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Gambling in Italy Statistics 2026: 70 Sourced Data Points on Where the Money Physically Sits

By the 16Best gambling data desk · Published 3 August 2026 · Last reviewed 3 August 2026 · About 22 minutes to read. Primary sources: the Agenzia delle Dogane e dei Monopoli Libro Blu series (2019–2024) and its bilancio d’esercizio 2025, read alongside Ministry of Economy and Finance bulletin data for 2025.

Italy is not, in the way that matters, an online gambling market. Online took 61% of everything staked in 2025 — and in the last year ADM published a full channel breakdown, the slot and VLT machines standing in Italian bars, tobacconists and arcades took 41.5% of everything Italians lost, against 21.2% for every online product combined. Machines look small in the turnover tables because they recycle money slowly. They are large in the loss tables because they keep a quarter of every euro fed into them, and online keeps a twentieth. That is why a 300-metre line drawn on a municipal map moves more Italian gambling money than any rule about a website.

Every figure below is attributed to a named, dated source. Every number we worked out ourselves is stamped 16Best analysis and shown with its inputs so you can redo it. Sources are tiered out loud: the tax authority’s own accounts, ministry bulletin data, trade-press tabulations of ADM tables and an eight-year-old national health survey are not the same kind of evidence, and we say which is which.

How much do Italians stake and lose in 2025?

EUR 165.33 billion staked, EUR 21.869 billion lost. Those are ADM’s own figures for calendar 2025, published in its bilancio d’esercizio: turnover up 5% on the year, player losses up 1.36%. The second number is the market. The first is the speed at which the same money moves.

Put the loss figure somewhere you can feel it. EUR 21.9 billion is more than the EUR 19.7 billion INPS paid out in 2025 under the Assegno unico to 6.3 million families with 10 million children. The turnover figure is worth 85% of everything Italian households spent on food and non-alcoholic drinks in the same year (EUR 193.7 billion), which is the sort of comparison that makes people write that Italians gamble away a fifth of the grocery bill. They do not. They stake it, get 87 cents of every euro back, and stake it again.

Raccolta and spesa as published by ADM for each year (Libro Blu 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024; bilancio d’esercizio 2025). Hold, the multiple and both compound rates are 16Best calculations from those totals. The 2021 and 2022 hold figures come from ADM’s own published winnings-to-turnover ratios of 86.08% and 85.03%; the 2022 raccolta shown is the implied figure from the 2023 total and ADM’s printed +8.53% growth. No 2020 row: the Covid year saw turnover fall 20.05% and losses 33.23%, and it distorts every rate it touches.

Read the line, not the level. Italy’s aggregate hold rose in 2022 and has fallen every year since. ADM does not leave the 2022 rise to interpretation: its own Libro Blu attributes it to “a return of users to the physical play of entertainment machines, with less remunerative payouts than other types of game.” The regulator, in other words, already told everyone what drives the national margin. It is the machines. Everything below is that sentence with the arithmetic filled in.

Where does the Italian gambling euro get staked?

Overwhelmingly online, and overwhelmingly on one product. Online turnover passed EUR 100 billion for the first time in 2025, at EUR 100.88 billion — above 60% of the national total, against EUR 92.1 billion in 2024 and EUR 65.3 billion for the physical network that year. A single category, online fixed-odds games of chance (the ADM label that covers online slots and casino games), took EUR 77.25 billion on its own: 46.7% of everything staked in Italy.

Machines are now the small side of the stake ledger. AWP and VLT turnover was EUR 33.738 billion in 2023, EUR 32.618 billion in 2024, and an estimated EUR 31.541 billion in 2025 — a fall of more than EUR 2.1 billion in two years, and roughly 32% below the 2019 level. Avviso Pubblico’s product tabulation of ADM data for 2025 gives AWP EUR 14.9 billion and VLT EUR 16.5 billion, which lands within EUR 0.14 billion of the MEF-derived estimate. Two routes, one answer.

Raccolta by product from ADM 2025 tables as reported by JAMMA and Avviso Pubblico, and from MEF bulletin summaries reported by AGIMEG; the national totals are ADM’s bilancio d’esercizio 2025 and the erario total is the Corte dei Conti figure of EUR 11.47bn. Shares are ours. Two tax lines are on different bases — the machine figure is PREU levied on turnover, the online figures are imposta unica levied on margin — which is the whole point of the next two sections. The product rows do not sum to the national total because horse racing, virtual events, numeric-total games and several minor categories are not shown.

Which channel actually keeps the euro?

The physical network keeps 25 cents in the euro. The online network keeps five. This is the hinge of Italian gambling and almost nobody states it, because it requires dividing two ADM numbers that the agency prints in different chapters.

In 2023 — the most recent year with a published channel split of both quantities — the physical network took EUR 65.1 billion of turnover, paid out EUR 48.8 billion in winnings and kept EUR 16.3 billion. That is a hold of 25.04%. The online channel is the residual of the national totals: EUR 82.58 billion staked against about EUR 4.38 billion kept, a hold of 5.30%. Same country, same year, same regulator — and a euro that walks into a tobacconist is worth 4.7 times as much to the industry as a euro that opens an app.

