Mexico Gambling Permit 2026: No Licence to Apply For, a 50% IEPS, and the Route That Still Works

A prohibition with permits as the exception

The Ley Federal de Juegos y Sorteos opens by prohibiting games of chance and betting throughout the national territory (art. 1). Art. 2 lists what may be permitted: chess and similar games, dominoes, dice, bowling, billiards, ball games in every form, races of people, vehicles and animals, “and in general every kind of sport”, and draws. Everything else is prohibited, and the Reglamento repeats the point in its own art. 2: activities not expressly covered by the Act and the regulation are forbidden. Art. 3 puts regulation, authorisation, control and supervision in the hands of the Secretaría de Gobernación, and art. 4 bars any house or place, open or closed, from running bets or draws without a SEGOB permit, on the conditions SEGOB fixes case by case. Art. 5 adds the clause that funds the system: every permit fixes a participation for the federal government in the holder’s proceeds, independent of the taxes the fiscal laws impose.

That is the whole statute as far as an operator is concerned. It is 1947 text and has not been amended since; the Interior Secretary said so in her own words in September 2025. The operating rules are in the Reglamento of 17 September 2004, and the Reglamento is what the decree of 16 November 2023 rewrote.

What the permit is, who can hold it, and what internet has to do with it

Art. 20 of the Reglamento says who gets which permit. For racetracks, dog tracks, frontones, and for the two titles that matter to a modern operator, the centro de apuestas remotas (remote betting centre, the sportsbook) and the sala de sorteos de números (number-draw hall, the bingo-style venue), only a sociedad mercantil incorporated under Mexican law qualifies. A permit covers one event or one establishment; several establishments can never run under one permit, and a change of address needs a new permit. Art. 31 makes permits non-transferable: they cannot be pledged, assigned, sold or otherwise commercialised. Art. 33 sets the term at a minimum of one year and a maximum of fifteen, renewable for further periods of up to fifteen years while the holder is in good standing.

The file behind an application (arts. 21-22) is a disclosure exercise. Every individual shareholder, and every individual behind a corporate shareholder, gives name, nationality, address, a statement of net worth with the origin of the capital contributed, five years of federal tax returns, a curriculum vitae, any ties to other permit holders, a declaration of no conviction for property, tax or organised-crime offences, and a credit report with no defaults; the same goes for the ultimate beneficiary. The company files a financial viability study covering its first ten years, the exact location and trade name, and the favourable opinion of the state and the municipality for the site. Art. 29 adds the standing obligations: quarterly and audited annual financial statements, insurance, at least 25% independent directors, and a surety bond from an authorised institution, kept in force for the whole term, covering unpaid prizes for 60 days of average annual operation, filed with SEGOB within three days of issue together with the calculation behind it.

Internet appears in arts. 85-86. An establishment “may capture bets via internet, telephone or electronic means”, provided it sets up an internal control system for those transactions, describes its procedures in writing, records at least the bettor’s account number and identity and, per bet, the date, time, transaction number, amount and selection, and has the mechanism approved by SEGOB beforehand. Internet bets count as paid only when the bank confirms payment. There is no other online provision. Mexico does not license online gambling; it lets a licensed establishment sell through a screen.

The decree of 16 November 2023

Published in the Diario Oficial on 16 November 2023 and in force the next day, the decree did four things that reshaped entry.

Change	Provision	Effect
Operador abolished	Art. 30 repealed; transitional art. 4	The company a permit holder could contract to run its establishments no longer exists as a figure. Operators already running an establishment keep their rights until the host permit expires, without extension; operators not running one lost theirs on 17 November 2023.
Slot machines banned	Art. 12; transitional art. 2	”Slot machines in any of their forms” prohibited; permits granted earlier that included them are respected but capped at fifteen non-extendable years from publication. No new permits for activities outside the regulation.
Term cut	Art. 33	Maximum permit term from 25 to 15 years.
Files tightened	Arts. 21-22, 29	Beneficiary disclosure, credit reports, ten-year viability study, state and municipal opinion, 60-day prize bond.

The first row is the one that matters for anyone reading a “how to get a Mexico licence” page. The Mexican white-label market ran on the operador: a permit holder with an establishment, a foreign brand running the online business under it, a revenue share. Von Wobeser’s client note put it plainly: the decree “eliminates the figure of the operador”, so the permit holder “will be the only one who may set up and manage establishments”. What survives is what a permit holder may buy in as a supplier, a platform or an agent inside its own operation and its own SEGOB-approved control system. When Stake announced stake.mx on 4 May 2026, five weeks before the World Cup, its own wording was “a permit-based structure regulated by SEGOB, acting as an agent under Uno Capali’s licence agreement”. Three of the guides in our audit say the slot ban is being contested through amparo proceedings; I did not trace that litigation and do not state its status.

