Tuvalu Gaming Licence 2026: The TGA Act Checked Against Tuvalu's Own Legislation Database

The short answer

On 30 October 2026 we searched Tuvalu’s official legislation database, run for the Tuvalu Government at tuvalu-legislation.tv, for the two texts the Tuvalu gaming licence rests on. Neither is there. The index of current laws has one entry under G for gaming: the Gaming and Lotteries Act, first enacted in 1964, consolidated as CAP. 37.10 in the 2022 Revised Edition and last amended by Act 13 of 2021. The acts-by-year lists for 2023, 2024 and 2025 contain the Tuvalu Fisheries Authority Act, appropriation and supplementary budget acts, a Foreign Direct Investment Act and others. They contain no Tuvalu Gaming Authority Act and no online gaming law.

That does not prove the texts were never made. The database publishes no Gazette issues for 2023 to 2026, so a commencement notice could exist that it does not show. It does mean that the one place Tuvalu’s government publishes its laws gives a buyer nothing to rely on, and the texts in circulation come from the seller.

What is sold

The licence is sold at betuvalu.com by Tuvalu Gaming Licensing, which calls itself the “sole representative of the Tuvalu Gaming Authority”. Its About page names the contracting entity: registered company 3-102-944182, incorporated in Costa Rica, with an office in Los Yoses, San José. The TGA’s own site, tuvga.com, says the same: “All applicants must apply exclusively through Tuvalu Gaming Licensing Ltd.”

Term	Agent (betuvalu.com)	TGA (tuvga.com)
Licence types	B2C Operator, B2B Provider, Principal (up to 15 operator permissions)	One licence covering B2C and B2B services
Term	One year, renewable	One year, renewable
Timeline	4-5 days pre-approval, 3-4 weeks in total	2-4 weeks to incorporate, then 2-4 weeks to issue
Domains	Two included, up to ten	Two included, up to seven
Local company, capital	Not required	Not required
Gaming tax	None	None
Fee	”Confirmed on enquiry"	"Please contact Tuvalu Gaming Licensing”
Restricted markets	Not listed	AU, AT, FR, DE, NL, ES, UK, US, FATF blacklist, and any jurisdiction restricted by the “Tuvalu Offshore Financial Authority”

The two sites disagree on the domain ceiling and on the timeline, and the TGA FAQ names a “Tuvalu Offshore Financial Authority” that appears nowhere else on either site. Neither site publishes a fee. The agent’s own article in Yogonet (26 February 2026, bylined “By Tuvalu Gaming Licensing”) calls pricing “highly competitive” and gives no figure.

The two texts, read

Both sites link the same two documents. The agent publishes a transcription of each and the page images, which it says “remain the authoritative version”.

The Tuvalu Gaming Authority Act

The cover reads “Tuvalu Gaming Authority Act, 2023 Revised Edition, CAP 48.20.5”. The text has 16 sections over five Parts. It sets up the Authority with a Board of a Chairperson and one representative each from the Ministries of Finance and Justice, all appointed by the Minister (s. 5). It bans operating an online gaming platform “in Tuvalu” without a TGA licence (s. 7), requires applications “in the prescribed manner” with the “required documentation and fees” (s. 8), and leaves the detail to regulations issued by the Authority (s. 15). Section 16 repeals any inconsistent law “to the extent of the inconsistency”.

What it lacks:

1. A date and a number. No Act number, no date of assent, no commencement date and no endnotes. Section 1 says the Act “shall come into force on the date prescribed by the Minister through publication in the Government Gazette”. We found no such notice.
2. A real revised edition. Tuvalu’s consolidated laws are the 2022 Revised Edition; the official entries say “Consolidated as part of the 2022 Revised Edition”. A “2023 Revised Edition” does not appear in the database. The one 2023 Act in the database that sets up an authority, the Tuvalu Fisheries Authority Act, is numbered CAP. 48.22.
3. Complete pages. The page image files are named “Tuvalu_Gaming_Authority_Act_DRAFT”, numbered page 0001 to page 0007, and page 2 is missing. The contents page lists Part II twice (the second should be Part III) and a section 17, “Effective Date”, on page 7. Page 7 ends at section 16.

The Online Gaming Regulation

The cover reads “Online Gaming Regulation, CAP 50.03, 2023 Revised Edition”. Its first line reads “AN ACT”, and section 1 says: “This Act shall be cited as the Tuvalu Gaming Authority Online Gaming License Act, 2024.” So a document presented as a 2023 regulation names itself a 2024 Act. It has 91 sections. The parts that matter to a licensee:

Section	Rule
s. 5	Online gaming within Tuvalu is “strictly prohibited”
s. 19	Licences run for no more than one year
s. 20	Renewal filed at least 30 days before expiry
s. 21, s. 53	Fees under “mandatory fee schedules”; none published
s. 25	The Authority may appoint an Authorized Representative by written agreement
s. 26	The Authority “shall maintain a public register of all licensed operators”
s. 52	”Online Gaming License holders shall not be subject to a gaming tax”
s. 65	Targeting Tuvaluan citizens: immediate revocation and “criminal prosecution”
s. 86	Unclaimed winnings go to the Authority after “a specified period”
s. 88	In force on publication in the Official Gazette
s. 90	Applications accepted no later than 60 days after publication

Part VII is headed “Enforcement, Penalties, and Dispute Resolution”. Its first four sections, ss. 58-61, repeat ss. 54-57 on advertising word for word. Section 65 threatens “criminal prosecution”, yet the TGA Act it would hang from mentions only “fines, license suspension, or revocation” (s. 12) and creates no offence. Section 89 says no licence is valid “prior to its enactment”, which makes the date of enactment the first thing a licensee needs. Neither text gives it.