The ordering matters more than any single bar. Every product that requires a physical location holds between 17% and 29%. Everything delivered down a wire holds about 5%. And the 2025 online figures confirm it has not moved: all licensed online casino, poker and bingo games together took EUR 77.85 billion of stakes and kept EUR 3.337 billion, a hold of 4.29%. Online sports betting kept EUR 1.7 billion of EUR 13.9 billion, or 12.2%.

So where do Italians really lose their money?

In front of a machine — still, and by a distance. Rank Italian gambling by losses rather than by stakes and the league table inverts. In 2023, AWP and VLT machines produced EUR 8.582 billion of player losses out of EUR 20.68 billion nationally. That is 41.5% of everything Italians lost, from a channel carrying 22.85% of what they staked. Every online product on the market, added together, produced 21.2%.

Losses by product from the ADM Libro Blu 2023 as tabulated by AGIMEG in September 2025. Shares, stake shares and the ratio are 16Best calculations; stake shares use the same year’s raccolta of EUR 147.68bn and are shown only where a product-level raccolta for 2023 is published on the same basis. Machines include the small Article 110(7) amusement category, whose turnover is about EUR 30m a year and is immaterial here. The residual reconciles the listed products to the national total and is chiefly online skill games and horse racing.

That 21.2% online figure is a residual, so it deserves an independent check — and it gets one. The CGIA research unit, working from ADM data for As.tro, put 2024 online player losses at EUR 5.074 billion, up 16% on 2023. Run that growth rate backwards and 2023 online losses were EUR 4.37 billion. We derived EUR 4.38 billion by subtracting ADM’s physical total from its national one. Two methods, a gap of under ten million euros on a four-billion-euro number. When a residual and an independent estimate agree to a quarter of one per cent, the residual is safe to build on.

Has online closed the gap since? Partly, and it is worth being precise rather than dramatic. That EUR 5.074 billion was 23.5% of everything Italians lost in 2024. For 2025 ADM has not yet published a comparable online total; the products it has reported — online casino, poker and bingo at EUR 3.337 billion, online sports betting at a further EUR 1.7 billion — give EUR 5.04 billion, a floor, because online lotteries, Lotto and skill tournaments are not in it. Machines over the same year are not published either, but unlike online they can be bounded from above.

2024 is the cleaner test, because both sides of it are published or near-published. Online losses that year were EUR 5.074 billion, or 23.5% of the national EUR 21.577 billion. Machine losses on the same constant-hold method were about EUR 8.30 billion, or 38.5%. Machines still cost Italians 1.6 euros for every euro the entire internet cost them — down from 1.96 in 2023, but nowhere near level.

Now project it honestly, which means refusing to name a year. Machine turnover has fallen 3.3% a year for two consecutive years, and machine losses with it. Online loss growth is the unstable term: it ran at 16% in 2024 on the CGIA-As.tro reading of ADM data, but online sports-betting losses grew only 6.3% in 2025 while online sports-betting turnover actually fell 2.8%. Hold machines at −3.3% and run online at both ends of that range and the lines cross in late 2027 on the fast case and not until 2030 on the slow one (16Best analysis from the 2024 base of EUR 8.30bn against EUR 5.074bn; the 6.3% low bound is a sports-betting rate applied to all online, which is a deliberately pessimistic reading, and the 16% high bound is a single year). A three-year band is the honest output of two observed trends, and anyone quoting a single crossover year for Italy has picked a growth rate and not told you which. What the band does establish is the direction of the error in most coverage: the transition is treated as history, and on the money Italians actually lose it is still in the future.

Where do the machines physically sit?

In 50,067 ordinary commercial premises, at a rate of one AWP slot for every 200 or so Italian adults — before a single VLT is counted. This is the part of the Italian market that has an address. The CGIA Mestre survey of the sector counted 246,663 AWP machines installed in 2024, 6.3% fewer than the 263,000-odd standing in 2019, in 50,067 venues. VLT terminals live in dedicated halls and are counted separately: ADM’s register carried 282,454 permits and installation rights in May 2026, 227,810 AWP and 54,644 VLT.

Those two numbers do not conflict, and the gap between them is informative. The AWP register in mid-2026 is smaller than the AWP estate installed in 2024, because the estate kept contracting — CGIA counted more than 16,000 AWP sitting in warehouses during 2024 alone.

