Belgium's Online Gambling Market Reaches €964.5m as Online Casino GGR Rises 13%
Belgium's regulated online gambling market grew to €964.5 million in 2025, with online casino GGR up nearly 13%, even as first-time player registrations fell sharply, according to the Kansspelcommissie's newly published annual report.
Belgium's regulated online gambling market generated approximately €964.5 million in gross gaming revenue (GGR) in 2025, an increase of 5.41% on the previous year, according to the 2025 Annual Report published by the Kansspelcommissie (Gaming Commission), Belgium's gambling regulator, on 16 September 2026. Online casino gambling — activity conducted by operators holding an A+ licence, which ties an online casino to a partner land-based venue — accounted for €554.1 million of that total, up approximately 13% year-on-year.
The figures were published in Dutch and French as part of the regulator's annual review of Belgium's licensed gambling sector. Total regulated GGR across all channels, online and land-based combined, was €1.62 billion in 2025, essentially unchanged from a revised 2024 baseline of €1,621,707,086 — a decline of just 0.07%.
Behind that flat headline figure, however, the report describes a market in transition. Online gambling grew while land-based gambling contracted, and online casino was the fastest-growing major segment identified in the data. At the same time, the number of people registering to gamble online for the first time fell by more than 40%, even as existing players were more active on a daily basis than the year before.
Online Gambling Growth Outpaces the Wider Market
Online gambling reached €964.5 million in GGR in 2025, representing 59.51% of Belgium's total regulated gambling market — meaning more than half of all licensed gambling revenue in the country is now generated online. That marks a continuation of a longer-term shift: as recently as the 2023 reporting year, online GGR stood at approximately €944.6 million.
Land-based gambling moved in the opposite direction. According to the Kansspelcommissie's figures, land-based GGR fell 7.17% to €656.1 million in 2025. The result is a gap of roughly 12.6 percentage points between the growth rates of the two channels — one expanding, the other contracting, within an overall market that barely moved.
The decline in land-based gambling was not uniform across sub-sectors. Land-based casinos actually grew, with GGR rising 5.85% to €152.3 million. Café-based gaming, including bingo, fell sharply by 17.77% to €196.0 million, and gaming arcades declined 4.17%. The overall land-based contraction, in other words, was driven primarily by café-based venues rather than casinos themselves.
Online Casino Drives a Larger Share of the Online Market
Online casino gambling was the standout performer within the online segment. GGR from A+-licensed online casino operators reached €554.1 million in 2025, up 12.99% year-on-year — more than double the growth rate of the online market as a whole. On a Level.casino calculation based on the published KSC figures, online casino now accounts for approximately 57% of total online GGR and roughly 34% of Belgium's entire regulated gambling market.
That growth rate, while still substantial, represents a deceleration rather than an acceleration. According to Belgium's 2023 Financial Report, online casino GGR grew 20.2% that year, reaching €455 million. The rate of expansion has since slowed to roughly 13% in 2025, even as the absolute GGR figure continues to climb.
The Kansspelcommissie's report does not provide a category-level breakdown of the €554.1 million figure — it is not possible, from the data available, to say how much reflects slots, live-dealer casino, or other formats. Nor does the available reporting reconcile precisely how online casino's growth compares to other online verticals such as sports betting; the Kansspelcommissie's aggregate online figures do not isolate betting GGR with the same precision applied to online casino. Level.casino's analysis of the published percentages found the arithmetic linking segment-level growth to total online market growth does not fully reconcile, and readers should treat online casino as a major — but not necessarily sole — driver of the market's online expansion.
Fewer First-Time Players, More Daily Activity
The most striking contrast in the 2025 report concerns player numbers rather than GGR. First-time online registrations fell from 193,342 in 2024 to 110,032 in 2025 — a drop of 43.1%. Over the same period, the average number of daily active online players rose by approximately 3%, to 160,144.
The Kansspelcommissie states that part of the decline in first-time registrations is linked to Belgium raising the minimum legal gambling age from 18 to 21, effective 1 September 2024, a change that applies across both online and offline gambling (excluding lottery products, for which the minimum age remains 18). The regulator notes that 21-to-29-year-olds are now the largest cohort of newcomers to the market. Importantly, the Commission's own report attributes only "part" of the decline to the age change, without quantifying what share of the 43.1% fall that factor accounts for.
