Gambling regulation in Gibraltar

Who regulates gambling in Gibraltar, and who does not

Gibraltar has no gambling “commission”. Three entities share the work.

The Licensing Authority

Section 4 of the Gambling Act 2025 makes the Minister the licensing authority; section 5 gives it one job, determining licence applications.

The Gambling Commissioner

Appointed under section 6. Section 7 makes him the supervisor: regulating licence holders, monitoring compliance, enforcing. Player complaints go here.

The Gambling Division

The staff carrying out delegated functions for both, inside the Ministry of Justice Trade and Industry. Its site, gamblingdivision.gov.gi (opens official website), publishes the register, guidance, warnings and the complaints route.

The Gambling Act 2005 (opens official website) is marked Repealed on the statute portal. The Gambling Act 2025 (opens official website) commenced on 1 April 2026 for every provision except sections 55 to 77, the Part 5 approval regime for regulated individuals, which is not in force.

What is licensed, and the three names each licence carries

The Division regulates both remote (online) and land based commercial gambling conducted in or from Gibraltar, including society lotteries and charitable raffles; the Government lottery and genuine free prize draws sit outside its remit. Section 17 adds two activities new in this Act: advertising or marketing of gambling, and owners of more than 25% of a relevant company. Under section 38 one licence may authorise either remote or non-remote gambling, not both.

No official mapping between the three vocabularies was located. Label frequencies that day, in the order above: 28, 24, 19, 3, 2 and one — label counts, not holder counts.

Who needs a licence, and what one does not reach

Section 26 creates the general prohibition: nobody may carry on regulated activities in or from Gibraltar unless licensed or exempt. Licensing is tied to presence — a holder that is a legal person with a registered office must have it in Gibraltar, and sections 39 and 40 require a substantive presence judged on equipment located there, jobs maintained and tax accruing to Government, with no numeric threshold set.

The territorial point. A Gibraltar licence authorises the holder’s business in or from Gibraltar; it does not establish that the holder may serve consumers where you live. The Commissioner’s own warnings say operators facing the United Kingdom market are dual licensed in Gibraltar and the UK, and tell readers to check both regulators’ websites. One operator may also hold licences from different jurisdictions for different products.

The official register, and the exact way to read it

Section 14 requires the Commissioner to maintain a register, but publication is discretionary: he may publish it as he considers appropriate. What is published is a three-column table with no header cells — sequence number, registered company name beside a link to that holder’s Approved Brands document, and one or more of the six labels. It held 59 rows on 18 September 2026.

1. Open the register and use find-on-page

   Register of Licence Holders (opens official website). No search box or filter exists; the only form controls are accessibility options. Use Ctrl+F on Windows, Cmd+F on Mac.

2. Search the registered company name, not the brand

   Take it from the site’s terms and conditions or footer; searching the brand you know often returns nothing.

3. Open the Approved Brands document beside that row

   That PDF is the only place the brand list, the “RGL No.” licence numbers and a “Content as from” date appear. A row found this way records a licence; it is not a recommendation or a safety verdict.

Tested on 18 September 2026: the register fetched with a query string appended returned the same 39,230 bytes as the bare URL. There is no linkable search and no per-operator page.

Status, dates and domains: what this register omits

There are no status values, so there is nothing to interpret. The register has no status column, and the Division publishes no vocabulary of status values at all. Nothing on it distinguishes a licence in good standing from one under suspension, so any site showing a Gibraltar “licence status” took it from somewhere else. Nor is there a last-updated date anywhere on the Division’s site. Most Approved Brands documents do print a “Content as from” date — fourteen of fifteen sampled on 18 September 2026 — and that line, not the table, is the best currency signal available.

What Gibraltar requires of licence holders

The duties sit in two places: Schedule 2 of the 2025 Act, and the Generic Code of 2012, still current guidance though written under the repealed Act. Schedule 2 sets conditions of holding a licence, not consumer rights.

