El Salvador Gambling Licence 2026: LNB Canon, the .sv Domain Rule and 12 Operators

What the licence is

El Salvador does not run a conventional licensing regime. Article 7 of the Ley Orgánica de la Lotería Nacional de Beneficencia makes lottery, sports betting and online games “actividad exclusiva” of the LNB, the state lottery, and bars anyone else from running them without authorisation. The same article lets the LNB authorise third parties as operators by permit, licence, agreement, contract, concession or public-private partnership, provided there is a general interest. Everything else follows from that: the licence is a concession from a state monopoly, and the LNB is at once the regulator, a competitor and the beneficiary of the revenue.

The law was approved by the Legislative Assembly on 21 December 2021 with 63 votes and published in Diario Oficial 244 (tomo 433) the next day. It entered into force eight days after publication (art. 112). It replaced a 1960 statute. The Reglamento, Decreto Ejecutivo 16, is dated 29 June 2022. Decreto 31 amended it in August 2023, including the article that sets the canon.

What it costs

Article 52 of the law says the canon is paid after the permit is granted and before the licence is issued, and calculated from the licence term and the operator’s initial investment, with any percentage on investment or balance sheet capped at 30%. The Reglamento sets the numbers in article 14.

Charge	Amount	Source
Initial canon, declared investment up to USD 2m	USD 100,000	Reglamento art. 14
Initial canon, investment up to USD 5m	USD 200,000	Reglamento art. 14
Initial canon, investment above USD 5m	USD 250,000	Reglamento art. 14
From year two to expiry	Up to 25% of the prior year’s gross income minus prizes, paid monthly	Reglamento art. 14, as amended by Decreto 31 (2023)
Renewal of the licence	USD 25,000	Reglamento art. 19
Bond or guarantee	Amount set by the LNB per licence and renewed each year; it must run past each licence year to cover the last month’s prizes	Law art. 36; Reglamento arts 15-18
Fines	3 to 300 urban commercial-sector minimum salaries	Law art. 102

Neither text we read contains a gambling-specific tax beyond the canon. General Salvadoran taxes apply under other laws, which this page does not cover.

The annual share is the number that matters. “Gross income minus prizes” is gross gaming revenue, and the percentage is fixed in each licence resolution, with 25% as the ceiling. Set against a fixed-fee regime such as Curaçao’s EUR 47,450 a year for a B2C licence (about USD 54,900 at the EUR/USD rate of 1.1578 on our Curaçao cost page), the ceiling works out as follows.

Annual gross gaming revenue	El Salvador, at the 25% ceiling	Curaçao B2C fee, as % of GGR
USD 500,000	USD 125,000	11.0%
USD 1,000,000	USD 250,000	5.5%
USD 5,000,000	USD 1,250,000	1.1%
USD 20,000,000	USD 5,000,000	0.3%

At the 25% ceiling the two costs are equal at about USD 219,750 of annual revenue. Below that the Curaçao fee is the larger, above it the Salvadoran share is. At USD 4m of annual revenue the Salvadoran ceiling is USD 1m a year, about USD 83,300 a month, and a ten-year licence at that level would cost up to USD 9.1m in canon and share combined. These are ceilings; the LNB may set a lower percentage, and we have found no published licence resolution that shows what it has set.

One check on the schedule. The LNB’s report for June 2025 to May 2026, as carried by Yogonet on 13 August 2026, says the LNB took USD 300,000 in initial canon from three new operators. That is exactly three times USD 100,000, the lowest tier, so the schedule is being applied as written. It also implies, though the report does not say so, that all three declared investment of USD 2m or less.

The domain and territory rules

Article 40 sets two obligations on operators of internet games. They must use a dedicated site on a .sv domain for their gambling activity, and they must redirect to that site every connection from a location in El Salvador, or using a Salvadoran user account, that arrives through a site on any other domain owned or controlled by the operator, its parent or its affiliates.

Article 39(c) adds that operators carry on their activity at national level, within the territorial scope fixed in the licence. Article 45 tells the LNB to weigh, among other things, local market demand, the public revenue the operation will generate and whether the grant is “in the best interest of the citizens of El Salvador”. Article 2 states the guiding principle that every operator must contribute to the State’s social-development spending through the LNB’s charity programme.

Read together, the licence authorises a Salvadoran-facing business with a Salvadoran-domain front end. We found no provision that recognises it elsewhere, and none that creates a licence class for serving foreign markets. Whether the LNB would license an operator whose customers are all outside El Salvador is not answered by the text. An applicant who needs that answer must get it from the LNB in writing.