AWP venue and machine counts from the CGIA Mestre 2025 report on the AWP and VLT sector as reported by JAMMA and AGIMEG — note that the 6.3% decline in that report is measured 2019 to 2024, not year on year. Permit counts from MEF undersecretary Sandra Savino’s answer to a parliamentary question, 20 May 2026. AWP and VLT turnover for 2023 and 2024 from ADM, with 2025 estimated by JAMMA from MEF bulletin data pending the official ADM release; the AWP-only split is Avviso Pubblico’s tabulation of ADM product data. The 2019 combined turnover is implied by I-Com’s and CGIA’s finding that the 2024 figure of EUR 32.6bn was about 30% below 2019, and the 2019 share uses ADM raccolta of EUR 110.5bn; both are 16Best derivations and should be read to the nearest billion. Turnover per AWP is 2024 AWP turnover divided by the 2024 AWP count — scopes deliberately matched, which is why it is not the combined machine figure divided by the same denominator.

Divide that per-machine figure by 365 and the physical economy becomes tangible. About EUR 177 goes into the average Italian AWP slot every day. At the 65% minimum payout the law allows, at most about EUR 62 of it stays — and of that EUR 62, roughly EUR 42 is PREU, handed to the Treasury before the bar owner, the distributor or the concessionaire sees a cent. A slot in an Italian bar is, in cash terms, a tax collector that happens to have a screen.

Multiply back up to the estate and you get the whole point of this page. Italy’s machine network takes something close to EUR 22 million a day out of players, from a slowly shrinking footprint of bars, tobacconists and arcades. The online channel turns over EUR 276 million a day and keeps around EUR 14 million (16Best analysis: EUR 8.02bn and EUR 5.04bn of annual losses, and EUR 100.88bn of annual online turnover, each divided by 365).

The estate is shrinking without any national instruction to shrink it. AWP venue numbers are down 39.9% since 2015 and 14.4% since 2019. The causes are cumulative: a statutory ceiling of 265,000 AWP imposed in 2018, pandemic closures that never reopened, and above all the regional distanziometro rules — minimum distances of generally 300 to 500 metres between a machine or betting shop and schools, hospitals, places of worship or youth centres. Those rules are regional and municipal, not national, and the Constitutional Court upheld that competence in judgments 108/2017 and 27/2019. Our sibling page on gambling laws in Italy sets out the legal architecture; the point here is arithmetical. The only Italian gambling rule that directly regulates where money can be lost is written by regions and mayors.

Who taxes the euro, and at what rate?

The State takes EUR 6.94 per EUR 100 staked nationally — and EUR 16.83 from a machine against EUR 1.07 from an online slot. Italy does not have a gambling tax. It has about a dozen, on incompatible bases, and the spread between them is the largest structural fact in the sector after the hold.

16Best analysis. Raccolta and tax by product for 2025 from the MEF bulletin summary reported by AGIMEG and from ADM imposta unica tables reported by JAMMA; the national erario of EUR 11.47bn is the Corte dei Conti figure in the Unimpresa study of the Rendiconto dello Stato 2025. Scope note: this column deliberately puts every product on the one base they share — money staked — because that is the only way to compare a turnover levy with a margin levy. It is not a statutory rate and should never be quoted as one. The machine and lottery lines also mix tax proper with residual state margin, which is how the ministry itself reports them.

The consequence runs through the whole system. Machines carry 19.1% of Italian stakes and paid 46.2% of Italian gambling tax in 2025; in 2024 ADM’s own Libro Blu put the machine share of gambling tax at 50.31%, and in 2022 at 54.77%. Online carried 60% of stakes and produced under 13% of the take. That is why the ratio of gambling tax to turnover has collapsed from 19.4% in 2006 to 6.9% in 2025, even though statutory rates went up on 1 January 2025, not down: the tax base moved to a product the tax was never designed for.

Italy is not alone in this. Germany’s 5.3% turnover tax works out at about 133% of gross gaming revenue on a 96%-RTP slot, which is the same arithmetic taken to its absurd conclusion. Italy’s version is milder and better hidden: PREU at 24% of AWP turnover is at least 68.6% of gross gaming revenue at the statutory minimum payout, against 25.5% for an online casino.

Where in Italy does the money sit?

Concentrated in three regions on losses, and inverted between North and South on loss rate. Lombardy, Campania and Lazio between them accounted for EUR 6.35 billion of the EUR 16.3 billion Italians lost on the physical network in 2023 — just under 40% of it.

ADM Libro Blu 2023 regional tables as tabulated by AGIMEG. Machine losses are the AWP, VLT and Article 110(7) category. Lombardy alone accounted for 21.2% of Italy’s machine losses that year, on 16Best arithmetic against the national machine total of EUR 8,582m — more than double the next region.

The North/South claim needs care, because it is half right. On the Osservatorio dei Conti Pubblici Italiani’s 2025 figures, the South stakes and loses more per head: Campania EUR 3,862 staked per head against an Italian average of EUR 2,792, and about EUR 482 lost per head against EUR 371 nationally. But the southern loss rate is lower, because the South plays more online skill games — a preference the OCPI puts at 80% above the North’s — while the North plays more machines, bingo and lotteries. Southern players stake more and lose a smaller fraction of it. The machine economy is disproportionately a northern one, and Lombardy’s EUR 1.82 billion of machine losses is the single largest regional number in Italian gambling.

