Finland Gambling Licence 2026: €29,000 to Apply, 22% Tax, Start on 1 July 2027

The short answer

Finland is ending its gambling monopoly for betting and online casino. The Gambling Act (Rahapelilaki 10/2026) was passed by Parliament on 16 December 2025 and confirmed by the President on 16 January 2026. Veikkaus keeps lotteries, scratch cards and physical casinos and slot machines. Licensed operators can offer fixed-odds and variable-odds betting, virtual betting, electronic casino games, electronic slot games and electronic money bingo (s. 6).

What matters for an operator, in order:

• Start date: 1 July 2027 (s. 106). Not January 2027, the date in the government’s first proposal and in guides written before the final Act.
• Application fee: €29,000 in 2026, whether the decision is yes or no.
• Tax: 22% of gross win from 1 July 2027.
• Annual supervision fee: €4,000 to €434,000, banded on gross win, in the statute.
• Applications: open since 1 March 2026. Media report 75 filed by 24 September 2026 and none decided.

The rest of this page shows the supervision-fee table, a cost model that combines it with the tax, the three dates that are easy to get wrong, and the product rules that decide whether an existing offshore model carries over. We read the Act in the Finlex open-data text, the fee regulation as published, and the Tax Administration’s page. We could not open the Police Board’s own news pages, which sit behind an access check, so the application counts come from press reports.

Dates

Date	What happens	Source
16 Dec 2025 / 16 Jan 2026	Parliament passes the Act; the President confirms it	Act 10/2026, signature block
1 Mar 2026	Chapters 2 and 9 and ss. 43(3), 44, 57, 63, 64 in force; the Police Board takes applications	s. 106(2)
31 Dec 2026	End of the year the police fee regulation covers	Reg. 1335/2025 applies to 2026
30 Jun 2027	Police Board is the licensing authority until this date	s. 106(3)
1 Jul 2027	Whole Act in force; Licensing and Supervisory Agency takes over; software licences can be applied for	s. 106(1), (4)
1 Jul 2028	Licensees must use only licensed software	s. 106(4), s. 33

Borenius and the Tax Administration both give 1 July 2027 as the earliest date for licensed operation, whatever the date a licence is granted.

What it costs to apply

The application fee is not in the Gambling Act. It sits in the police fee regulation. Interior Ministry Regulation 96/2026, published 27 January 2026 and in force from 1 March 2026, adds these lines to the annex of the 2026 regulation:

Item	Fee
Exclusive licence	€29,000
Gambling licence (rahapelitoimilupa)	€29,000
Amendment of either licence	€1,120
International cooperation permit for a licence holder	€1,120

The Police Board’s application instruction says the fee is charged on every pending application regardless of the outcome, and that from 1 July 2027 the amount is set in a regulation of the Licensing and Supervisory Agency. So €29,000 is a 2026 price. We found no published fee for applications filed from 1 January 2027, and none for the Agency. If you plan to file in the new year, treat the cost as unknown rather than €29,000.

For comparison, Ireland charges €20,000 to €400,000 for a remote betting licence depending on gross win, and the Netherlands charges a flat €61,300. Finland’s application fee is flat but the annual fee is not.

The annual supervision fee

Section 70 of the Act sets a fixed annual sum for each licence by the licensee’s gross win (pelikate: stakes less winnings paid), based on the previous calendar year:

Gross win	Annual supervision fee
below €100,000	€4,000
€100,000 to under €1m	€12,400
€1m to under €2m	€22,400
€2m to under €5m	€45,300
€5m to under €10m	€80,700
€10m to under €20m	€152,000
€20m to under €50m	€248,000
€50m and above	€434,000

Rules around the table: in the first year of operation the licensee pays a €10,000 base fee, the Agency fixes the final fee from the audited gross win and collects or refunds the difference. A software licence pays €1,500. A holder with several licences pays one fee per licence. The fee falls due no earlier than 30 June, and the decision must reach the payer 30 days before the first due date. Gross-win data is due by the end of February. If the Agency would otherwise recover more than 5% above its budgeted costs, it must cut every fee by the same proportion (s. 73), so the table is a ceiling for the year, not a guaranteed bill.

