Netherlands Online Gambling Licence 2026: The €61,300 Fee, 37.8% Tax and the First Renewal Round

The short answer

The Netherlands licenses online gambling directly. The Kansspelautoriteit (KSA) grants a five-year licence under article 31a of the Wet op de kansspelen, the provision added by the Remote Gambling Act (Wet kansspelen op afstand, “Koa”). There is no tender or application round: the KSA takes applications at any time through its Koa portal.

What it costs, in 2026:

• €61,300 to apply, non-refundable, since 1 April 2026. Most guides, including the ICLG chapter that ranks first for the query, still print €48,000.
• 37.8% gambling tax on gross gaming revenue (GGR) since 1 January 2026.
• 1.95% KSA levy on the same GGR, every year.

The rest of this page is what changed in 2026: the fee, the first renewal round of the licences granted in 2021, the new policy rules every applicant now files against, and what the tax increase actually raised. We also counted the KSA register on 14 October 2026. There are 31 online licence holders.

What it costs

Fees and charges

Item	Amount	Source
Application for a licence	€61,300	Regeling kansspelen op afstand art. 2.1(1), from 1 April 2026
Application to widen or replace the permitted games	€10,200	art. 2.1(2)(c)
Change of name, seat or legal form	€100, plus €10,200 if reliability must be reassessed	art. 2.1(2)(a)
Application to narrow the permitted games	€100	art. 2.1(2)(b)
Gambling tax (kansspelbelasting)	37.8% of GGR	Wet op de kansspelbelasting art. 5(1)
KSA levy (kansspelheffing)	1.95% of GGR a year	KSA levy page: 1.7% KSA, 0.25% addiction prevention

The fee change comes from a regulation of the State Secretary for Justice and Security of 13 January 2026, published as Staatscourant 2026, 1642. Article II replaces ”€ 48.000” with ”€ 61.300” and every €8,000 modification fee with €10,200, effective 1 April 2026. The annex shows the method: the 2021 tariffs indexed for wages and prices from 2022 to 2026. The KSA’s own cost page states the fee is not refunded if the licence is refused or the application is not processed.

The tax base, under article 3 of the Wet op de kansspelbelasting, is the difference between stakes received and prizes made available in a period: GGR, not turnover. The KSA’s monitoring counts stakes and prizes from bonus money in GGR as well. The levy is declared to the KSA by 31 January for the previous year, settled in a final assessment in March, and charged in advance through a provisional assessment in June. If you file no return, the KSA sets the assessment itself and adds 10%.

At your revenue

Tax and levy together take 39.75% of GGR. Computed per year:

Annual GGR	Gambling tax 37.8%	KSA levy 1.95%	Total	Same GGR at the 2024 rate (30.5%)
€1,000,000	€378,000	€19,500	€397,500	€324,500
€5,000,000	€1,890,000	€97,500	€1,987,500	€1,622,500
€10,000,000	€3,780,000	€195,000	€3,975,000	€3,245,000
€50,000,000	€18,900,000	€975,000	€19,875,000	€16,225,000

The rate rose 7.3 points in two years, 23.9% in relative terms. At €10 million of GGR that is €730,000 a year more than in 2024 for the same business. Corporate income tax, Cruks and control-database costs, testing and the people the KSA expects to see are on top.

For comparison, Denmark charges a 28% duty on its online casino licences, and the Malta cost guide sets out the MGA side for the many Dutch licensees registered in Malta. Our cost comparison across jurisdictions puts the fixed fees side by side.

The 2026 renewal round

Koa licences run for five years. The KSA told ten companies on 29 September 2021 that they would be licensed from 1 October 2021, so the first expiries fell at the end of September 2026. For those renewals the KSA opened a separate procedure in the Koa portal on 1 December 2025.

On 17 September 2026 it announced the first eight renewals, valid from October 2026 to September 2031:

Licence holder	Brand named by the KSA	2021 first ten	Renewed 17 Sep 2026
TOTO Online B.V.	TOTO, Winnitt	yes	yes
Holland Casino N.V.	Holland Casino Online	yes	yes
Play North Limited	Kansino	yes	yes
FPO Nederland B.V.	FairPlay Casino	yes	yes
Bingoal Nederland B.V.	Bingoal	yes	yes
Hillside (New Media Malta) Plc	Bet365	yes	yes
NSUS Malta Limited	GG Poker	yes	yes
Betent B.V.	Betcity	yes	yes
Tombola International Malta Plc	—	yes	not on the register on 14 Oct 2026
LiveScore Malta Limited	—	yes	not on the register on 14 Oct 2026

The KSA notice does not mention the other two members of the 2021 cohort, and we found no KSA document that says when or why they left the register. Do not read their absence as a refusal.

What the KSA assessed is the part that applies to everyone who renews from here on. It looked at the violations established against each licensee in the past five years and asked each to explain how it had remedied them and how it would prevent repeats. “Several” licensees received additional points of attention. Addiction prevention and advertising policy were reassessed, and every renewing licensee went through a new control-database (CDB) integration test.

The register on 14 October 2026

The KSA’s register of licence holders, the Kansspelwijzer, is served from openovergokken.nl. We downloaded all 538 entries through its public data interface on 14 October 2026 and counted those in the online gambling categories, then read each holder’s entry for its registered address and licence dates.

	Count
Online licence holders	31
licensed for online casino against the house	30
licensed for online sports betting	25
licensed for online horse racing	9
licensed for online casino between players (poker, bingo)	8

Registered address of the licence holder	Holders
Malta	15
Netherlands	10
Belgium	5
Estonia	1

A Dutch company is not a condition: half the market files from Malta. The address is the licence holder’s registered address, not the group’s headquarters. Bingoal Nederland B.V. gives a Belgian address.