On the corrected denominator, Italy loses at least EUR 433 per adult per year, roughly US$488 at the 2025 ECB average of about US$1.128 to the euro. We quote the low end of the adult range deliberately; the arithmetic supports up to EUR 436, or US$492. Either way it is 3.7 times the global average of about US$132 lost per adult a year that underpins our global casino revenue analysis and our gambling loss statistics. The OCPI reaches the same conclusion by a different route, finding Italy above Spain, France, the United Kingdom and Germany on losses per adult and losses as a share of GDP.

Where does the euro end up?

About 53 cents of every euro lost goes to the Treasury and 47 to the supply chain. Of the EUR 21.9 billion Italians lost in 2025, EUR 11.5 billion went to the State and EUR 10.4 billion to concessionaires, operators, distributors, tobacconists and betting-shop agents, on the Unimpresa reading of Corte dei Conti data. The state share is drifting down, not up: the erario fell 0.7% in 2025 while turnover rose 5%.

Two details make the destination physical. The first is deposits. Italian online accounts received EUR 13.2 billion across 337.8 million top-ups in 2025 — an average of just over EUR 39 a time, drifting above EUR 41 by December — and that EUR 13.2 billion supported EUR 100.88 billion of online turnover. Every euro paid into an Italian gaming account is staked about 7.6 times before it is gone (16Best analysis). Almost half of all accounts lose under EUR 100 in a year, which is the shape of a mass-market, low-stake product rather than a high-roller one.

The second is Italy’s four land casinos. Venice reported EUR 117.8 million of net gaming revenue in 2025 from 767,727 admissions, Saint-Vincent EUR 74.4 million, Campione d’Italia EUR 61.0 million and Sanremo EUR 58.7 million — about EUR 312 million between them, or 1.4% of national losses. The machine estate is on the order of 25 times larger. Whatever Italian gambling is, it is not a casino industry.

What happens to the machine estate next?

The government wants roughly a fifth of it gone, and the fight is over who draws the map. The riordino del gioco fisico under discussion in 2026 proposes cutting AWP from about 250,000 to 200,000 and VLT from about 55,000 to 45,000, alongside a national distanziometro of 100 metres for certified outlets and 200 metres for uncertified ones — considerably looser than the 300 to 500 metres most regions currently impose. To buy regional agreement, the 2026 Budget Law refinanced the fund for reorganising the physical network with EUR 80 million, and the government has offered the regions a standing 5% share of physical-gambling receipts. The delegation deadline, after the last extension under law 120/2025, is 29 August 2026.

It has not landed, and the reason is the point of this page. As of mid-2026 the implementing decree had not cleared the Prime Minister’s office, and the clause holding it up is the distance rule — not the tax rates, not the machine caps, not the concession tenders. The one number in Italian gambling policy that nobody can agree on is measured in metres.

Size the proposal against this page and it reads differently again. A 20% cut to the machine estate, applied to the 2025 machine loss estimate of about EUR 8.0 billion, is on the order of EUR 1.1 to 1.6 billion of player losses depending on how much play migrates rather than disappears — against at least EUR 5.0 billion currently lost online and growing somewhere between 6% and 16% a year depending on the product (16Best analysis; the migration assumption is ours and is the whole uncertainty). Which is the honest version of the argument: reducing the machine estate is the single largest lever anyone has over Italian gambling losses, and it is also the lever most likely to push players onto the channel the Treasury taxes at EUR 1.07 per EUR 100.

What do the participation and harm numbers say?

Italy’s national evidence base on gambling harm is eight years old, and the state knows it. The Istituto Superiore di Sanità ran the last national epidemiological study across more than 12,000 adults and nearly 16,000 students aged 14 to 17, finding that about 18 million Italians — 36.4% of adults — had gambled in the previous year and about 1.5 million showed a problem-gambling profile, most heavily concentrated between ages 40 and 64. In July 2026 the ISS put out a European tender worth more than EUR 900,000 for a replacement survey, with bids closing 6 August 2026 and fieldwork running October 2026 to September 2027.

Treat any Italian problem-gambling percentage published between now and late 2027 with that in mind: it is either the 2018 study restated, a regional sample, or an operator-adjacent panel. None of the three is a current national prevalence rate. What is measured currently is spending: the state allocates EUR 32.2 million a year to regional plans for gambling disorder, which is under 0.3% of what it collects from gambling.

Enforcement data is firmer because it is administrative. ADM blocked 1,038 illegal gambling sites in 2025, up 111% on 2023, ran 31,403 inspections and suspended 28 premises over access by minors. The legal age is 18.

Why do Italian gambling figures disagree?

Because two Italian words are routinely translated into the same English one, and because ADM’s own 2025 accounts do not add up. This is the section to cite.

