A new report is making an extraordinary claim about Europe’s online gambling market. According to research produced by Gaming Compliance International for the Campaign for Fairer Gambling, unregulated operators generated an estimated €91.6 billion in gross gambling revenue from players across the European Union in 2025.
If that estimate is accurate, unregulated operators aren’t a small alternative sitting outside Europe’s licensed gambling industry. They are the majority of it.
GCI estimates the total EU online gambling market was worth €128 billion in 2025, with locally regulated operators generating €36.5 billion and operators outside local regulatory systems accounting for the remaining €91.6 billion. That would put 72% of online gambling revenue outside the local licensing systems of the EU’s 27 member states.
The number is enormous, but there is a reason to be careful with it. Other recent attempts to measure Europe’s unregulated gambling market have produced dramatically smaller estimates. One study released only weeks earlier put the unregulated share at around 25%.
That leaves Europe with an important question that goes beyond which report has the better number. Everyone appears to agree that a significant amount of online gambling is taking place outside local regulatory systems. What nobody seems to agree on is just how large that market really is.
The report estimates €91.6 billion in unregulated gambling revenue
Gaming Compliance International produced the report for the Campaign for Fairer Gambling, an organization that advocates for stronger gambling regulation and enforcement. Its analysis estimates that unregulated online gambling revenue increased from €52.6 billion in 2023 to €80.6 billion in 2024 before reaching €91.6 billion in 2025.
That represents an estimated 74% increase in two years. Regulated online gambling also grew during the same period, but at a considerably slower pace according to the report, reaching €36.5 billion in 2025.
Casino games account for most of the estimated unregulated market. GCI says approximately 75% of unregulated gross gambling revenue came from online casino products, compared with 25% from sports betting. Within the locally regulated market, the split was estimated at 59% casino and 41% sports betting.
The regional estimates are just as striking. GCI puts the unregulated share at 81% in Eastern Europe, 74% in Western Europe, 60% in Southern Europe and 58% in Northern Europe. Western Europe produced the largest estimated amount of unregulated revenue at €36.9 billion, while Eastern Europe followed at €30.7 billion.
Using an average gross gambling revenue tax rate of 24%, the report estimates that governments potentially missed approximately €22 billion in gambling tax revenue during 2025. That figure depends entirely on the underlying market estimates and should not be treated as €22 billion that governments would automatically collect if every unregulated player moved to a locally licensed casino.
Another study says the unregulated market is closer to 25%
The problem with the 72% figure is that other researchers looking at the same general market have arrived at very different conclusions.
Research commissioned by EUROMAT and conducted by Regulus Partners and Helios estimated Europe’s illegal online gambling market at approximately €12 billion in net revenue during 2025. That study concluded the unregulated market represented around 25% of online gambling activity across the European markets it examined.
H2 Gambling Capital has also produced estimates much closer to that range than GCI’s 72% figure.
These studies are not perfectly comparable. They cover somewhat different groups of countries and use different definitions and methodologies, which makes lining up one number directly against another difficult. Even with those differences, however, the gap between approximately 25% and 72% is far too large to ignore.
We are effectively being presented with two very different pictures of the same industry. In one, locally regulated operators still control a clear majority of Europe’s online gambling market while a substantial unregulated sector continues to operate alongside them. In the other, the relationship has been completely reversed, with almost three quarters of online gambling revenue occurring outside local regulatory systems.
That distinction matters because governments are making regulatory decisions based partly on how much gambling they believe is moving outside their control.
What does “unregulated” actually mean?
There is also an important distinction between an unregulated operator and a casino with no gambling license at all.
An online casino can hold a gambling license in one jurisdiction while accepting players from another country where it does not hold the locally required license. From the perspective of the player’s country, that gambling activity may be classified as unregulated even though the casino itself operates under a license somewhere else.
This is particularly relevant in Europe because online casinos can operate internationally under licenses issued by jurisdictions such as Curaçao, Malta, the Isle of Man and others. Holding one of those licenses does not automatically give an operator permission to accept players everywhere in Europe.
That means the €91.6 billion estimate should not be interpreted as €91.6 billion being spent with completely unlicensed gambling websites. The report is attempting to measure gambling taking place outside the regulatory perimeter of the individual country where the player is located.
For players, that distinction can be important. The protections, complaint procedures, responsible gambling requirements and legal options available to someone using a locally regulated casino can be different from those available when playing with an internationally licensed operator.
The report says players are seeing far more unregulated gambling content
One of the more interesting parts of the research has less to do with gambling revenue and more to do with how players find gambling sites in the first place.
