Peru Gambling Licence 2026: Two Taxes, Two Bases, and Why One Blended Rate Is Always Wrong

Start with the thing everyone gets wrong

Peru’s remote gambling tax is not one number. It is two instruments with two different bases, and adding them together produces a figure that is only true at one margin.

The first is the impuesto a los juegos a distancia y apuestas deportivas a distancia, at 12%. The second is a selective consumption tax at 1%. Almost every published guide either quotes the 12% alone, or stacks the two into a single percentage without saying what margin it assumes.

Both bases are published by the tax authority in its own words, so neither has to be inferred.

The 12% is not a gross gaming revenue tax

This is the commonest error written about Peru, and SUNAT settles it directly. Its definition of the base:

“Ingreso Bruto (IB) que contiene las apuestas percibidas y las bonificaciones otorgadas menos los premios y devoluciones dando como resultado el Ingreso Neto (IN), al cual se le descuenta los gastos de mantenimiento (2% del IN)”

As a calculation:

Ingreso Bruto  = bets received + bonuses granted
Ingreso Neto   = Ingreso Bruto − prizes − refunds
Taxable base   = Ingreso Neto − 2% of Ingreso Neto
Tax            = 12% of that base

Two things fall out of it. Bonuses granted are added into gross income rather than deducted, which is the opposite of how most gross gaming revenue definitions treat them. And because the base is 98% of net income, the effective rate is 11.76% of net income, not 12%.

The tax has applied since 1 April 2024 and is declared and paid monthly. Two categories of taxpayer are recognised: a company incorporated in Peru, and a branch established in Peru of a foreign company.

The 1% is a tax on stakes, and the player is the taxpayer

The selective consumption tax is a different instrument entirely. SUNAT’s base:

“El valor de cada apuesta… se entiende como apuesta todo dinero o bonificación valorizada en dinero aplicado en el juego a distancia o apuesta deportiva a distancia.”

The value of each bet. Not revenue, not net income, the stake itself. A bonus valued in money counts as a bet for this purpose.

And legally the player is the taxpayer. The authorised platform operator acts as withholding agent, collecting and remitting. That is a consumption tax on the bettor, not an operator levy, whatever it feels like on your profit and loss.

It arrived with Decreto Legislativo N° 1644, published 13 September 2024. Decreto Supremo N° 008-2025-EF cut it to 0.3% from 19 January 2025 until 30 June 2025, after which it returned to 1%. It is reported to face a constitutional challenge, so treat 1% as the current rate rather than a settled one.

What the two cost together, worked

A tax on stakes is indifferent to whether the bet wins. That makes the combined burden a function of your hold, not a property of the jurisdiction.

Take a month with 100 in stakes and 95 paid out in prizes, no bonuses or refunds.

Item	Amount
Stakes	100.00
Prizes	95.00
Ingreso neto	5.00
Less 2% maintenance	4.90
Tax at 12%	0.588
Selective consumption tax, 1% of stakes	1.00
Total tax	1.588
As a share of net income	31.8%

That 31.8% is the figure circulating in trade commentary, and it holds only at a 5% margin. Run the same arithmetic at a 10% hold and the total falls to roughly 21.8% of net income. Run it at 3% and it rises to about 45%.

Notice which instrument dominates. At a 5% hold the stake-based tax is nearly twice the revenue-based one. A comparison that presents Peru as lightly taxed on the strength of the 12% headline has ignored the tax that usually costs more.

The guarantee is a formula, not the number everyone quotes

You will see S/ 3,300,000 quoted as Peru’s guarantee. That figure is real but it is not a fixed sum.

Ley 31806 art. 24.4 sets the guarantee as the greater of 3% of annual net income or 600 UIT. The UIT is Peru’s tax reference unit, reset annually; at the 2026 value of S/ 5,500, 600 UIT is exactly S/ 3,300,000, roughly USD 980,000.

So two things the flat figure hides. The floor moves every year. And an operator whose 3% of net income exceeds the floor posts the larger amount, so the guarantee scales with the business rather than sitting still.

No separate minimum capital figure is published. No application or annual fee could be verified either: the MINCETUR tariff schedule that sets administrative fees refused every attempt to read it, so we do not print a figure for it.

You cannot easily verify a Peruvian licence

This is worth knowing before you rely on anyone’s operator count, including your own supplier’s.

MINCETUR does not publish a readable list of granted authorisations. Its register pages return identical shell documents containing only navigation, with no data in them. We checked three separate register paths and all three returned byte-identical files.

The one concrete document MINCETUR publishes is a PDF listing 80 companies under the transitional provision of the Reglamento. Its own title says these are companies that submitted applications, not operators that received authorisations. We counted it: numbered 1 to 80, no gaps.

Operator counts circulating elsewhere range from five to over a hundred, and none is tied to a dated official document. We publish the gap rather than pick a number. If you need to confirm a specific operator holds a Peruvian authorisation, ask MINCETUR.

The rest of the frame

The regime is national, under MINCETUR through the Dirección General de Juegos de Casino y Máquinas Tragamonedas, created by Ley N° 31557 of 13 August 2022, amended by Ley N° 31806, with the Reglamento in Decreto Supremo N° 005-2023-MINCETUR. There is no provincial layer, which puts Peru alongside Colombia and apart from Brazil, Mexico and Argentina.

The authorisation is consistently reported to run six renewable years. We could not open the Reglamento text to confirm that against primary law, so we carry it as reported. The same applies to a thirty-business-day decision period that circulates: we could not confirm it, so we publish no timeline.

Foreign entities authorised by MINCETUR may elect to declare and pay tax in soles or US dollars, choosing in the January declaration and keeping that choice for the calendar year.

Who Peru suits

An operator with a decent hold, targeting Peruvian players, able to post a guarantee that grows with revenue rather than a fixed entry fee. Against Colombia, which charges 15% of gross win and nothing on stakes, Peru is heavier for a thin-margin book and lighter for a fat one. That comparison flips at roughly the point where your hold crosses the high single digits, which is a calculation worth doing with your own numbers rather than accepting either country’s headline rate.