Cliffs

The fee steps up in flat amounts at each line. Computed from the table:

Gross win crosses	Fee moves from	to	Step
€100,000	€4,000	€12,400	+€8,400 (+210%)
€1m	€12,400	€22,400	+€10,000 (+81%)
€2m	€22,400	€45,300	+€22,900 (+102%)
€5m	€45,300	€80,700	+€35,400 (+78%)
€10m	€80,700	€152,000	+€71,300 (+88%)
€20m	€152,000	€248,000	+€96,000 (+63%)
€50m	€248,000	€434,000	+€186,000 (+75%)

What it costs at your gross win

The Tax Administration says the lottery tax is 22% of gross win, self-assessed, filed and paid monthly, and that an operator needs a Finnish business ID (Y-tunnus) to file and must give it to the supervisory authority. Adding the supervision fee:

Annual gross win	Supervision fee	Tax at 22%	Total	Total as % of gross win
€50,000	€4,000	€11,000	€15,000	30.0%
€100,000	€12,400	€22,000	€34,400	34.4%
€500,000	€12,400	€110,000	€122,400	24.5%
€1m	€22,400	€220,000	€242,400	24.2%
€5m	€80,700	€1,100,000	€1,180,700	23.6%
€10m	€152,000	€2,200,000	€2,352,000	23.5%
€20m	€248,000	€4,400,000	€4,648,000	23.2%
€50m	€434,000	€11,000,000	€11,434,000	22.9%
€100m	€434,000	€22,000,000	€22,434,000	22.4%

The fee matters only below about €5m: above it the total is within 1.6 points of the tax alone. It excludes the application fee, corporate income tax, the central self-exclusion system, testing, marketing and the cost of Finnish-language compliance. It also uses one rate for all products, which is what the Tax Administration page states; we did not check for product-specific carve-outs. Older material quoting a 16% tax predates the final law.

Compare Denmark, where online casino and betting duty is 28%, and the Sweden profile, the other Nordic licence market Finland’s reform is modelled on.

Who can apply, and how

• Eligibility. Any natural or legal person who meets the suitability test in s. 10: no recent relevant convictions, solvency, tax compliance, no recent licence revocation or illegal-gambling penalty, no sanctions exposure. The test applies to board members, senior management and holders of 25% or more.
• EEA representative. A licensee not resident or established in the EEA needs a representative domiciled in an EEA state who meets the same test and can receive service of proceedings (s. 12).
• Language. The application and attachments in Finnish or Swedish; the Police Board may ask for translations at the applicant’s cost and says translation can delay the case.
• Content. Section 11 and the Police Board’s instruction of 11 February 2026 list the documents. They include ownership and control, finances, software provider, marketing plan, AML measures and dispute handling.
• Timing. No deadline for filing. Reports give a target decision time of three to six months (Borenius, May 2026) and six to eight months (Rahapelisanomat, September 2026). We could not confirm either on the Police Board’s site.
• Volume. Borenius counted 41 applications by late May 2026, mostly from companies registered outside Finland, Malta the most common. Rahapelisanomat reported 75 on 24 September 2026, with none approved yet.

Rules that change the product

These come from the Act itself and decide whether an existing offshore setup carries over:

• Residents only. Electronic games may be offered only to natural persons who live permanently in Finland, and the licensee must verify residence regularly and block players who live abroad (s. 21).
• Bonuses. Only a moderate bonus to an established customer, on equal terms, not based on time played or money spent. It cannot be converted directly to cash and wagering is capped at five times (s. 26). Free or discounted play and credit are otherwise banned (s. 25).
• Loss limits. The government may set daily, monthly and yearly maximum-loss limits per licensee for slots, money bingo, virtual betting and electronic casino games, poker excluded (s. 32). We did not look for a decree that sets them.
• Cooperation. Games run jointly with an operator outside Finland need a permit (€1,120) and the partner must be licensed for such games and must not market unlicensed games into Finland (s. 43).
• Software. From 1 July 2028 only licensed software may be used.

How we counted

• Statute text: the original version of Act 10/2026 in the Finlex open-data service, read in Finnish. Section numbers follow the printed section headings.
• Fees: Interior Ministry Regulation 96/2026 annex as published on Finlex, and the Police Board instruction on applications of 11 February 2026.
• Tax: the Tax Administration page on lottery tax. We did not open the lottery tax act itself.
• Supervision-fee steps and the cost table: computed by script from s. 70 and a 22% rate.
• Application counts and decision times: Borenius (28 May 2026) and Rahapelisanomat (24 September 2026). The Police Board’s news pages blocked automated access, so we did not use them.
• Not found: the 2027 police fee, the Agency’s fee decree, any maximum-loss decree, any licence already granted.

For the cross-jurisdiction picture see our licence cost comparison and the step-by-step licensing guide.