Gambling license: choosing the jurisdiction

A licence authorises you where it was issued. It does not decide whether the country your player sits in allows the game, and it does not make a bank or a store accept you. Those are three separate questions, and the regime is chosen against all three at once.

What the regulators ask for overlaps heavily: a company they can see through, owners whose history stands up to a check, money whose origin can be shown, software somebody has tested, and rules for players that are written down. What differs is the price of entry, the speed, and what the licence is worth to the people you need to say yes.

What every regulator asks

• A company in the right form, sometimes required to be local, with directors who meet the regulator’s conditions.
• The people behind it: owners, their sources of funds, and a check that goes past the first layer of the structure.
• The software: certification of the games and of the generator that decides their outcomes, by a laboratory the regulator recognises.
• Player rules: age checks, limits, self-exclusion, how funds are held and how complaints are answered.
• Standing duties: reporting, changes notified before they happen, and records kept for as long as the licence runs.

What a licence does not do

It does not travel with your player. Whether a person in a given country may lawfully place a bet is decided by that country, and a licence from elsewhere does not answer it in their favour.

The practical consequence is a blocked-countries list that has to be built, kept current and enforced in the product, because it is the first thing a regulator and a payment provider both look at.

Five regimes, one product

Malta

The tariff is published in full: a one-time non-refundable application fee of 5,000 euro, an annual licence fee of 25,000 euro for a gaming service, and a monthly compliance contribution with its own floor and ceiling per game type.

Curacao

New rules took effect on 24 December 2024 and only a company formed under local law with its seat there may apply. The authority aims to handle each of the two phases within eight weeks, extendable by up to four more.

Isle of Man

The commission licenses several tiers, from a full licence down to a sub-licence running on games supplied by another local holder. Its application checklist puts a payment of 5,250 pounds at filing, and the annual fees sit in a schedule of their own: from 36,750 pounds a year for a full licence up to 52,500 for a network licence.

Georgia

Permit fees sit in the law itself, as ranges: a betting house runs from 30,000 to 300,000 lari a year and a gambling club from 10,000 to 50,000, with the government setting the rate inside the range. Those are the land-based permits. The online and international permits an overseas operator actually needs are in the same law but only in its Georgian text: an international permit runs to 100,000 lari a year, an online casino permit on its own to 5,000,000.

Anjouan

The island of the Comoros issues gaming licences through an authority of its own. The authority publishes both a tariff and a register: issuance and annual renewal run to 17,828 euro each, every extra domain costs 500, and a change of ownership has to be notified from a 10% stake. The legal basis it names for itself is the 2005 legislation, the text of which is not published anywhere we could find.

Sources: the application fee, the annual fee and the compliance contribution are in the Maltese authority’s note on licence fees; the ranges in the Georgian law on licence and permit fees; the date, the eligibility rule and the eight weeks on the Curacao authority’s portal; the payment at filing in the Manx gambling commission’s application checklist, version V1.08.