• Minimum ages are split: at least 16 for a lottery, at least 18 for gambling of any other description. A blanket “18 and over” is wrong for lotteries here.
• Vetting and registration. Nobody may gamble until the customer-registration requirements are satisfied, and vetting data must be kept for the relationship plus six years.
• Other regulators’ codes are imported. A holder must comply with responsible-gambling codes issued by the Commissioner and by the competent authority in any comparable jurisdiction where it does business.

The Guidance page (opens official website) settles the currency question: the Codes of Practice issued under the previous Gambling Act remain in force until new Codes are issued by the Gambling Commissioner. So the Generic Code v1.0.2012 (opens official website) is live guidance citing a repealed Act, and its modality is permissive: holders are expected to act, not required to. It expects a facility to set daily deposit, time or gambling limits, but prescribes no level. One hard figure survives: where age cannot be established within 72 hours of a first deposit, the account should be suspended or cancelled with stakes returned. A draft replacement was out for consultation (opens official website) until 9 October 2026 and is not in force.

Self-exclusion: operator level, and only operator level

No Gibraltar-operated self-exclusion scheme could be verified from official sources as at 18 September 2026. That is what the sources show, not proof that none exists, but the evidence is direct: a word-level search of the full 157-page Gambling Act 2025 returns zero occurrences of self-exclusion in any spelling, and zero of GAMSTOP. It is a code obligation on each operator, and the Generic Code limits it to those matters under the control of the operator — so excluding yourself at one Gibraltar-licensed site does nothing at another. Self-exclusion schemes sets out which regulators run a central one.

Complaints: who can actually decide

Gibraltar departs from the usual pattern. Most regulators say they do not resolve individual disputes; this Commissioner does determine them, issuing a Final Decision the page calls final subject to any decision by the courts. But he has no formal power to order consumer redress on his own volition, and may ask a court to consider it — a decision in your favour is not a payment order.

1. Exhaust the operator’s procedure first

   His stated expectations, not statutory deadlines: acknowledgement in two or three working days, a response within a week, escalation after two weeks.

2. Check he will accept it

   Four conditions must all be met: you can show grounds; it concerns a Gibraltar remote licence holder; the operator’s procedure has been exhausted; and it is not already answered by his published advice.

3. Send the Complaint Resolution Request Form by email

   Complete it in full and email it to [email protected]; telephone complaints are not taken. Take the current form from the Complaints page (opens official website), not the Contact page, which lists only the licensing mailbox.

What the Commissioner publishes about enforcement

Two lists matter. Consumer Warnings carries dated entries about sites falsely claiming Gibraltar licensing; twenty carried an “Information provided as at” stamp on 18 September 2026, from 31 March 2016 to 7 January 2026. Public Statements lists thirteen items dated 18 February 2022 to 9 June 2026, predominantly regulatory settlements for anti-money-laundering deficiencies; the individual pages were not retrieved, so no amounts or findings appear here.

One warning repays reading. In an entry dated 5 June 2025 the Commissioner addressed affiliate sites carrying a “Not on Gamstop” banner, advising that they drive UK consumers towards unregulated markets and appropriate legitimate operators’ brands, and stating: Customers are advised not to use any affiliate site that carries the ‘Not on Gamstop’ heading. The list records what he has actively noticed, so absence from it proves nothing.

Part 8 names five sanctions — administrative penalties, a public statement, a cease and desist order, a temporary suspension order and a prohibition order — so publication is itself a formal sanction. Penalty ceilings were not read. Schedule 8 preserves the repealed Act for matters begun before repeal, so older settlements were decided under it.

The mistakes specific to checking a Gibraltar licence

• Going to the Gibraltar Regulatory Authority. It has no gambling remit and no gambling register.
• Searching the brand name, then concluding there is no licence. Brands sit inside each row’s Approved Brands document, which still does not establish which website is operated under them.
• Reading a row as proof of a current licence. There is no status column, no expiry date and no date on the page.
• Citing the Gambling Act 2005. It is repealed, though one Government page still cites it.