• Raccolta is not spesa, and in 2025 they differ by 7.56 times. Raccolta is turnover — everything staked, including winnings staked again. Spesa is what is left after winnings are paid out: gross gaming revenue, what players lost. EUR 165.33bn against EUR 21.869bn. Any English sentence of the form “the Italian gambling market is worth EUR 165 billion” is a scope error of more than an order of magnitude. It is the single most common mistake in coverage of this market.
• ADM’s 2025 accounts do not close, and an independent source resolves it. The bilancio d’esercizio defines spesa as raccolta minus winnings and prints all three: raccolta EUR 165.33bn, winnings EUR 135.87bn, spesa EUR 21.869bn. But 165.33 minus 135.87 is 29.46, not 21.87 — a EUR 7.6 billion hole, first flagged on our Italian gambling law page. The residual implied by the two headline figures is winnings of about EUR 143.5bn, and in June 2026 the Cattolica university’s Osservatorio dei Conti Pubblici Italiani independently wrote that “of the 165 billion staked, 143 billion goes back to players.” Two of the three printed figures are mutually consistent and corroborated; the EUR 135.87bn winnings line is the outlier. We use raccolta and spesa throughout and quote no 2025 payout total (16Best analysis).
• The gap is widest exactly where the market is growing. Online fixed-odds games of chance took EUR 77.25bn of turnover in 2025 — 46.7% of everything staked in Italy — on a hold near 4.3%. Machines took EUR 31.5bn on a hold near 25.4%. Ranking Italian products by raccolta ranks them by recycling speed, not by how much anyone loses.
• Machines can be inside or outside a quoted “market size.” ADM’s Libro Blu puts machines at 50.31% of gambling tax in 2024; MEF data as presented by I-Com puts entertainment machines at 57% of state gambling income the same year. The difference is which receipts count as tax and which as residual state margin. Never mix a Libro Blu percentage with an MEF one.
• One widely repeated 2022 figure is a misread growth rate. A trade headline of January 2024 reported that “in 2022 gambling spend reaches EUR 22.3 billion.” The Libro Blu text it summarises says spesa rose 31.56% and raccolta 22.39%. Apply the published growth rate to the 2021 spesa of EUR 15.5bn and you get EUR 20.4bn, which is what AGIMEG and ADM report. The EUR 22.3bn is a percentage that lost its percent sign (16Best analysis).
• Account numbers depend on the definition of “active.” ADM’s Libro Blu 2024 reports more than 21 million active online gaming accounts; ADM’s 2025 online data reports 17.1 million active accounts with 3.77 million playing in an average month. These are three different quantities — registered-and-not-dormant, active in year, and playing in month — and they get quoted interchangeably.
• Independent trackers do not match ADM on 2024. ADM puts 2024 spesa at EUR 21.577bn, up 4.38%. I-Com, working from ADM and MEF sources in December 2025, charts EUR 22.99bn, up 11%. EGBA gave Italy EUR 21bn of GGR for 2023 with EUR 4.6bn online where ADM reports EUR 20.68bn with about EUR 4.38bn. We use ADM, because ADM collects the money.
• Per-head figures use different denominators without saying so. EUR 371 per head and EUR 433 per head are the same national loss total divided by residents and by adults respectively. Check which one a source used before comparing Italy with anywhere else — and check the currency year, since the euro moved from about US$1.08 in 2024 to about US$1.128 on the 2025 ECB average.
• Turnover ratios are not comparable across countries unless the products are. Italy staked 7.56 euros for every euro lost in 2025. South Africa staked 20.1 rand for every rand lost in the year to 31 March 2025 — a 4.96% hold against Italy’s 13.23%. Both are national hold rates on the same definition, so the comparison is legitimate, but the reason for the gap is product mix, not national character: South Africa’s handle is overwhelmingly high-payout betting, Italy’s still contains a large low-payout machine estate. It is also a calendar year against a fiscal year.

Who produces these numbers, and which way do they lean?

Almost every Italian gambling figure in circulation originates with the tax authority, and is then framed by one of two lobbies. Knowing which is which is most of the work.

• ADM and MEF — primary, authoritative, the collector’s own accounts. But they measure what the State can see and tax. Their raccolta and spesa definitions are built around collection, not harm, and they publish nothing on the unlicensed market. The Libro Blu also runs about eighteen months behind: the 2024 edition appeared on 22 July 2026, and it did not restore the product-level loss table that makes the 2023 edition so useful.
• Industry-adjacent trade press (AGIMEG, JAMMA, PressGiochi, Gioconews) — the only outlets that actually tabulate ADM’s regional and product tables, and indispensable for that. They are also funded by the sector they cover, and their framing consistently emphasises decline in the physical channel, which happens to be the channel facing a 20% cut. The tables are reliable; the emphasis is a position. Note where that cuts on this page: our online growth rate comes from a CGIA study commissioned by As.tro, the machine operators’ own trade body, which has every incentive to show online growing fast and machines shrinking. We have used it anyway, because it is the only full-year online loss total published for 2024 — but it means the 16% figure should be read as the top of the plausible range, not the middle of it, and it is why we ran the crossover at 6.3% as well.
• Prohibition-leaning civil society (Avviso Pubblico, Libera, Federconsumatori) — the most complete public tabulations of product data anywhere, and they headline raccolta, which is the largest available number and the wrong one. Their tables are reliable; their headlines are the scope error described above.
• Academic and think-tank analysis (Osservatorio dei Conti Pubblici Italiani, I-Com) — the most useful framing available, and the source of the strongest single sentence in this literature. Also, as shown above, capable of labelling a per-resident figure as per-adult.
• The harm evidence is the weakest link and it is not close. Italy sizes a EUR 21.9 billion market to the euro every year and estimates who is being harmed by it once a decade. The ISS is currently tendering for the first national prevalence study since 2018. Any Italian problem-gambling percentage you read this year rests on fieldwork done before online overtook the physical network.