GCI estimates that online gambling content reached approximately 121 million people across the EU during 2025. According to the report, 88 million encountered content associated with unregulated operators, while 33 million were reached exclusively by locally regulated gambling content.
The difference becomes even larger when looking at consumers who actively interacted with gambling related content. GCI estimates that 91% of the content encountered by those consumers promoted operators outside the relevant local regulatory system.
That may ultimately be one of the most important findings in the report. Gambling regulation traditionally focuses heavily on the operator itself, but online casinos do not exist in isolation. They depend on search engines, advertising platforms, social media, payment companies, app stores and other technology businesses to reach customers and process transactions.
The report argues that this infrastructure is one of the reasons national regulators struggle to control an industry that operates across borders.
Marketers and streaming sites are part of the equation
GCI estimates that 6,238 unregulated operators were actively targeting consumers in the EU during 2025. Its definition can count active websites, apps, mirror sites and redirect domains separately depending on the jurisdiction being targeted, which is another reason the headline numbers need context.
The report also points toward marketers and streaming platforms as important sources of exposure. This matters because gambling discovery has moved far beyond someone simply typing the name of an online casino into Google.
Players can encounter casino promotions through influencers, sports content, ranking websites, streaming sites and social media before ever visiting the operator itself. Some offshore and internationally licensed casinos can also offer products, bonuses or betting options that locally regulated operators are prohibited from offering, which can make them attractive to certain players.
That creates an enforcement problem that blocking individual casino domains may not solve. A blocked website can potentially be replaced with another domain, while marketers and social platforms can continue sending users toward alternative destinations.
The disagreement goes directly to the gambling tax debate
There is another reason the size of the unregulated market matters.
Gambling operators across Europe have repeatedly argued that high taxes and increasingly restrictive regulations can push players toward sites outside the local regulated market. Restrictions on bonuses, advertising, game design, deposit limits and other parts of the gambling experience can create larger differences between locally licensed casinos and offshore alternatives.
The Campaign for Fairer Gambling takes a different view. Its argument is that governments should not respond to the unregulated market by weakening consumer protections or reducing taxes for licensed operators. Instead, it believes authorities need to become much more effective at enforcing existing rules against operators serving players without the required local licenses.
Those are very different solutions to the same problem.
If regulation becomes so restrictive that large numbers of players deliberately seek alternatives, simply blocking more domains may have limited effectiveness. On the other hand, reducing consumer protections every time an offshore operator offers a less restricted product would make it difficult for regulators to enforce meaningful standards at all.
That is why understanding the actual size of the unregulated market matters. A market where 25% of revenue sits outside local regulation presents a serious problem. A market where 72% sits outside local regulation suggests something much more fundamental is happening.
Regulators are increasingly looking beyond the casinos themselves
One recommendation from the GCI report is particularly interesting because we are already seeing versions of it elsewhere.
Instead of pursuing thousands of gambling websites individually, regulators can target the infrastructure that allows those sites to operate. That means looking at search engines, advertising networks, payment companies, app stores and other services that connect operators with players.
The logic is relatively simple. Thousands of gambling domains may be difficult to police individually, but many of them depend on the same much smaller group of technology and financial companies.
We have already seen a similar strategy emerging in the United States with sweepstakes casinos. Rather than focusing exclusively on whether an individual casino should be allowed to operate, some enforcement efforts have begun looking at the payment companies and advertising platforms surrounding those businesses.
Europe’s situation is much larger and more complicated, but the principle is similar. If regulators cannot effectively control every gambling website accessible on the internet, they may increasingly focus on the companies that help those websites advertise, process payments and reach customers.
So how big is Europe’s unregulated gambling market?
The safest conclusion from the latest research is not that 72% of European online gambling is definitely unregulated. The disagreement between major estimates is simply too large to make that claim with confidence.
What is much harder to dispute is that Europe has a substantial online gambling market operating outside individual countries’ local licensing systems, and multiple studies suggest that market has grown significantly.
Whether the correct share is closer to 25%, 72% or somewhere between those figures changes the scale of the problem, but it does not eliminate it.
For regulators, the challenge is figuring out why players continue using operators outside their local markets and what can realistically be done about it. Stronger enforcement may be part of the answer, particularly when it comes to advertising and payments. But regulators also have to consider whether their own taxes, restrictions and product rules are making locally licensed casinos less competitive with alternatives that remain only a few clicks away.
That is the larger story behind the €91.6 billion estimate. The headline number is getting attention because of its size, but the enormous disagreement over that number may tell us just as much about the current state of online gambling regulation in Europe.
Last Updated: 44 minutes ago