Primary sources

Each link below goes to the issuing authority’s own website. Where a page could not be retrieved by our automated checks, that is stated rather than hidden.

• Gibraltar Gambling Commissioner Code of Practice for the Gambling Industry — The Generic Code v1.0.2012
  Visibly stale but still the operative code. Date taken from its own version history (first published 13/12/2008, amended 10/10/2012). It cross-references the repealed Gambling Act 2005, names industry bodies as they stood in 2012 and prints superseded contact addresses that must not be published as live routes. Its player-protection wording is permissive — licence holders are expected to, not required to — and self-exclusion under it is limited to matters under the operator's control. A draft replacement was out for consultation until 9 October 2026 and is not in force.
  Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
• Gibraltar Regulatory Authority Gibraltar Regulatory Authority (homepage)
  Included to correct the most common factual error about Gibraltar: the GRA does not regulate gambling. Its own homepage lists communications, data protection, broadcasting, postal, competition, higher education and cyber security, with zero occurrences of gambling or gaming.
  Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
• Government of Gibraltar — Gibraltar Laws Gambling Act 2005 — legislation entry (status: Repealed)
  The official record that the 2005 Act is marked REPEALED. Useful precisely because other official Gibraltar pages still cite it as current law.
  Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
• Government of Gibraltar — Gibraltar Laws Gambling Act 2025 — legislation entry
  Linked from the official Getting Licensed page. Records the amending Gambling (Amendment) Act 2026 (2026-12) with effect from 1 April 2026.
  Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
• Government of Gibraltar — Gibraltar Laws Gambling Act 2025 (Act No. 2026-04), consolidated
  A 157-page PDF: it returns HTTP 200 but as binary that HTML-to-markdown fetchers cannot read, so any re-verification needs a PDF text extractor. Part 5 (sections 55 to 77), the regime for regulated individuals, is expressly excluded from the 1 April 2026 commencement and is not in force. A word-level search of the full text returns zero occurrences of self-exclusion in any spelling.
  Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
• Government of Gibraltar — Gibraltar Laws Legislations index — gambling topic
  Lists Gibraltar's gambling instruments from 1958 to 2026. Two passes counted the instruments differently and neither count was derived reliably, so publish no instrument count. Several named instruments, including the fees regulations, were seen only as index entries and not fetched.
  Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
• HM Government of Gibraltar — Finance Centre Regulatory environment
  Stale and contradicted by the regulator's own site. It still states that all gambling operations in Gibraltar require licensing under the Gambling Act 2005, which is repealed, and it lists the Gibraltar Regulatory Authority alongside the Gambling Commissioner. It shows no last-updated date. Included as evidence of the conflict, not as a statement of current law.
  Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
• HM Government of Gibraltar — Finance Centre Remote Gambling (finance, gaming and regulations)
  Carries no legislative reference of its own and directs readers to the Gambling Division site.
  Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
• HM Government of Gibraltar — Gambling Commissioner Complaint Resolution Request Form (CRRF) V 1.0.10
  The form a player must complete and email to the Commissioner. The filename embeds a version number, so this URL will break when the form is revised; link readers to the Complaints page and let them click through.
  Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
• HM Government of Gibraltar — Gambling Commissioner Complaints (Gambling Division, Gibraltar)
  Unusually candid about its own limits: the Commissioner will not take a complaint by telephone, will not normally look at events more than two years old, does not have a formal power to order consumer redress on his own volition, and is largely displaced for gambling taking place in the UK since 1st November 2014 by the UK ADR system. The published acceptance test refers to remote licence holders; whether non-remote complaints are accepted is unaddressed.
  Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
• HM Government of Gibraltar — Gambling Commissioner Consumer Warnings
  Warnings about sites falsely asserting Gibraltar regulation. The page itself carries no last-updated date; the date recorded here is the newest of its 20 per-entry Information provided as at stamps, which run back to 31 March 2016.
  Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
