Online Gambling Licensing in Germany: What GlüStV 2021 Actually Covers

GlüStV 2021 created a national licensing route for four specific verticals: virtual slots (virtuelle Automatenspiele), online poker, sports betting, and online horse-race betting. Nothing else is nationally licensable under this framework.

The GGL is deliberately not the licensing body for live-dealer online casino games. Those games fall to individual Länder under their own separate arrangements — Schleswig-Holstein and Bavaria are the ones that currently offer a route to a live-dealer licence, and each only covers players physically located in that specific state. A site describing itself as holding a “GGL online casino licence” is describing something the GGL itself does not issue as a category.

The GGL publishes a public register (the “Weiße Liste”) of licensed operators, including the specific vertical and territorial scope of each licence, on its own website. Check an operator’s name against that register directly, including which state or national scope applies, rather than relying on a badge displayed on the casino’s own site.

LUGAS (Länderübergreifendes Glücksspielaufsichtssystem) enforces a default deposit limit of €1,000 per calendar month that applies across every GGL-licensed operator combined, not per site. Once the limit is reached, further deposits at any licensed operator are automatically blocked for the rest of that month. Players can apply for an individual higher limit under the conditions prescribed by GlüStV 2021, verified through supporting documentation.

The statutory default remains €1 per spin. As of 1 July 2026, the GGL used its powers under GlüStV 2021 for the first time to permit licensed operators to offer higher tiers to qualifying players: up to €3 per spin for players aged 21 and over, and up to €5 per spin for players who have shown no signs of harmful gambling activity over a 90-day monitoring period. Players under 21 remain capped at €1 regardless of these tiers.

OASIS is Germany’s cross-operator self-exclusion database for GGL-licensed operators; registration blocks a player from every licensed operator and stops marketing from those operators. Separately, every licensed operator must provide a “panic button” during gameplay that triggers an immediate 24-hour exclusion when pressed.

On 16 April 2026, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in Case C-440/23 that EU law does not prevent a Member State from prohibiting certain online gambling services, even where those services are lawfully licensed in another Member State, and does not prevent that State from attaching civil-law consequences — including nullity of the contract and restitution of losses — to that prohibition. This resolved the EU-law question in the case, which concerned a German player’s losses at two Malta-licensed operators during a period when German law prohibited that activity.

The EU-level question is now settled, but a related domestic question is not: Germany’s Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Court of Justice) has its own lead case, I ZR 216/25, formally designated in May 2026 as a Leitentscheidungsverfahren because it affects a large number of similar pending loss-recovery claims. An oral hearing is scheduled for 17 September 2026. This case will address specific domestic questions about recovering losses from unauthorised online gambling that the CJEU ruling did not itself resolve.

The GGL has stated publicly that it is increasing scrutiny of affiliates, media owners, and ad networks connected to Germany’s regulated gambling sector. Combined with the fact that live-dealer casino games have no available national licence, and that the BGH’s domestic loss-recovery question remains open, we are publishing this page as a straightforward explainer rather than recommending specific operators.