Key takeaways

• Italy is an online turnover market and a machine loss market. Online took 61% of stakes in 2025. Machines took 41.5% of losses in 2023 against 21.2% for all online, 38.5% against 23.5% in 2024, and on our bounded estimate about 36.7% against a floor of 23.0% in 2025. The crossover has not happened. Extrapolate the two observed trends and it arrives somewhere between late 2027 and 2030 — a band, not a date, because the online growth rate is not stable enough to give you one.
• The mechanism is the hold, and it is a 4.7-fold gap. The physical network keeps 25.04 cents of every euro staked; the online channel keeps 5.30. Nothing else about Italian gambling makes sense until that number is in front of you.
• Italian machine payouts sit at the legal floor. Two independent methods — statutory minimum payouts and the last realised hold ADM published — both put 2025 machine losses at EUR 8.02 billion, which means real payouts are indistinguishable from the 65% and 83% minimums the law sets.
• The machine estate has an address and it is shrinking without a national law. 246,663 AWP slots in 50,067 venues, one for every 200 or so adults before VLT terminals are counted at all. About EUR 177 a day goes into each, at most EUR 62 stays, and roughly EUR 42 of that is tax — from a venue network down 39.9% since 2015 under regional distance rules, not national ones.
• Tax follows the machines, revenue follows the phone. EUR 16.83 of tax per EUR 100 staked on a machine against EUR 1.07 on an online slot. Machines are 19.1% of stakes and 46.2% of the tax take; the gambling tax-to-turnover ratio has fallen from 19.4% in 2006 to 6.9% in 2025 for exactly this reason.
• Per adult, Italy is a genuine outlier. At least EUR 433 lost per adult in 2025, roughly US$488, some 3.7 times the global average of US$132. The widely quoted EUR 371 is per resident, newborns included, and at least one academic source labels it as per adult when its own daily figures prove it is not.
• The regulator’s own accounts do not close, and the fix is publishable. ADM prints raccolta EUR 165.33bn, winnings EUR 135.87bn and spesa EUR 21.869bn, which cannot all be true. The winnings line is the outlier, and the Cattolica’s independent EUR 143 billion figure says so.
• The largest lever on Italian gambling losses is a distance in metres. Cutting the machine estate by a fifth touches on the order of EUR 1.1 to 1.6 billion of annual player losses. No advertising or licensing measure in Italian law reaches a number that size — and the distance rule is precisely the clause on which the 2026 reform has stalled.

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Frequently asked questions

How much do Italians gamble each year?

Italians staked EUR 165.33 billion in 2025, according to the Agenzia delle Dogane e dei Monopoli bilancio d’esercizio for that year, up 5 per cent on 2024. That figure is raccolta, meaning turnover, and it includes winnings that were staked again. The amount Italians actually lost was EUR 21.869 billion, up 1.36 per cent, which is the figure ADM calls spesa and which is equivalent to gross gaming revenue in English-language reporting. Dividing one by the other gives a national hold of 13.23 per cent, meaning about EUR 86.77 of every EUR 100 staked went back out as winnings. Only the EUR 21.869 billion figure is comparable with another country’s gambling revenue.

Is Italian gambling mostly online?

By money staked, yes. By money lost, not yet. Online turnover reached EUR 100.88 billion in 2025, above 60 per cent of the national total, and a single category, online fixed-odds games of chance, accounted for EUR 77.25 billion of it. But the online channel returns about 95 cents in the euro, so it produces a small fraction of the losses. In 2023, the most recent year ADM published losses by product, AWP and VLT machines produced EUR 8.582 billion of the EUR 20.68 billion Italians lost, or 41.5 per cent, while every online product together produced about EUR 4.38 billion, or 21.2 per cent. In 2024, the last year with a published online loss total, online games cost players EUR 5.074 billion, or 23.5 per cent of the national EUR 21.577 billion, while machines on a constant-hold estimate cost them about EUR 8.30 billion, or 38.5 per cent. For 2025 the online products ADM has reported give a floor of EUR 5.04 billion, or 23 per cent, against a bounded machine estimate of about EUR 8.02 billion, or 36.7 per cent. Machines still cost Italians about 1.6 euros for every euro the whole online channel costs them.

How many slot machines are there in Italy?

There were 246,663 AWP slot machines installed in Italy in 2024, spread across 50,067 venues, according to the CGIA Mestre 2025 report on the sector; that is 6.3 per cent fewer than the 263,000-odd installed in 2019, and the decline in that report is measured over five years, not one. VLT terminals are counted separately and sit in dedicated halls. ADM held 282,454 machine permits and installation rights on its register in May 2026, of which 227,810 were AWP and 54,644 were VLT, according to an answer given to the Chamber of Deputies by MEF undersecretary Sandra Savino on 20 May 2026. The AWP register in 2026 is smaller than the 2024 installed count because the estate kept contracting: CGIA counted more than 16,000 AWP put into storage during 2024 alone. Statutory law has capped AWP at 265,000 since 2018, and the physical-gambling reform under discussion proposes cutting AWP to 200,000 and VLT to 45,000.

How much does the average Italian lose to gambling?

At least EUR 433 per adult in 2025, against EUR 371 per resident. The difference is only the denominator: EUR 21.869 billion of national losses divided by the adult population, which the published age structure puts between 50.2 and 50.5 million, gives EUR 433 to EUR 436, while dividing by Istat’s total resident population of 58,934,177 on 1 January 2025 gives EUR 371.07. At the 2025 European Central Bank average of about US$1.128 to the euro, the per-adult figure is about US$488, which is roughly 3.7 times the global average of about US$132 lost per adult per year. Several widely cited Italian sources print the per-resident figure while describing it as per adult, so check the denominator before comparing Italy with another country.

What is the difference between raccolta and spesa in Italian gambling data?

Raccolta is turnover, the total amount staked including winnings that are staked again. Spesa is turnover minus winnings paid out, which is what players actually lost and what English-language reporting calls gross gaming revenue. In 2025 the two figures were EUR 165.33 billion and EUR 21.869 billion respectively, a ratio of 7.56 to one. The ratio varies enormously by product because payout rates do: Italy’s physical network held 25.04 per cent of stakes in 2023 while the online channel held 5.30 per cent. This is why ranking Italian gambling products by raccolta ranks them by how fast money recycles rather than by how much anyone loses, and why comparing Italy’s raccolta with another country’s gross gaming revenue overstates the Italian market by more than a factor of seven.

How much tax does Italian gambling pay?

The Italian state collected EUR 11.47 billion from gambling in 2025 on Corte dei Conti figures, which is 6.94 per cent of the EUR 165.33 billion staked and about 53 per cent of the EUR 21.9 billion lost. The rate varies by product to an extreme degree because the bases differ. Put on the one common base of money staked, the Lotto yielded EUR 20.00 per EUR 100 staked in 2025, AWP and VLT machines EUR 16.83, instant lotteries EUR 15.38, bingo EUR 12.00, fixed-odds sports betting EUR 3.28 and online fixed-odds games of chance EUR 1.07. Machines carried 19.1 per cent of national stakes and produced 46.2 per cent of the tax take. The ratio of gambling tax to turnover has fallen from 19.4 per cent in 2006 to 6.9 per cent in 2025, because the market moved to products taxed on margin rather than on turnover.

What is the distanziometro and why does it matter to the numbers?

The distanziometro is a minimum distance, generally 300 to 500 metres, that regional Italian law requires between a gambling venue or gaming machine and sensitive places such as schools, hospitals, places of worship and youth centres. It is regional and municipal, not national, and the Constitutional Court upheld that regional competence in judgments 108/2017 and 27/2019. It matters to the statistics because it is the only instrument in Italian gambling regulation that directly controls where the highest-margin product can physically stand. The venue network hosting machines has fallen from 83,307 premises in 2015 to 58,472 in 2019 and 50,067 in 2024, and the machine estate is the source of the largest single share of Italian gambling losses. The 2026 physical-gambling reform proposes replacing the regional rules with a national distance of 100 metres for certified outlets and 200 metres for uncertified ones, which would be substantially looser than most current regional laws.

