37m fine to EOD Code, reinforcing the picture of a regulator simultaneously tightening enforcement and absorbing the revenue consequences of its own 2024 reform package. For operators weighing further investment in the Dutch market, the combination of shrinking legal online revenue, rising tax rates and an expanding compliance burden adds up to a tougher commercial environment than existed before the reforms took effect.
Sources
- CasinoBeats – Ksa market scan: Dutch licensed gambling market shrinks to €4.1bn in 2025
- SBC News – Dutch gambling market still adjusting to 2024 reforms
- Soloazar – Dutch Gambling Market Shrank 2025 Due to Online Decline
- iGamingToday – Dutch Gambling Revenue Shrinks as Channelization Rate Falls to 59%
- Gaming.net – Dutch Regulator Reports Licensed Gambling Market Shrank in 2025
Leave a Reply