The excise: 50% since 1 January 2026, foreign operators included

Mexico’s gaming tax is the federal IEPS on games with bets and draws, art. 2 II B of the Ley del IEPS, charged on the amounts collected from participants less prizes effectively paid and refunds (art. 18, as advisers and the UNAM tax literature summarise it). The rate was 30%. The decree published in the Diario Oficial on 7 November 2025, part of the 2026 Economic Package, set it at 50% for tax from 1 January 2026. The same paragraph does something no earlier text did: it names games with bets and draws “carried out via internet or electronic means by residents abroad without an establishment in Mexico” as within the 50%, and routes them through the digital-services rules of the VAT law. A foreign operator registers and pays; an intermediation platform that collects the price retains 100% of the tax as a definitive payment; a provider that does not pay faces, under art. 20-A, the temporary blocking of its digital service and publication of its name and blocking date by the SAT and in the Diario Oficial.

On EUR 10 million of bets less prizes, the IEPS is EUR 5 million. Around it sit charges the guides mostly skip: the federal participation that art. 5 of the Act fixes in each permit and that advisers put at 1% of bets for remote sports betting and 2% for number draws; state taxes, which vary by state and are not tabulated here; corporate income tax at 30%; and the tax on prizes under Ley del ISR art. 138, 1% withheld at source, or 21% where the state levies its own prize tax above 6%. Every competitor page in our audit that printed a rate printed 30% or lower, except one that invented 20%; ours said “about 20% on GGR”.

Fees: what we could and could not read

SEGOB’s permit charges are not statutory licence fees. They are aprovechamientos: amounts the Secretaría de Hacienda authorises to the Secretaría de Gobernación each year under the Ley de Ingresos, which the DGJS publishes as a tariff notice. The one notice I could read in full is the 2009 Diario Oficial acuerdo, and it prices draw permits as a sliding percentage of the prize pool, 15% of the first MXN 5,000 falling to 2% above MXN 6 million, with fixed quotas per band. The 2026 notice sits on the DGJS website, which refused every connection I made on 15 September 2026, and the guides that quote a number, from USD 10,000 to our own “MXN 50-100M”, cite nothing. So this page states no permit price. What the Reglamento fixes in words is the bond for 60 days of unpaid prizes, and the fact that the permit document itself carries the bond amount and the federal participation (art. 32).

Who is in, and what the regulator did in July 2026

Chambers counts 36 permit holders and describes new grants as seldom. SEGOB data reported by Yogonet on 9 July 2026 put the authorised betting websites at 136, of which about two thirds were still active; the rest had stopped for technical, administrative or commercial reasons, or had been suspended. That month the DGJS suspended ten online domains running under authorised permits during an update of its operator register: bet365.mx and betano.mx, both under Ganador Azteca of Grupo Salinas; 1xbet.mx under Internapuesta México; luckia.mx; netabet.com.mx and netabet.mx; casinomiravallepalace.com; kingsbet.com.mx under Televisa Gaming; and kasino.mx and diamantecasino.com.mx. The bet365 and betano suspensions tie back to an investigation the financial intelligence unit announced in November 2025 into high-risk operations at 13 casinos. Between January and May 2026 the financial sector filed 202,045 gambling-related reports with the UIF, on transactions above 645 UMA, about MXN 75,665 each.

The reform is the other moving part. On 24 September 2025 the Interior Secretary told the Chamber of Deputies that SEGOB wanted to change a law “in force since 1947, 78 years without any modification”, to give certainty to investment and to sanction money laundering. On 3 September 2026 she said the bill was complete after two years of inter-agency work and was about to go to the security cabinet before Congress; the framing in the same press conference was money laundering and tax fraud first, with a warning to permit holders that corrupting SEGOB staff would close their businesses. A separate bill by deputy Ricardo Mejía Berdeja for a new Ley Federal de Juegos con Apuesta y Sorteos, dated 7 October 2025, had its committee review extended to 31 August 2027. No draft of the SEGOB bill is public as of 15 September 2026.

What to do with this

If you want Mexico, you are choosing between two things: buying into a Mexican company that holds a permit, with its shareholder disclosure, its bond and its exposure to the register clean-up, or contracting as a supplier or agent inside a permit holder’s operation and control system, as Stake did. Neither is a licence you apply for, and neither is priced by a fee schedule you can read today. Model the excise at 50% of bets less prizes from the first bet, add the participation the permit fixes, the state’s own tax and 30% on profit, and check the counterparty’s domains against the DGJS register before signing, because in July 2026 the regulator showed it will suspend a live brand under an authorised permit. Then watch the security cabinet: the bill it is reviewing is the first change to the Act since 1947, and its first stated purpose is enforcement.