Spain Online Gambling Licence 2026: DGOJ Fees, 20% Tax, and the Call That Closed in December 2018

The date that decides everything: 17 December 2018

Ley 13/2011 art. 10 says how a general licence comes into being: the DGOJ promotes a call, the minister approves a pliego de bases by order published in the BOE, and applicants file inside the period the order sets. There have been three. The first two, in 2011 and 2014, were open for one month each. The third, under Orden HFP/1227/2017, was open for a year, from 17 December 2017 to 13:00 on 17 December 2018, and Patricia Lalanda of Loyra wrote the practitioner’s guide to it two days after publication. That is the last time anyone could file for a Spanish general licence.

Two Spanish-language pages say a call opened in December 2022. There is no such order in the BOE, and Chambers, ICLG and Loyra, writing in late 2025, all put the last close at December 2018 with no signal of a fourth. What did happen from 2022 onwards is renewals: general licences run 10 years (art. 10.6), so the first wave, granted in June 2012, came up for its second decade, which is the process a hurried reader can mistake for a call.

The Act does give a way to force the question. Once 18 months have passed since the previous call, any interested party can ask the DGOJ to promote a new one, and the DGOJ has six months to act unless it cites the protection of minors, addiction or the public interest as grounds not to. Eighteen months from December 2018 was June 2020. The mechanism exists; nobody has made it produce an order.

So the route in is a company, not an application. A licence cannot be assigned or run by a third party; it moves only through a merger, spin-off or business-branch contribution that the DGOJ has authorised in advance (RD 1614/2011 art. 6). A share deal for a licensee leaves the licence where it is, with its 10-year term, its singular licences and its guarantee, and the buyer inherits the operator. Advisers disagree on whether the change of control needs the DGOJ’s prior approval or a notification within a month; ask the one you hire to show you the provision they rely on. There were 77 licence holders in 2025 and 64 of them were active, which means 13 companies hold a licence they are not using.

Singular licences are a different matter. A general licensee can ask for one at any time (RD 1614/2011 art. 17.2), each lasting one to five years by game type, and the DGOJ keeps granting them: eight provisional singular licences on 17 June 2026, five to Iberix Gaming for roulette, blackjack, slots and two betting types, three to Winamax for roulette, blackjack and slots. Buy the company and the product pipeline is open; wait for a call and it is not.

The tasas as the Act writes them

Art. 49.5 of Ley 13/2011 lists the tasas by the letter of art. 49.2 that triggers them. The table is short, and most guides get it wrong by promoting the largest number to “licence fee”.

Trigger (art. 49.2)	Tasa (art. 49.5)	What it is
a) Registry certificate	EUR 20	Per certificate
b) Technical conformity report of the gaming system	EUR 38,000 minimum	The certification of the platform; one report has been accepted for several general licences on the same system
c) Entry in the Registro General de Licencias de Juego	EUR 2,500	Per registration
d) Licence or authorisation application	EUR 10,000 per licence; EUR 100 per authorisation	General and singular licences alike
e) Mandatory inspection or technical verification	EUR 5,000 minimum	Per action
f) Regulatory levy on operators	0.75 per mille of gross operating income	Annual, accrued 31 December, paid in January

The EUR 38,000 is the number that travels. Our own page carried it as “EUR 38,000 general licence application”, and so do most of the pages that outrank us. It is the certification report. The application itself is EUR 10,000 per licence, and an operator filing for betting and other games with three singular licences in 2018 paid EUR 50,000 in application tasas, one EUR 38,000 report and EUR 2,500 per registration.

One caveat on the amounts. The BOE consolidated text shows the figures the Act was passed with; budget laws can index fixed tasas, and Asensi’s Chambers chapter of November 2025 quotes EUR 10,615.20 per licence, EUR 2,653.81 per registration and EUR 40,337.76 for the report, which is the statutory amounts with about six per cent of indexation. The DGOJ publishes the current figures on its tasas page, which answered every request I made on 15 September 2026 with a 503 error from its web firewall, so I hold the indexed amounts as adviser-reported and the base amounts as verified. The difference on a full filing is a few thousand euros; the difference between the report and the application fee is a category.

Letter f) is where every competitor fails. The levy is 0.75 per mille, which is 0.075%, of the operator’s gross operating income, and the Act defines that as the total amounts dedicated to participation in the games: stakes, not gross gaming revenue, with the exception that for exchange betting the base is the players’ winnings. Loyra calls it “the other tax” and explains the mechanics: it accrues on 31 December, is paid in January, and a quarter of it is earmarked for anti-fraud and safer-gambling work. The guides I read put it at 1% of GGR, 0.5 to 1% of GGR, 0.075% of GGR and 0.00075% of wagers. All four are wrong on the base, the rate or both.

Why the base matters: for a slots book with a 4% hold, EUR 250 million staked produces EUR 10 million of net income, and the levy on the stakes is EUR 187,500, about 1.9% of GGR. For a sportsbook at an 8% margin, EUR 125 million staked produces the same EUR 10 million and a levy of EUR 93,750, under 1%. Two operators with identical GGR pay levies that differ by a factor of two, and neither pays “1% of GGR”.

The guarantee ladder to 2027

Ley 13/2011 art. 14 requires a guarantee from every general licensee, and RD 1614/2011 arts. 40 to 45 and annex I set the form and the amounts. The period that matters is the “initial period”: from the date of the application to 31 December of the year after the grant.

