Dutch regulator: 94% of online players stay licensed, but unlicensed sites take an estimated 41% of online spend

The Netherlands’ gambling regulator, the Kansspelautoriteit (KSA), has published its annual market scan alongside its half-yearly online monitoring report, and the two documents together tell an uncomfortable story for licensed operators. Almost all Dutch players stay inside the regulated market. A large share of the money does not.

What the KSA published

On 29 October the KSA reported that the licensed Dutch market, land-based and online combined, shrank from €4.5bn in 2024 to €4.1bn in 2025, measured as gross gaming result (stakes minus payouts). The regulator said the fall came mainly from the online offering: online casino revenue dropped 18.2% and online betting 30.2%.

The KSA attributes part of the decline to measures introduced at the end of 2024, including the net deposit limit, and notes that 2024 was flattered by the men’s European Championship. As reported by CasinoBeats, total online revenue fell to €1.20bn from €1.52bn, online casino to €947m and online betting to €254m, while the gambling tax rate rose from 30.5% to 34.2%.

Land-based was more stable. Holland Casino grew 2.8%, driven by slot machines rather than table games, while slots in arcades and hospitality venues fell 4.7% and lotteries 1.8%.

The channelisation gap

The headline number in the online monitoring report is channelisation of the online market, and the KSA measures it two ways.

By players, it is about 94%: roughly 94 in every 100 people who gamble do so only with licensed operators. By revenue, the KSA estimates channelisation rose slightly, from 54% in the second half of 2025 to 59% in the first half of 2026. Put simply, licensed operators are estimated to hold about 59% of Dutch online gambling spend, leaving around 41% with operators that hold no Dutch licence.

The regulator’s own reading of the gap is direct: it suggests that people who gamble with illegal operators lose considerably more on average than those who use licensed sites.

Other figures in the report point the same way. Online accounts at licensed operators rose to 1.48 million from 1.38 million six months earlier, but the KSA estimates the number of people gambling online each month at about 490,000 and says it has not grown significantly. The regulator suggests the World Cup may explain part of the rise in accounts, and that some players may be opening multiple accounts to get around per-account deposit limits. It also reports that more than 14% more people were in treatment for gambling addiction in 2025 than in 2024.

The report lands a week after the KSA’s record €37m fine against EOD Code SRL, a company that says it is registered in Costa Rica. As reported by DutchNews.nl, the regulator found twelve unlicensed casinos run by the company, including Instantcasino and Skyhills, where its inspectors could register and play from the Netherlands, several sites showed no visible age checks, and cryptocurrency and other anonymous payment methods were accepted.

Why it matters

For operators licensed in Gibraltar and elsewhere, the Dutch data is regulator-published evidence on a question the industry argues about constantly. On the KSA’s figures, only a small share of players gamble offshore, but those who do appear to account for a disproportionate share of spend.

That matters well beyond the Netherlands. The UK raised Remote Gaming Duty from 21% to 40% from April 2026, a change that, as iGaming Business reported, Gibraltar’s Gambling Commissioner Andrew Lyman described as “bordering on reckless”. The Dutch figures show that player share and revenue share can diverge sharply: about 94% of online players, but an estimated 59% of online spend.

It also sharpens where licensed operators compete with the unlicensed market: at the moment a player goes looking for somewhere to play. Practical points for licensed operators:

• Own the branded results. When a player searches for a licensed brand, the official site, help pages and responsible-gambling information should be the answers that appear in Google and in AI answers, not a mirror or an unlicensed lookalike. That is a question of SEO and AI-search visibility, and it can be checked and tracked.
• Watch for lookalikes. The EOD Code case involved a dozen brands run by one company. Clone sites, fake apps and phishing pages that use a licensed operator’s name are a direct route for players to end up somewhere unregulated; brand impersonation protection treats that as a monitoring and takedown problem rather than a one-off complaint.
• Track revenue channelisation in your own markets. Where regulators publish both measures, as the KSA now does, compliance and commercial teams should be reading them side by side.

Editorial Desk view

In our view, the most useful thing the KSA has done here is publish both numbers. Player channelisation of 94% is the figure regulators like to quote; revenue channelisation of 59% is the figure that explains why licensed operators feel the market slipping. A 94% headline can hide a 41% leak. The gap is not proof that any single rule is wrong, and the KSA itself treats deposit limits as one factor among several. But it does show that the players who matter most to an operator’s economics are the ones most exposed to the offshore market.

For Gibraltar-licensed, UK-facing businesses now absorbing a 40% Remote Gaming Duty, the lesson seems to us practical rather than political. Lobbying on tax will continue, but the part operators control is whether a high-value customer looking for their brand finds them, or finds something pretending to be them. That is where we would expect the next year of competition with the unlicensed market to be decided.

— Casino.gi Editorial Desk

Operators who want to review their search visibility or brand exposure can talk to casino.gi.