How the process runs

The licence follows a permit. Articles 63 to 67 fix the periods the LNB’s Compliance and Oversight Department and Board must observe.

Step	Period in the law	Article
Review of the filing; queries or move to inspection	10 working days	63
Applicant answers queries	5 to 20 working days, extendable once by up to 20	63
Admission of the application	5 days after queries are cured	64
Inspection and technology approval	Within 10 days of admission; up to 10 more, extendable by the same period	64
Department’s opinion to the Board	10 working days	66
Board resolution	10 days from the opinion	67
Payment order, canon, then the licence resolution	After the permit, on payment	52, 67

Counting every period as working days, the floor with no queries is 45 days and the ceiling on the written maximums is 105 days. Both leave out the applicant’s time to assemble the file. Article 68 lets the Board ask for more information or order further inspection before deciding, the Department’s opinion is not binding on it, and article 20 of the Reglamento suspends the clock while the LNB waits. A vendor figure of two to three months sits inside this range but covers none of those exceptions.

The file itself is heavy for an offshore vehicle. Article 12 of the Reglamento lists, for a company, certified incorporation documents whose corporate purpose is preponderantly lottery, sports betting, online games or similar, a shareholder register, and for each individual shareholder a net-worth statement showing the source of funds, two years of tax returns, a CV, links to other licensed operators, a sworn statement and a credit report. Corporate shareholders file two years of accounts, or the equivalent in their home country. Article 13 adds a ten-year viability study, an operating programme with responsible-gambling and anti-money-laundering controls, an investment plan, game rules, a technology report and, since 2023, proof of sector experience. Article 21 requires international certification of software and systems.

Control, revocation and enforcement

The licence cannot be sold. Article 57 makes every licence non-transferable and says that a change of 50% or more of the shares, any new shareholder, or any other change the LNB treats as a transfer of control requires a new licence application and payment before the change takes effect. Article 38 separately requires notice to the LNB of any change in composition, domicile, capital or ownership within ten working days.

Article 50 calls a licence a revocable privilege with no acquired rights, and says the Board’s resolution to deny, revoke, authorise, condition or restrict one admits no administrative appeal. Article 62 lists the grounds for extinction, among them two very serious infractions within a year and a year without activity. Operating without authorisation is “prohibida e ilegal” (art. 61) and a very serious infraction (art. 98).

Enforcement reaches the network. Article 16(l) lets the LNB’s Board order internet providers to block IP addresses and domains used for unauthorised games, as a precaution, a penalty or as part of its regulatory power. Reglamento article 26 routes the order through the telecommunications regulator, SIGET. Reglamento article 44 adds provisional closure and blocking of a website or platform. A site without an LNB licence that accepts Salvadoran players is therefore within reach of a block order, whatever its home licence.

Who holds licences

The LNB’s work report for June 2025 to May 2026, as published by Yogonet, says it granted three new licences for online games and sports betting, bringing the number of authorised operators to 12. The report as published does not name them. We have not seen the LNB’s own list, because the LNB site refuses automated requests from our servers, so we do not publish a roster.

What the text does not settle

Three points stay open after reading the law and the Reglamento.

• Prize cap. Article 77 limits prizes to 70% of the issue, or of income for games played online. It sits in the chapter on games the LNB itself operates. Article 58(f) says a licence may not set prizes above the percentage fixed in the Reglamento, and we found no such percentage in the Reglamento’s 59 articles. Whether 70% binds licensees is not clear from the text.
• Base of the share. Article 52 of the law speaks of a yearly value plus a percentage of initial investment or balance sheet, capped at 30%. The Reglamento instead uses a share of gross income minus prizes, capped at 25%. We note the difference in basis and do not resolve it.
• Foreign-market use. As above, the statute is silent on serving players outside El Salvador.

What we could not read

The LNB’s download page returned a Cloudflare block from our machines. The law was read from the LNB-hosted PDF, which is the Legislative Assembly’s text. The Reglamento was read from vLex’s consolidated text, which reproduces the Diario Oficial and marks the Decreto 31 amendments; we did not read Decreto 31 in its own gazette issue. The Yogonet report is trade press summarising the LNB’s report, not the report itself. If the LNB’s current text differs from these, the LNB’s text governs.

How it compares

For the cheapest fixed-fee routes, see what a gambling licence costs in 2026 and our Curaçao cost page. Other Central American regimes are covered in the Costa Rica licence page and the Panama licence page; see also the Costa Rica jurisdiction profile and the Panama profile.