The regulator also reported that 528,706 unique individuals gambled online at least once in 2025. A comparable figure for 2024 was not confirmed in the sources available for this article, and Level.casino has therefore not published a year-on-year comparison for that specific metric.
Taken together, the figures show a widening gap between new-player acquisition and the value generated by the existing regulated online market, but they do not by themselves establish why that gap emerged. The Kansspelcommissie's report does not draw a complete causal line connecting the fall in new registrations to the simultaneous rise in online GGR and daily active players. It is possible that existing players are engaging more frequently or spending more, but no source reviewed for this article provides a verified per-player spend or frequency metric that would confirm this. Belgium's gambling trade association, BAGO, has separately raised concerns that some prospective new players may be migrating to unlicensed gambling sites rather than registering with regulated operators, citing a Kansspelcommissie youth survey in which 28% of respondents aged 18 to 30 said they had already used an illegal gambling site. That claim comes from an industry body responding to the figures, not from the Kansspelcommissie's own annual report, and should be read as such.
Responsible Gambling and Self-Exclusion
The report also details an expansion of Belgium's self-exclusion framework. The number of people voluntarily enrolled in EPIS, the national Excluded Persons Information System, rose from 56,458 at the end of 2024 to 66,998 at the end of 2025 — an increase of roughly 19%. The Kansspelcommissie recorded 16,358 new exclusion requests during the year, approximately 76% of which were submitted through the itsme digital identity app.
Since 1 May 2025, Belgian law has required operators to check every player against the EPIS register before granting access to gambling products, a tightening of an earlier, narrower requirement. The Kansspelcommissie reports that this resulted in 715,373 blocked visits — combining physical and online attempts — over the course of 2025.
On enforcement, the regulator says more than 8,500 illegal gambling advertisements were reported to Meta for removal during the year, 370 new websites were added to Belgium's blacklist of illegal operators, and €81,100 in fines was effectively collected from operators found in breach of licensing rules.
Belgium's Regulatory Environment
The 2025 figures were recorded against one of the more restrictive gambling-advertising environments in Europe. A broad advertising ban — covering television, radio, cinema, print, outdoor advertising and most digital and social media marketing — has been in force since 1 July 2023. From 1 January 2025, additional restrictions limited gambling sponsorship messaging inside sports stadiums, with shirt sponsorship permitted only via a brand name or logo no larger than 75 square centimetres through 2027, ahead of a full sponsorship ban due to take effect in 2028.
No source reviewed for this article shows the Kansspelcommissie itself linking these advertising or sponsorship restrictions to the fall in first-time online players recorded in the 2025 report. The Commission's own stated explanation for that decline centres specifically on the minimum-age increase.
Separately, the Kansspelcommissie noted that the 2024 comparison figures used throughout the 2025 report are revised rather than the figures originally published in October 2025, following a capacity shortfall in the Commission's Financial Control unit that was resolved with the addition of a full-time staff member in December 2025. Readers comparing this report against earlier Belgian gambling coverage should be aware that the 2024 baseline has since been restated.
What the Figures Mean for Belgium's Regulated Market
Three trends stand out from the Kansspelcommissie's 2025 Annual Report. Online gambling now represents a clear majority of Belgium's regulated gambling GGR, having grown to 59.51% of the total market. Land-based gambling, by contrast, declined in aggregate, though not uniformly across its sub-sectors. And within online gambling, online casino grew faster than the online market overall, even as its own growth rate has slowed compared with 2023.
At the same time, market value and player acquisition moved in different directions. New player registrations fell sharply while GGR and daily active player counts both rose — a pattern the regulator's own data documents but does not fully explain.
Conclusion
Belgium's regulated gambling market ended 2025 essentially flat in overall value but structurally reshaped: online gambling, and online casino in particular, now account for a growing share of a market in which land-based venues — cafés and arcades especially — are losing ground. Set against that backdrop, the sharp fall in first-time online players sits alongside rising engagement among the existing player base, a contrast the Kansspelcommissie's report documents clearly but does not, on its own, resolve. Whether that gap reflects existing players spending more, a shrinking pool of newly eligible entrants following the 2024 age change, migration toward unlicensed platforms, or some combination of factors remains, on the evidence published so far, an open question.