The law Tuvalu does publish

The Gaming and Lotteries Act, CAP. 37.10, is short and old, and it is the official text. It has no licensing regime for casinos, bookmakers or online operators.

• Gaming (s. 3). Gaming is lawful only if the chances are equally favourable to all players and no stakes go anywhere except to players as winnings. A banked game, where the house keeps a margin, fails both conditions.
• Gaming machines (s. 6). “Any gaming with a gaming machine is unlawful.” Fine up to $1,000 and six months for whoever permits it.
• Lotteries (s. 7). “All lotteries are unlawful unless the Minister has by notice published in the Gazette, exempted a specified lottery.” It is an offence for a person in Tuvalu to sell, advertise or send money out of Tuvalu for a lottery “promoted or proposed to be promoted within Tuvalu or elsewhere”.
• Fees (s. 12). The only fees set under the Act are $5.00 for each of the two small-lottery exemptions (LN 1/1992).

The Act was last amended by Act 13 of 2021, in force on 23 December 2021, which added pyramid and Ponzi schemes. Nothing in its endnotes refers to online gaming or a gaming authority. If the TGA Act was enacted, its s. 16 would override CAP. 37.10 only where the two conflict. The agent lists “lotteries” and “sweepstakes” among the B2C products, which is where the conflict is sharpest.

The register, counted

The TGA site has a “License Registrar” page. We counted it on 30 October 2026. The page has four columns: company name, licence number (GLN-xxxx), “valid until” (month and two-digit year) and type.

Measure	Count
Rows on the page	90
Licences (one row, Cendrix Gaming Limited GLN-1185, appears twice)	89
B2C / B2B / Principal	74 / 14 / 1
Holders named only by a Costa Rican ID number (3-102-…)	6 (6.7%)
Rows with the month misspelt (“Janaury”, “Febrary”)	18
Earliest expiry	December 2026 (5 licences)
Latest expiry	October 2027 (2 licences)

With a one-year term (Regulation s. 19), the expiry month gives the month of issue or last renewal: 5 in December 2025, then 10, 8, 21, 8, 9, 9, 5, 8, 4 and 2 from January to October 2026. March 2026 is the peak, with 21.

Two things the register cannot tell you. It has no issue date, no licensed domains (s. 14 makes every domain subject to approval) and no status, so a payment provider cannot match a website to a licence. And it has no history. In February 2026 the agent wrote in Yogonet that the licence was “originally launched in mid-2025”, that “approximately 129 licenses are expected to have been issued” by the end of 2025, and that internal projections indicated 600-700 licences during 2026. The register now lists 89 in all. Even if no licence had been issued in 2026, at least 40 of the 129 would have left the list. The 84 licences with 2027 expiry dates are 12-14% of the 2026 projection. The numbered Costa Rican names follow the pattern we found on the Tobique register; Costa Rica has identified new companies by number alone since 2025.

Who runs what

The TGA says on its home and About pages that it was “established in 2023 under national legislation”. The registry records for the two domains say this:

Domain	Role	Registered (UTC)
betuvalu.com	Agent, Tuvalu Gaming Licensing	10 July 2025, 19:28:17
tuvga.com	Regulator, Tuvalu Gaming Authority	10 July 2025, 19:28:20
tuvalugamingact.tv	”Laws of Tuvalu & Online Gaming Regulation” portal	27 July 2026

The regulator’s domain and the agent’s were registered three seconds apart, 557 days after the end of the year the TGA says it was founded. The footer of tuvga.com reads “Copyright © 2026 – Tuvalu Gaming Licensing”. The TGA names no Chairperson, Board member or Executive Director, and the agent’s About page names the regulator only by its web address. We have not seen the written agreement s. 25 of the Regulation requires for the appointment.

None of this shows the licence is void. Several island licences are run by a private company under a government contract; on Nevis the arrangement is written into a gazetted ordinance. The difference here is that we can find no published law to read the contract against.

Before you pay or onboard

For an operator. Ask the agent in writing for: the Gazette number and date that brought the TGA Act into force (s. 1) and published the Regulation (s. 88); the Act number and date of assent; the fee schedule (s. 21); the s. 25 appointment agreement; and a contact at a Tuvalu government ministry who will confirm the licence. A licence from a small authority is also not acceptance by banks, payment providers or the countries you serve. Our Anjouan analysis shows how that plays out.

For a payment provider or bank. The register gives you a company name, a GLN number and a month. Ask for the licensed domains and check them against the licence certificate. Treat a licence whose legal basis you cannot find in the state’s own database as unverified, and say so in the file.

For a player. A TGA logo says nothing about whether the operator may take bets where you live. The TGA’s own list excludes the UK, the US, Australia and five EU states.

What we could not read

The Tuvalu Government Gazette for 2023-2026 (the official database publishes none); any Cabinet or ministerial decision on online gaming; the s. 25 appointment agreement; and page 2 of the Act scans. We did not contact the TGA, the agent or the Tuvalu Government, and we did not apply for a licence. If an enactment or Gazette reference is published, we will add it here with the date.

For the other island-name licences on this site, see Bougainville, Kunaisa-Wargandí and the Anjouan profile. Registers we count each month are on the register page.