Austria Sends Gambling Monopoly Overhaul to European Commission

Austria’s Finance Ministry announced on August 4, 2026 that it has submitted its draft gambling law to the European Commission for review, starting a three-month standstill period before the bill ending the country’s gambling monopoly can be adopted.

The submission moves the overhaul of the Glücksspielgesetz, the statute underpinning Austria’s decades-old state gambling monopoly, into the EU’s formal notification procedure, under which the Commission and other member states can examine the draft’s compatibility with single-market rules. The ministry said the law cannot be passed until the standstill expires, but that the parliamentary process can continue during the review.

At the centre of the draft is an open licensing procedure for online gambling, replacing the exclusive-concession system. Operators currently serving Austrian customers without authorisation must cease their offering from January 1, 2027 to remain eligible for a licence. Those that do not face an 18-month block on being granted one, rising to 24 months from 2030, and all unsettled tax debts and unpaid player-protection claims must be cleared before a licence is issued. The ministry said the settlement requirement delivers, in its words, justice for around 20,000 players in Austria with outstanding claims against unlicensed operators.

Enforcement powers in the draft include payment blocking, blacklisting and network blocks against illegal gambling services, backed by a new digital supervision system that enforces a central, cross-operator deposit limit for online play. A national self-exclusion register will, for the first time, record both operator-imposed and self-exclusions across casinos, slot-machine venues and online providers, so a player blocked in one part of the market cannot simply switch to another.

The monopoly system Austria is replacing

Austria currently reserves gambling to the federal state, which exercises that monopoly through a small number of strictly supervised concessions, with the Finance Ministry acting as gambling supervisor, according to the ministry’s own description of the system. The lottery and online-gambling concession sits with Österreichische Lotterien, which operates the win2day online casino, slots and sports-betting platform alongside the national lottery games, while Casinos Austria runs the country’s 12 land-based casinos.

That structure has been contested for more than a decade. The draft was sent for stakeholder consultation on June 26, 2026, with responses due by July 15, 2026, according to the consultation letter filed with the Austrian parliament. Gaming.net detailed the draft’s provisions when an early version circulated in June.

Austria’s gambling overhaul by the numbers

• 13 land-based casino licences, a fixed cap set out in the draft, with licences awardable in packages
• 18-month block on licensing for operators that keep serving Austria past the January 1, 2027 cut-off, rising to 24 months from 2030
• Around 20,000 players with outstanding claims the ministry expects the settlement requirement to cover
• 90 minutes of continuous slot-machine play before a mandatory cooling-off period
• Ages 18 to 26, the band subject to lower deposit limits under the player-protection rules

Beyond licensing, the draft reduces maximum slot-machine stakes and slows game speeds, measures in line with stake-limit rules adopted in several European markets, whose effectiveness Gaming.net has examined. It also requires scientific assessments of each game’s addiction potential to be submitted to the regulator.

What happens next for the Glücksspielgesetz

The Commission’s review runs for three months from the transmission, placing the earliest possible adoption in November 2026. During that window the Commission and member states can submit opinions and objections on individual provisions, while Austria’s parliamentary work on the bill continues.

For operators, the first hard date is January 1, 2027, when any company still taking Austrian play without a licence forfeits eligibility for at least 18 months. Only once the standstill closes, outstanding claims are settled and the licence conditions bite does the state monopoly formally give way to a licensed market.