• HM Government of Gibraltar — Gambling Division About Us
  Places the Division within the Ministry of Justice Trade and Industry and states that it covers both remote (online) and land based commercial gambling, excluding the Government lottery and genuine free prize draws.
  Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
• HM Government of Gibraltar — Gambling Division Administrative Guidelines — Duties and Fees (v2)
  Date taken from the document's own version-control block (first release 30.04.2026, amended 12.06.2026). It explains the licensing year and payment mechanics but states that the Regulations prevail; the fee schedules themselves were not read, so no Gibraltar fee figure is verified. The filename embeds a version marker and will break on revision.
  Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
• HM Government of Gibraltar — Gambling Division AML/CFT/CPF
  Partial read: retrieved for a keyword check only, and its contents were not analysed. Do not attribute any substantive AML rule to this page.
  Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
• HM Government of Gibraltar — Gambling Division Approved Testing Facilities
  The table numbers rows 1 to 11 but one number covers two entities, so it lists 12 facilities under 11 numbers as at 18 September 2026. Publish it that way or publish no number.
  Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
• HM Government of Gibraltar — Gambling Division Consultations
  Recorded in this dossier's verification pass rather than by the original researcher. It carries a Consultation on the Draft Safer Gambling Code of Conduct with a 9 October 2026 response deadline. The draft is not law and must never be described as a current requirement; even the draft keeps self-exclusion at operator level.
  Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
• HM Government of Gibraltar — Gambling Division Contact
  Publishes the Europort address, a single licensing email address and a telephone number that conflicts with the number printed in the Division's own duties and fees guidance. The conflict was reproduced independently and is recorded, not resolved.
  Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
• HM Government of Gibraltar — Gambling Division Gambling Division (Gibraltar) – home
  Sets out Gibraltar's three-part structure in the regulator's own words: the Licensing Authority who is the designated Minister, and the gambling regulator who is the Gambling Commissioner. No page on this site displays a last-updated date; the footer shows only a 2026 copyright.
  Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
• HM Government of Gibraltar — Gambling Division Gambling Division Online Applications
  Despite the hostname beginning with register-, this is an applicant-facing licence application portal, not a public register. It opens at an email-verification screen; nothing beyond it was accessed and nothing was submitted. Do not link consumers here.
  Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
• HM Government of Gibraltar — Gambling Division Getting Licensed
  States that holders licensed under the Gambling Act 2005 are deemed to be licensed under the Gambling Act 2025 and that a transition period runs from 1 April 2026 for six months. Existing holders are not required to re-apply, contrary to some trade commentary. Nothing located states how long a Gibraltar licence lasts.
  Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
• HM Government of Gibraltar — Gambling Division Guidance – Gambling Division (Gibraltar)
  Carries the regulator's own savings statement: the Codes of Practice issued under the previous Gambling Act remain in force until new Codes have been issued by the Gambling Commissioner. It also links a Remote Technical and Operating Standards document that was not independently fetched and must not be cited as verified.
  Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
• HM Government of Gibraltar — Gambling Division Public Statements
  An index of 13 linked items dated 18 February 2022 to 09 June 2026; the date recorded here is the newest item, not a page date. Only titles, dates and URLs were read; the individual statement pages were not fetched, so penalty amounts and findings are unverified.
  Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
• HM Government of Gibraltar — Gambling Division Register of Licence Holders
  A static HTML table with no search, no filter and no working query-string deep link: a query-string variant was fetched and came back byte-identical to the bare URL. It shows no licence number, issue date, expiry date, status or approved domain, and carries no date of its own. Licence numbers and brand names appear only inside each row's linked Approved Brands PDF, most of which print a Content as from date that is the best currency signal available.
  Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable