Malta Gaming Authority

Last reviewed: 18 September 2026MawarSlotResmi Editorial Desk

In short

Gaming provided from Malta, to a person in Malta, or through a Maltese entity is licensed by the Malta Gaming Authority. Malta is unusual in publishing a dedicated URL Checker, so its registers can answer “is this website covered?”. They cannot tell you the licence status: status is a search filter, not a result field, and the value appears only on the operator’s seal. A register record is regulatory information, not a recommendation.

Regulator: Malta Gaming Authority (opens official website)
Territory: Gaming from Malta, to a Maltese person, or through a Maltese entity.
Domains published?: Yes — a URL Checker, and “Website Urls” on the seal.
Licence status: Not a result field. Only on the record’s seal.
Self-exclusion: No national register; it binds one licensee.
Who decides a dispute: A registered ADR entity, not the Authority.

The authority, and what it authorises

The Malta Gaming Authority splits its site between a Player Hub and a Licensee Hub, and most of the verification machinery sits in the Licensee Hub. The framework is the Gaming Act (Cap. 583) and the subsidiary legislation the MGA indexes itself; nothing here is quoted from it.

Gaming Service Licence (B2C): “A business-to-consumer licence to offer or carry out a gaming service” — what a gambling website holds.
Critical Gaming Supply Licence (B2B): Covers the material elements of a game, or the software processing essential regulatory records. Its holder supplies operators and does not hold your account.

Fees are annual, paid upfront in advance and non-refundable — about fees, not a term. No MGA page reached states a licence duration. The Authority’s own numbering drifts too: S.L. 583.3 and 583.6 on its legislation index, 583.03 and 583.06 elsewhere.

Authorisations also carry a game type shown in register results, from Type 1 — chance against the house on a random generator — to Type 4, controlled skill games under regulation 8 of the Gaming Authorisations Regulations.

Who needs an MGA licence, and what it does not cover

The scope sentence is narrower than the licence’s reputation: “A B2C Gaming Service Licence is required whenever a Maltese or EU/EEA entity wishes to offer a gaming service from Malta, to a Maltese person or through a Maltese legal entity.” Whether such an operator may lawfully accept a customer where you live is your local law’s question, not one the MGA answers.

Malta also recognises foreign authorisations. A recognition notice treats an authorisation from another EU or EEA Member State — or one offering “safeguards largely equivalent to those offered by Maltese law” — as having the same effect as an MGA one. Those entities sit in a Recognition Notice Register (opens official website) and need not appear in the Licensee Register, so checking one list alone can produce a false “not licensed”.

The official registers, and the exact instruction

The Licensee Register landing page carries two tabs, Licensee Register and URL Checker, both iframes onto separate subdomains — which is why it looks empty without JavaScript, and the only place the URL Checker’s address appears. Neither tool has a query string, so no deep link to a Malta result exists; a legacy Results.aspx address is still indexed and now returns an empty shell, so a search result can leave you reading silence as an answer.

Malta’s five surfaces, read on 18 September 2026
Tool	What it accepts
URL Checker	One field labelled URL; no status column
Licensee Register	Licensee Name, Authorisation Status, Gaming Service; no domain field
Dynamic seal	A company identifier only; never searched directly
Recognition Notice Register	Company Name or Recognition Number; blank returns all
Unauthorised URLs	Nothing — a static list; absence proves nothing

Recorded as a conflict, not resolved: the register’s own introduction says you can search it by URL; the live form has no URL field.

Enter the full address in the URL Checker
MGA URL Checker (opens official website) introduces itself: “Verify if an online gaming site is licensed by the Malta Gaming Authority by entering the URL below.” Type the address into the field labelled URL and press Search → — in full, including https://www., because it matches stored URLs.
Read past the first line of the result
It prints “URL not found in Licensee database.” even when it has matching records underneath, below a heading beginning “Closest matches containing”. One test search returned that message above a counter reading 10 of 163. Results give Company Name, URL and a Company Seal, shown as “Click to View” — the only route to a status.
Cross-check the company in the Licensee Register
Search the company named in the site’s terms and conditions under Licensee Name in the MGA Licensee Register. Cards carry Company Name, Registration Number (C ######) and Authorisation Number (MGA/<segment>/<number>/<year>, with B2C, B2B and CRP segments seen).

The status vocabulary, and where the register hides it

The “Authorisation Status” dropdown offers exactly six values, read from the live option list:

LicensedCancelledSurrenderedExpiredSuspendedVoluntary Suspended

The MGA publishes no definition of any of them. Nothing reached explains what separates Cancelled, Surrendered and Expired, or Suspended from Voluntary Suspended, and we will not invent meanings. The affirmative value is Licensed, not “Active”.
Status is a filter, not a result field. A result card shows no status at all, so finding a company here is not the same as confirming its authorisation is current — a cancelled one still has a record. See what a licence number proves.

Domain verification: the question Malta can answer

Most registers list companies and leave you to guess whether the site you are on is one. Malta binds domains to authorisations twice: the URL Checker returns the company holding an address, and the seal record carries a “Website Urls” field listing the domains an authorisation covers, alongside Status Of Licence, Licence Number and Approved ADRs. A dynamic seal is a required on-site display item, so its absence is itself a signal.

What the MGA requires licensees to do for players

Obligations sit in the Player Protection Directive (Directive 2 of 2018), whose text could not be read by machine; what follows is from the MGA pages describing it.

Responsible gambling tools, and which are actually required
Tool	Status	As the MGA describes it
Self-exclusion	Mandatory	Definite or indefinite; simple and easily accessible
Deposit or wagering limits	One of the two	Either must be offered; both is encouraged, not required
Reality checks	Mandatory	For slots, alerts that suspend play and show session information
Loss limits, time and session limits	Encouraged	Limit the money lost, or the time spent playing
Time Out / Short Break	Encouraged	As self-exclusion does, for more than 24 hours and not more than 30 days

Only one limit type is required — see deposit and loss limits.

Licensees must also document a complaints procedure “whilst establishing the expected timeframe to settle a dispute or refer the matter to the Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) entity”, and run their own Player Support team — not the Authority’s Player Support Unit. On minors: once aware a holder is underage, an operator must close the account and refund all deposits, and excess winnings are confiscated. See age verification.

Self-exclusion in Malta, and the limit that defines it

Malta requires the mechanism: licensees must always have an effective and readily available one, definite or indefinite. The MGA’s definition is site-scoped — “a tool which prevents players from gambling by blocking access to the gaming website which the player has excluded with”.

The reason you give changes the coverage. Made because of problematic gambling, the exclusion must cover all of that licensee’s brands, account or not; for other reasons, one brand only.
Your balance is not forfeited — funds can still be withdrawn, and the MGA recommends withdrawing them when requesting exclusion.
Reopening is not automatic: only once the exclusion has expired, or on the player’s request at the operator’s discretion.
Durations are not published here: the MGA presents timeframes as ones operators are encouraged to offer, and the figures sit in Directive 2 of 2018, whose text we could not extract.

Land-based exclusion is separate: a self-barring system blocking access to casinos, gaming parlours and bingo halls, run through two forms on the Self-Barring page (opens official website) — MGA-F-006 to apply, MGA-F-015 to remove auto-renewal, whose mechanics are not stated. See also self-exclusion.

Complaints: who can actually decide

The Authority receives complaints; nothing on any MGA page reached describes it as a mediator, arbitrator or ombudsman. The binding decision sits with an ADR entity — and binds both sides.

Complain to the operator first — recommended, not required
“It is strongly recommended that you actively seek to resolve your dispute directly with the operator’s support and management prior to lodging your complaint with the Malta Gaming Authority.” Describing Malta as requiring exhaustion first overstates the page. The licensee must then “inform the complainant of the results of such inquiry within ten days”, extendable by a further ten with reasons given inside the first ten.
Then choose: the Player Support Unit, or an ADR entity
A dissatisfied player may “refer such complaint and all relevant facts to the Authority’s Player Support Unit or to another Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) entity.” These are alternatives, not a ladder — a structure particular to Malta.
Lodge it in English or Maltese
The complaint form (opens official website) asks for identity details, the operator’s name and website, the disputed amount and the incident time; fictitious details or abusive language lead to immediate rejection. When we read it, the page carried a notice of technical difficulties with the complaint system.

What the ADR route gives you in Malta

Operators must engage an ADR entity before going live and must fully comply with its decisions; no compliance timeframe is stated.
Resolution must be offered “free of any charge to any player”.
An ADR entity’s conclusions in an arbitration or adjudication capacity “shall be binding upon both the operator and the player who referred the dispute” — binding by directive, where Great Britain binds only if the customer agrees.
Outside the Small Claims Tribunal’s competence (Cap. 380) a licensee may offer non-binding resolution, but must explain how to get a binding decision; with no ADR engagement in place, referral follows “within twenty (20) days”.

Malta keeps no approved-provider list of its own: an entity must be EU or EEA established and listed under Article 20(2) of the EU ADR Directive, and a seal’s “Approved ADRs” field shows which covers a licensee.

What the MGA publishes about enforcement

The Enforcement Register (opens official website) publishes cancellations and suspensions of authorisation and preliminary Notices of Cancellation, filterable by year, by virtue of the first proviso to Regulation 12 of the Gaming Compliance and Enforcement Regulations — which that page numbers S.L. 583.06. Entries observed span 2013 to 2025, with none for 2026: whether that is a publishing lag or an absence of actions, the page does not say.

The Unauthorised URLs page lists domains the MGA states it has no connection with, and says any claim of an MGA licence on them is false and misleading. It is static, not a search tool — absence from it proves nothing. In a notice dated 16 July 2026 the Authority said it had observed a pattern of websites impersonating MGA-licensed operators, which is why the address-bar check matters more than the badge.

Mistakes specific to checking a Malta licence

Treating “URL not found in Licensee database.” as the answer

It prints that line and lists close matches underneath. Scroll — one search showed it above 163 records.

Typing a bare domain, or reading a register card as a status

The checker matches stored full URLs, so try the https://www. form first. And a register card carries no status field.

Trusting the seal graphic, or trying to search the seal page

The graphic is served by the operator, so it proves nothing, and the seal page cannot be used as a lookup. The check that works is the address bar starting https://authorisation.mga.org.mt, with your domain in that record’s “Website Urls” list.

What we could not verify for Malta

Licence duration — absent from both licence FAQs and the legislation index.
A statutory minimum gambling age. The number 18 appears on one MGA page inside a marketing-conduct rule; legislation.mt returned metadata only for the Player Protection Regulations on every attempt.
The meaning of the six status values, and what the CRP segment of an authorisation number stands for — both observed, neither explained officially.
Self-exclusion durations and cooling-off periods, which sit in a directive that downloads but whose text is not machine-extractable.
What the Player Support Unit does with a complaint, land-based self-barring mechanics, the Gaming Service dropdown values, the Recognition Notice Register’s result fields, and the MGA email addresses behind its obfuscation layer.

How we handle this is in the methodology; the claimed-but-absent licence pattern is in fake and misrepresented licences.

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.

Government of Malta Gaming Authorisations Regulations (S.L. 583.5)
Only landing metadata came back — title, ELI identifier and a point-in-time date of 16/08/2018 — with no regulation text extracted. Nothing here is quoted from it. This is the instrument a human must read to settle the licence duration and the suspension and cancellation provisions.
Checked 18 September 2026 · uncertain
Government of Malta Gaming Player Protection Regulations (S.L. 583.8)
Re-tested independently and still returns metadata only, with a point-in-time date of 16/08/2018. This is why no statutory minimum gambling age for Malta is stated on this site: the number 18 could not be read from the instrument, and the MGA's own pages do not state it.
Checked 18 September 2026 · uncertain
Government of Malta Gaming Player Protection Regulations (S.L. 583.8) — PDF
Same failure mode as the other legislation.mt attempts: metadata only, no substantive text.
Checked 18 September 2026 · uncertain
Malta Gaming Authority Applications — Malta Gaming Authority
A navigation hub listing six application categories, with no substantive detail.
Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
Malta Gaming Authority Contact Us — Malta Gaming Authority
Address, telephone +356 2546 9000 and office hours are confirmed. The email addresses are rewritten by Cloudflare email obfuscation and cannot be read as plain text from the served page. The page asks players not to use the general enquiries address for casino complaints and to use the online complaint form instead.
Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
Malta Gaming Authority Directive 2 of 2018 — Player Protection Directive (index page)
An index page: it links the directive PDF and carries no substantive content of its own.
Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
Malta Gaming Authority Dynamic Seal Of Authorisation — licensee chooser (company GUID without the details flag)
Returns a 'Please Select Licensee' chooser, showing that one company GUID can map to several authorisations. This particular URL was not re-tested in the independent verification pass.
Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
Malta Gaming Authority Dynamic Seal Of Authorisation — licensee detail view
Opens only with an internal 32-hex company GUID, which is why it is documented here rather than offered as a lookup. It carries Malta's strongest anti-spoofing instruction: make sure the address of the site you land on starts with https://authorisation.mga.org.mt. The field labels recorded from it are indicative, not exhaustive — an independent re-fetch saw labels the first pass missed and did not see one it listed.
Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
Malta Gaming Authority Dynamic Seal Of Authorisation — verification page called without a company parameter
Recorded because the failure is the finding: fetched without a company GUID the page returns 'Error occured - MGA' and 'Value cannot be null. Parameter name: company'. The seal page is the end of a verification journey, not an entry point — a consumer cannot type a domain, company name or licence number into it.
Checked 18 September 2026 · broken
Malta Gaming Authority Enforcement Register — Malta Gaming Authority
Publishes cancellations and suspensions of authorisation and preliminary Notices of Cancellation, filterable by year; entries observed run 2013 to 2025, with none for 2026. The page names its statutory basis in full — the Gaming Compliance and Enforcement Regulations — and writes the number as 'S.L. 583.06', while the MGA's own legislation index writes 'S.L. 583.6'.
Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
Malta Gaming Authority FAQs — Malta Gaming Authority
The FAQ index. Recorded for completeness only: the self-exclusion cooling-off figures once attributed to it came from a domain search surface rather than from a page opened directly, and remain unverified.
Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
Malta Gaming Authority Home — Malta Gaming Authority
No page-level last-updated date; the footer reads 'Copyright © 2026 Malta Gaming Authority All Rights Reserved.' The site also answers on the apex mga.org.mt.
Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
Malta Gaming Authority Licensee Register — Malta Gaming Authority
The landing page a consumer arrives at, with two tabs: 'Licensee Register' and 'URL Checker'. Both tabs are iframes onto separate subdomains, so a plain HTTP fetch returns essentially only the two headings — the tools have to be used in a browser. This page is the only place the URL Checker's real address is exposed to the public.
Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
Malta Gaming Authority Lodge a Complaint — Malta Gaming Authority
The page says 'It is strongly recommended that you actively seek to resolve your dispute directly with the operator' before lodging a complaint — a recommendation, not a precondition. Time-sensitive: at the check date it carried a notice of technical difficulties with the online complaint system, and the follow-up email address was rendered through Cloudflare email obfuscation and could not be read. Complaints must be in English or Maltese.
Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
Malta Gaming Authority MGA Licensee Register — search application
A JavaScript application behind Cloudflare: a plain fetch returns only the shell string 'LicenseeRegisterFrontEnd'. Driven in a browser it offers exactly three fields — Licensee Name, Authorisation Status and Gaming Service — and displayed 'Last Updated: 18/09/2026 13:43', which is a data-refresh time, not a content-review date. The structural trap: Authorisation Status is a filter only and is not shown in the result cards, so a consumer who searches by name sees no licence status until they open the record's dynamic seal.
Checked 18 September 2026 · js-only
Malta Gaming Authority MGA Publishes Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) Directive
The announcement states 'This Directive is applicable as of 3 December 2018.' The directive number does not appear in the page text at all — it appears only in the linked filename, which also carries a 'v2' suffix, so this 2018 announcement may not describe the current version. The page does not say whether ADR outcomes bind, whether court remains open, or whether ADR is free to players.
Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
Malta Gaming Authority MGA URL Checker — verify whether a gaming site is MGA-licensed
Malta's genuine official domain-verification tool, on its own subdomain; a plain fetch returns only the string 'UrlChecker'. Displayed 'Last Updated: 18/09/2026 13:36'. Two limitations to pass on: it prints 'URL not found in Licensee database.' even when it has matching records to list underneath, so reading only the first line produces false negatives; and it has no query string, so there is no deep link — it must be described as an interactive form.
Checked 18 September 2026 · js-only
Malta Gaming Authority Player Hub — Malta Gaming Authority
Describes the MGA's Player Support Unit as 'open to receiving complaints from all individuals' and defines what the Authority treats as a complaint. No last-updated date.
Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
Malta Gaming Authority Player Protection — Malta Gaming Authority (Licensee Hub)
States that once a player has exhausted the internal process, operators 'must offer the opportunity to refer any dispute to a registered ADR entity', and names the Player Protection Directive (Directive 2 of 2018) as the governing instrument. The licensee's own 'Player Support team' here is a different thing from the MGA's 'Player Support Unit'. This page is also the only place on any fetched MGA page where the figure 18 appears, and it appears inside a marketing-conduct rule rather than as a stated statutory minimum age. No last-updated date.
Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
Malta Gaming Authority Player Protection Directive (Directive 2 of 2018) — full text PDF
Downloaded successfully (about 650 kB) but the text is not machine-extractable: the PDF uses subset-embedded fonts with hex glyph IDs and no usable ToUnicode mapping. No clause of it is cited anywhere here, and its current version could not be confirmed from the document itself. Self-exclusion durations, cooling-off periods, complaint timeframes and any age provision sit inside this document and need a human reader.
Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
Malta Gaming Authority Recognition Notice Register — Malta Gaming Authority
Searchable by Company Name or Recognition Number; a blank search returns all notices. This is a second, separate list: an entity here operates under a recognised foreign authorisation, not an MGA licence, so checking only the Licensee Register can produce a misleading 'not licensed' conclusion. The register was not driven interactively, so its result fields are undocumented.
Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
Malta Gaming Authority Regulatory Framework — legislation and regulations index
The MGA's own index of the Gaming Act (Cap. 583) and ten subsidiary instruments with their S.L. numbers. The index itself states no licence duration and no minimum age, and the instrument texts could not be read from legislation.mt.
Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
Malta Gaming Authority Remote Gaming Services — B2C licences
Lists the commercial verticals under each game type. Note the scope it states: a B2C licence is required to offer a gaming service from Malta, to a Maltese person or through a Maltese legal entity — an MGA licence does not by itself make an operator lawful where a player lives.
Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
Malta Gaming Authority Remote Gaming: Are there any mandatory responsible gambling tools which must be offered to players?
A precision frequently lost by third parties: only one of deposit or wagering limits is mandatory, with both merely 'strongly encouraged'; loss limits, session limits and time-outs are encouraged, not required. A Time Out runs 'more than 24 hours and not more than 30 days'.
Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
Malta Gaming Authority Remote Gaming: Is a self-exclusion applied across all brands operated by a Licensee? (MGA FAQ)
The most important player-protection source for Malta, and the reason Malta must not be compared to jurisdictions with a national scheme: a self-exclusion covers all brands of one licensee, and the Authority only 'encourages Licensees to emphasise with players that they should also exclude any accounts they hold with all other Licensees', pointing additionally to third-party blocking software. There is no national cross-licensee self-exclusion register.
Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
Malta Gaming Authority Remote Gaming: What happens if a minor accesses and uses the site?
Deposits are refunded and excess winnings confiscated once the operator becomes aware. The page cites no regulation and gives no age figure — no fetched MGA page states a statutory minimum gambling age for Malta.
Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
Malta Gaming Authority Remote Gaming: What is the difference between a general account closure and a self-exclusion?
The URL resolves and was fetched in the independent verification pass, correcting an earlier record that treated it as second-hand. It says an account can only be reopened once the exclusion has expired, or on the player's request at the operator's discretion. It contains no obligation on operators to confirm that a closure request was not made because of gambling problems — an obligation that was wrongly attributed to it.
Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
Malta Gaming Authority Remote Gaming: What Responsible Gambling/Player Protection content must be displayed on-site?
The seven items an MGA-licensed remote operator must display, including 'A dynamic seal or kite mark' — which is why the absence of a seal is itself a signal.
Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
Malta Gaming Authority Safer Gambling — Malta Gaming Authority (Player Hub)
Defines deposit, wagering, loss and time limits, hosts a nine-step self-assessment questionnaire as an anchor on the page, and carries the land-based self-barring description. Two cautions about the support organisations it names: the Responsible Gaming Foundation's own site carries notices of its absorption into the MGA, so it is not plainly arms-length from the regulator, and the MGA's outbound SEDQA link returned HTTP 403 and could not be checked. No last-updated date.
Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
Malta Gaming Authority Self-Barring — Malta Gaming Authority (Player Hub)
Online-oriented: it describes self-exclusion as blocking access to 'the gaming website which the player has excluded with', and publishes the Self-Barring Request Application Form (MGA-F-006) and the Self-Barring Auto-Renew Removal Form (MGA-F-015). The land-based self-barring sentence is on the Safer Gambling page, not this one. No last-updated date, and the land-based renewal mechanics are not stated anywhere.
Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
Malta Gaming Authority Unauthorised URLs — Malta Gaming Authority
A static published list of domains the MGA has actively noticed, not a search tool and not a comprehensive blacklist — absence from it proves nothing. The page carries no last-updated date; the most recent notice date observed on it was 15/09/2026.
Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
Malta Gaming Authority What are the different types of games that are licensable by the Authority?
The definitional wording for game types 1 to 4, complementary to the vertical listing on the Remote Gaming Services page.
Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
Malta Gaming Authority What is the licence fee and when is it due?
Fees are annual and payable in advance under the Gaming Licence Fee Regulations (S.L. 583.03). This is distinct from the licence's overall term, which the page does not state; no amounts are given.
Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
Malta Gaming Authority What is the process to submit a player complaint to the Authority or an ADR entity?
Presents the Authority's Player Support Unit and an ADR entity as alternative routes, and says the player 'may' refer the matter onward. It states no timeframes, does not say whether an ADR outcome binds, and does not say whether court remains open.
Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
Malta Gaming Authority What types of licences are available?
Describes the Gaming Service Licence (B2C) and the Critical Gaming Supply Licence (B2B). It states no licence duration — the widely repeated ten-year figure was not found on any MGA page that was fetched, and is not published here.
Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable

In short

The authority, and what it authorises

Who needs an MGA licence, and what it does not cover

The official registers, and the exact instruction

Enter the full address in the URL Checker

Read past the first line of the result

Cross-check the company in the Licensee Register