Licence expires in	Licences
2026	1
2027	12
2028	4
2029	4
2030	2
2031	8

The next renewal wave is in 2027, when 12 licences granted in 2022 run out. The first is not in 2027 at all: JOI Gaming Limited (jacks.nl), licensed on 20 November 2021, expires on 20 November 2026. Seven licences expire before mid-April 2027, so they are already inside the six-month decision term. The register does not say whether those holders have filed.

The spring 2026 monitoring report, published on 16 April, said the number of licensees had stayed “virtually the same” as in autumn 2025. The June 2026 tax monitor, using Cruks connection data, reported a slight rise in active online operators over two years with no visible effect from the tax increase.

What the 2026 policy rules add

The Beleidsregels vergunningverlening kansspelen op afstand 2026 (BRVKOA 2026) replaced the 2023 rules on 1 January 2026. They apply to every application, first or renewal:

• An exit plan (art. 2.4): how the game offer is wound down if the licence ends, and how all player balances are paid out quickly. The KSA says it must be filed with the application because nobody can predict whether or when a licence ends early.
• An information-duty document: how you will make sure the KSA hears in time about important changes in your policies and operations.
• A Wwft risk analysis with the application, under the Dutch anti-money-laundering act.
• Narrower options for safeguarding player funds: some arrangements that were allowed before are no longer accepted.
• Dutch court judgments (art. 3.3): an applicant that has not complied with a final or provisionally enforceable judgment of a Dutch court is not beyond doubt as to reliability. The KSA added a matching licence condition requiring compliance with such judgments.

Renewing licensees file one extra module, supervision prevention, explaining how they will avoid repeating past violations. For modules where nothing changed they tick a declaration of compliance in the portal and must be able to prove it later; the KSA warns that a false declaration can have serious consequences for the licence.

Two older rules still shape who gets in. The KSA weighs illegal online offers to Dutch players: in its notice of 1 March 2022 it said that from 1 April 2022 it would weigh such offers going back at least eight years. And integrity is tested hard. In February 2025 the District Court of The Hague upheld the KSA’s 2023 refusal of a Malta-based applicant that had supplied incorrect and incomplete information about a former shareholder (ECLI:NL:RBDHA:2025:2076).

Process and timeline

1. Prepare the modules. The Koa portal is organised into modules A0 to I: general information, exit plan, information duty, violation prevention, reliability (B1 to B16), Wwft and match-fixing, sanctions, player funds, continuity, financial security, advertising, addiction prevention, outsourcing, integrity, payments, internal supervision, Cruks, the control database and game-system testing.
2. Write in Dutch. Documents must be in Dutch or translated, preferably by a translator sworn in the Netherlands. ICT documents, B2B contracts, audit reports and certifications may be in English.
3. Connect to Cruks. A working, tested connection to the national self-exclusion register is required before a licence can be granted.
4. File and pay. Submit in the portal and pay €61,300.
5. Decision. Six months from a complete application under article 2.4 of the Besluit kansspelen op afstand. Requests for information suspend the term; the usual response period is three weeks. The KSA does not advise individual applicants on how to meet the rules.
6. Licence. Five years. Adding a game category later is a new assessment of all modules, so the KSA suggests renewing first on unchanged terms and extending afterwards.

What the tax rise raised

The June 2026 monitor by the KSA and the Ministry of Finance compares the tax increase with what it was meant to bring in. The stated aim was €108 million more in 2025 and €216 million more in 2026 (2026 prices). The result:

	Target vs 2024	Outcome vs 2024
2025	+€108m	+€2m
2026 (forecast from first-quarter data)	+€216m	+€57m

Total gambling tax receipts, corrected for inflation and seasonality, were €1,034 million in 2024, €1,036 million in 2025 and a forecast €1,091 million in 2026. The authors’ model, which strips out the October 2024 player-protection rules and the 2024 European Championship, puts the isolated effect of the higher rate at €83 million in 2025 and €138 million in 2026, and calls those figures highly uncertain. It also expects lower corporate tax, payments and dividends from state-owned gambling companies, so the net gain to the state is smaller still.

Three numbers from the same reports describe the market you would enter:

• Online GGR was €602 million in the second half of 2025, about €100 million a month and roughly 18% below 2024.
• About 91% of Dutch players gamble only with licensed operators, but measured by money the channelisation rate is 53%.
• Since October 2024 players under 24 have a net deposit limit of €300 a month and older players €700, which can be raised only if the player shows they can afford it.

The KSA does not attribute the fall in GGR or channelisation to the tax increase alone. The deposit limits, the ban on sponsorship of television programmes and events from 1 July 2024 and the ban on sponsorship of athletes, clubs and competitions from 1 July 2025 all hit the same period.

How we counted

• Fees and rates: read in the consolidated statutes on wetten.overheid.nl (versions in force from 1 January and 1 April 2026) and in Staatscourant 2026, 1642. We checked earlier versions of the Regeling kansspelen op afstand: €48,000 applied in the versions in force from 10 December 2022 and 1 October 2024.
• Register: all 538 Kansspelwijzer entries downloaded on 14 October 2026; online holders identified by the KSA’s own online categories; addresses and validity dates read from each holder’s entry.
• Tax outcome: the KSA and Ministry of Finance monitor of June 2026 (Tables 3.1 and 3.2), quoted in 2026 prices as published.
• Derived figures (the 27.7% fee increase, 39.75%, the GGR table, the expiry counts) were computed by script from the figures above.

The Netherlands profile covers who can hold the licence, player protection and how to check a licensee. The Malta profile explains why an MGA licence does not reach Dutch players on its own, and our step-by-step licensing guide covers the stages that are the same everywhere.