Malta Gaming Tax From 1 October 2026: What Legal Notices 84 and 86 Actually Change

What was published, and when

Two instruments were published on 1 April 2026 and take effect on 1 October 2026. Legal Notice 84 of 2026, the Gaming Tax (Amendment) Regulations, amends the Gaming Tax Regulations (S.L. 583.10) under article 12 of the Gaming Act. Legal Notice 86 of 2026 amends the Fifth Schedule to the Value Added Tax Act.

The Authority’s own announcement confirms the instruments, the date and the shape of the reform, describing a consolidation of the existing gaming tax and the gaming device levy into a single structure classified by game type and mode of offer. It does not publish the rates. Those come from the legal notices themselves and from the Maltese advisory firms reading them, which is worth stating plainly because it changes how much weight any single number here should carry.

The rates

Gaming service type	Until 30 September 2026	From 1 October 2026
Type 1, games of chance against the house	5%	15%
Type 2, fixed-odds betting	5%	10%
Type 3, peer-to-peer	5%	10%
Type 4, controlled skill games	5%	10%
Controlled gaming premises and junkets	5%	5%

A Type 1 operator’s gaming tax triples. Everyone else’s doubles. The 5% rate survives only where the activity is classified as taking place in controlled gaming premises or as a junket.

The part that matters more than the rate

Gaming tax in Malta has never been a tax on worldwide revenue. It is charged on revenue from Maltese players, which is why an operator licensed in Malta and serving Germany, Brazil or Ontario has historically paid very little of it. That territorial limit survives the reform, and it is the single most misread fact about Maltese gaming tax.

What changes is the test. For remote gaming the base moves from revenue from players physically present in Malta to revenue from players established or resident in Malta. Those are not the same population. A Maltese resident betting while abroad was outside the old test and is inside the new one; a tourist betting from a hotel in Sliema was inside the old test and is outside the new one. For most operators the difference is small in euro terms and awkward in engineering terms, because the data point you need changes from a geolocation reading at the moment of the bet to a residency attribute on the account.

So the practical reading is this. If your Maltese player revenue is negligible, tripling a rate you barely pay is not the event. The VAT change below probably is.

The device levy goes, a studio levy arrives

Legal Notice 84 deletes the gaming device levy outright. In its place, a critical gaming supply licensee operating a broadcast studio pays a flat EUR 3,000 a year studio broadcasting levy.

For a live-dealer supplier this is a small, predictable number replacing a variable one, and it is the only part of the reform that is unambiguously simpler. It is also almost entirely absent from the licensing guides that dominate search results for this jurisdiction; we found it in tax commentary and nowhere else.

VAT: the change with the wider reach

Legal Notice 86 narrows the gaming exemption in item 9 of the Fifth Schedule to three things: low-risk games, occasional approved junkets, and sports betting offered in a venue. Most remote gaming falls outside that and becomes taxable.

The trade-off is input VAT recovery. An operator whose supplies were exempt could not reclaim VAT on what it bought; an operator making taxable supplies can. Whether that is a cost or a saving depends on the shape of the business, and in particular on how much Maltese VAT sits in the cost base. This is a question for a Maltese tax adviser on your actual numbers, not a question a comparison table can answer, and anyone who tells you the direction of travel without seeing your input VAT is guessing.

What is not changing, as far as the instruments show

Legal Notice 84 amends the Gaming Tax Regulations and nothing else. It does not touch the Gaming Licence Fees Regulations (S.L. 583.03), which is where the compliance contribution lives. On the face of the amending instrument the compliance contribution therefore continues unchanged alongside the new gaming tax. No source we found states that in terms, so treat it as an inference from the scope of the amendment rather than a settled statement, and confirm it before you model on it.

That distinction matters because the compliance contribution is the charge most often confused with gaming tax, including in earlier versions of our own Malta page. They are different instruments with different bases and different recipients.

The five payments, separated

Malta charges five distinct things. Almost no page sets out more than three of them in one place, which is how the confusion propagates.

Charge	Amount	Instrument
Application fee	EUR 5,000 once, flat for B2C or B2B	S.L. 583.03, Fourth Schedule
Annual licence fee	EUR 25,000 B2C, or EUR 10,000 if solely Type 4; B2B banded EUR 25,000 to EUR 35,000	S.L. 583.03
Compliance contribution	Tiered by type: Type 1 EUR 15,000 to EUR 375,000 at 1.25% falling to 0.40%; Type 2 EUR 25,000 to EUR 600,000 and Type 3 EUR 25,000 to EUR 500,000 at 4.00% falling to 0.40%; Type 4 EUR 5,000 to EUR 500,000 at 0.50% rising to 2.00%	S.L. 583.03, First Schedule
Gaming tax	5% on Maltese-player revenue, becoming 15% or 10% by type on 1 October 2026	S.L. 583.10, as amended by L.N. 84 of 2026
Corporate tax	35% headline, about 5% effective after the 6/7 shareholder refund on trading income	Income Tax Acts

Note the shape of the compliance contribution. Because every band has a floor, it behaves as a fixed annual cost long before it behaves as a percentage. A small Type 2 operator pays EUR 25,000 whether it earns anything or not. And Type 4 is the only type whose rate rises as revenue grows rather than tapering, which inverts the usual assumption that scale earns you a better rate.

What to do before 1 October

Four things are worth settling now rather than in the last fortnight.

Establish what proportion of your revenue actually comes from Maltese players, because that number decides whether the rate change is material to you at all. Then work out how you will identify players established or resident in Malta, which is an account attribute rather than a geolocation event and may not exist cleanly in your data today. Separately, ask your tax adviser to model the VAT change against your real input VAT, since the direction of the effect is genuinely business-specific. And if you supply critical gaming services from a broadcast studio, budget the EUR 3,000 levy and confirm the device levy has come off your ledger.

A note on sourcing

We read the legal notices rather than the commentary, and we have said above where a figure rests on advisory reading instead of published text. That is not pedantry. When we surveyed the pages competing for this topic, only six of twenty-two mentioned the reform at all, and one page carrying an update stamp from the day before our review still described the single 5% rate with no forward reference. That count is our own review of the pages competing for these queries in September 2026, not an independent survey, and we log which pages we opened. A jurisdiction page that is current on everything except the thing changing in two weeks is not current.