Period	Per general licence (betting, other games)	Contests licence	Basis
Initial period, until 31 December 2026	EUR 2,000,000	EUR 500,000	Annex I as applied in the 2017 call (Loyra, ICLG)
Initial period, from 1 January 2027	EUR 2,600,000	EUR 650,000	RD 520/2026 art. 1.7
Later years, from 1 January 2027	EUR 1,300,000 for all general licences together	EUR 325,000 if contests only	RD 520/2026 art. 1.7

The guarantee is lodged in cash, by bank guarantee from a credit institution authorised to operate in Spain, or by surety insurance, payable at first demand and in favour of the regulator (RD 1614/2011 art. 43). Until 25 June 2026 a mortgage was also accepted; RD 520/2026 art. 1.3 rewrote art. 43.1 without it, with effect from 26 June 2026, and operators whose guarantees fall below the new amounts have to top up under the decree’s transitional provision. The pre-2027 later-years amount is reported by advisers at EUR 1,000,000; the consolidated BOE text now shows only the 2027 wording, so I hold that figure as reported. Singular licences carry their own additional guarantees, set per game type, that count only after the initial period.

This is capital that stays on the balance sheet, not a fee, and our cost calculator lists it as locked capital rather than adding it to the regulator charges. For a buyer of a two-licence operator in the fourth quarter of 2026, the arithmetic is EUR 4,000,000 of guarantees in place today and a step to EUR 5,200,000 on 1 January 2027 if the target is still inside its initial period, in a form that can no longer be a mortgage.

Tax: 20% of net income, 10% in Ceuta and Melilla, 24% at the ceiling

The Impuesto sobre actividades de juego (art. 48) taxes betting of every kind, other games, contests and raffles at 20% of net income, defined as amounts staked less prizes paid; for exchange betting the base is the commission. State sports pools pay 22% of gross stakes and promotional random draws 10% of the prize value. The tax is declared quarterly. Corporate income tax is 25% (Ley 27/2014 art. 29), and the 0.075% levy on stakes sits beside both.

Two adjustments explain the “20 to 25%” that most guides print without a source. Operators fiscally resident in and actually based in Ceuta or Melilla pay half rates: 10% on betting and other games. In the other direction, art. 48.7.3 lets an Autonomous Community raise the rates by up to 20% of the rate for operators fiscally resident in its territory, which puts the statutory ceiling at 24%. The range is real; the guides just do not say where it comes from.

On EUR 10 million of net income the tax is EUR 2,000,000 at the standard rate, EUR 1,000,000 from Ceuta or Melilla and EUR 2,400,000 at the regional ceiling. Add the levy from the previous section and a slots operator at the standard rate pays about EUR 2.19 million to the state before corporate tax, a sportsbook about EUR 2.09 million. Against Estonia’s 5.5% of the same base, or the 40% Remote Gaming Duty Great Britain has charged since 1 April 2026, Spain sits where a large domestic market usually does: expensive, predictable and written down.

Advertising after 2 April 2024, deposits after 25 March 2027

Real Decreto 958/2020 confines gambling advertising on audiovisual media to 01:00 to 05:00, with separate rules for live sport (arts. 18 to 22). On 2 April 2024 the Supreme Court, on the appeal of the Asociación Española de Juego Digital, annulled arts. 13.1 and 13.3 (promotions aimed at new customers), 15 (celebrities and public figures), 23.1 (the blanket restriction on online commercial communications), 25.3 (video-sharing platforms) and 26.2 and 26.3 (social media) for lack of cover in the Act. The judgment was published in the BOE on 25 May 2024 and the consolidated decree marks each article “Anulado”. Welcome bonuses to verified new customers and celebrity campaigns are lawful again; the night-time window is not touched. Marketing spend followed: EUR 664.40 million in 2025 across 64 active operators, up 25.84%, with sponsorship up 140.15%.

Player protection moves the other way. RD 1614/2011 annex II sets default deposit limits per operator of EUR 600 a day, EUR 1,500 a week and EUR 3,000 a month, which a player can lower and which RD 176/2023’s risk-profiling rules sit on top of. Real Decreto 520/2026, approved by the Council of Ministers on 23 June 2026 and published on 25 June, inserts art. 36 bis: joint limits across every operator a player has an account with, of EUR 700 a day, EUR 1,750 a week and EUR 3,300 per four weeks, with the day running 06:00 to 06:00 and the week from Tuesday. The DGOJ will run the system; an operator must query it before accepting a deposit and refuse the ones it flags.

Date	What changes	Provision
26 June 2026	Permanent representative in Spain written into art. 13.1; mortgage removed from the accepted forms of guarantee	RD 520/2026 art. 1.1, 1.3
1 January 2027	Guarantees EUR 2,600,000 / 650,000 initial, EUR 1,300,000 / 325,000 later years; top-ups due	RD 520/2026 art. 1.7
25 March 2027	Joint deposit limits live; operators connected to the DGOJ system	RD 520/2026, general entry into force

Who Spain fits, and what to check before you buy

Spain fits a group that wants the Spanish market specifically, will run a Spanish-language product under a night-time advertising window, and can carry EUR 2,000,000 of guarantee per general licence rising to EUR 2,600,000 next January. It does not fit anyone shopping for an EU licence: a DGOJ licence authorises gambling offered to players in Spain, land-based gambling belongs to the Comunidades Autónomas, and Great Britain needs a UK Gambling Commission licence of any operator taking GB customers. The same is true of every member state’s licence on this site, and the comparison table shows it row by row.

For a buyer, the checks are on the licence, not the deck. The general licence has a grant date and a 10-year term, and the seller’s singular licences have their own one-to-five-year terms; both are in the DGOJ’s register of licensees, which is the document to read before any valuation. Confirm the guarantee amount and form on file, because the top-up on 1 January 2027 and the loss of mortgage security are the buyer’s problem the day after closing. Confirm the last technical certification and the singular licences actually in operation, since 13 licence holders in 2025 were not operating anything. Then read the tax at 20% of net income, the levy at 0.075% of stakes, and the guarantee as capital, which is how the calculator on this site prices the licence and how the Act does.