Sources

• Agenzia delle Dogane e dei Monopoli, via PressGiochi — ADM, Bilancio d’esercizio 2025: dai giochi raccolta pari a 165,33 miliardi di euro (2025 raccolta EUR 165.33bn, +5%; spesa EUR 21.869bn, +1.36%; about EUR 11.5bn collected; 1,038 illegal sites blocked against 492 in 2023; 31,403 inspections; 28 premises suspended over minors). Tier: the tax authority’s own annual accounts — the highest-confidence source here, and the origin of nearly every headline Italian gambling figure in circulation. Note the internal inconsistency described in the methodology section.
• AGIMEG — Libro Blu ADM: nel 2023 spesa giochi 20,7 miliardi, Libro Blu 2023: gioco fisico, la spesa sfiora i 16,3 miliardi and Libro Blu: apparecchi spesa a 8,5 miliardi di euro (2023 national spesa EUR 20.68bn on raccolta EUR 147.68bn; physical raccolta EUR 65.1bn, vincite EUR 48.8bn, spesa EUR 16.3bn, with the full regional table; AWP, VLT and Article 110(7) spesa EUR 8,582m against EUR 8,674m in 2022, Lombardy EUR 1,819m, Veneto EUR 792m, Campania EUR 777m). Tier: trade-press tabulation of ADM Libro Blu tables, published September 2025. This is the only public source for Italian losses by product and region, and it is the backbone of this page.
• AGIMEG — Libro Blu 2023: Gratta e Vinci a 3,1 miliardi, Libro Blu ADM: la spesa sulle scommesse sportive sfiora gli 1,4 miliardi and Libro Blu ADM, Bingo: nel 2023 spesi 423 milioni (instant lotteries and lotteries 2023 spesa EUR 3.13bn on raccolta EUR 11.8bn with vincite EUR 8.7bn; retail sports betting spesa EUR 1.34bn on raccolta EUR 8bn with vincite EUR 6.65bn, Campania EUR 326.8m or above 24% of the national total; bingo spesa EUR 423m against vincite EUR 1,029m; Lotto raccolta EUR 7.7bn, vincite EUR 5.4bn, spesa EUR 2.2bn)
• JAMMA — Gioco pubblico, raccolta delle AWP e VLT in calo: oltre 2,1 miliardi in meno tra 2023 e 2025, 12 March 2026 (machine raccolta EUR 33.738bn in 2023, EUR 32.618bn in 2024 and an estimated EUR 31.541bn in 2025; machine share of national raccolta 22.85% in 2023 and 20.7% in 2024; Article 110(7) raccolta about EUR 30m a year). Tier: trade-press analysis of MEF bulletin data ahead of the official ADM release; the 2025 machine figure is explicitly labelled an estimate by its author.
• JAMMA — ADM, Libro Blu 2024: gli apparecchi generano oltre la metà del gettito, Libro Blu 2024: cresce la raccolta del gioco pubblico and Libro Blu 2024: oltre 21 milioni di conti attivi, all 22 July 2026 (machines 50.31% of gambling tax revenue and 49.95% of physical raccolta in 2024, down 3.26% on 2023; numeric games and lotteries 33.56% of tax; betting 7.13%; active online accounts above 21 million with 5,677,859 in the 25–34 band and 4,304,563 in the 18–24 band)
• JAMMA — Gioco online e scommesse, nel 2025 raccolta a +8,7%, 17 April 2026, and Giochi online 2025: spesa dei giocatori oltre 3,3 miliardi, 7 January 2026 (2025 raccolta by product: online fixed-odds games of chance EUR 77,250m with imposta unica EUR 827m, sports betting EUR 19,190m with EUR 622m, betting exchange EUR 2,888m with EUR 3m, skill tournaments EUR 1,426m with EUR 31m, remote bingo EUR 272m with EUR 21m; online casino, poker and bingo raccolta EUR 77.85bn and spesa EUR 3.337bn; 17.1m active accounts, 3.77m monthly playing accounts, 239.9m monthly plays, 337.8m top-ups worth EUR 13.2bn, average top-up just above EUR 39 and above EUR 41 by December; nearly half of accounts losing under EUR 100 a year; 52 online concessions awarded for EUR 364m)
• AGIMEG — Savino (MEF): “Oltre 282.000 apparecchi tra slot e vlt”, 20 May 2026 (282,454 permits and installation rights: 227,810 AWP and 54,644 VLT, broken down by concessionaire, with the 25% concentration cap). Tier: a minister’s answer to a parliamentary question — primary, and the most authoritative machine count available.
• CGIA Mestre and As.tro 2025 report on the sector, via JAMMA and AGIMEG (AWP installed down from over 263,000 in 2019 to 246,663 in 2024, a fall of 6.3% over those five years; the venues hosting them down 14.4% from 58,472 to 50,067, and 83,307 in 2015; combined AWP and VLT raccolta of EUR 32.6bn in 2024, about 30% below 2019 and 3.3% below 2023; EUR 5.2bn of the EUR 11.6bn 2024 erario from AWP and VLT; over 16,000 AWP placed in storage during 2024; the statutory ceiling of 265,000 AWP from 2018). Tier: an artisan-business association’s research unit working with the machine-sector trade body — industry-sympathetic in framing, and the counts derive from ADM registers. Read the headline carefully: the 6.3% is a five-year change, and several outlets have reported it as a one-year one.
• CGIA research unit for As.tro, via JAMMA — Il settore dei giochi in Italia: nel 2024 spesa record a 5 miliardi (2024 online player losses of EUR 5.074bn, up 16% on 2023 and 23.5% of all Italian gambling losses against 4.1% in 2012; online raccolta of EUR 92bn in 2024 with EUR 87bn returned as winnings; online casino games driving 53% of the increase, non-tournament card games 28% and sports-based games 14%). Tier: a research-unit analysis of ADM data commissioned by the machine-sector trade body — the only published full-year online loss total for 2024, and the independent check on our 2023 online residual.
• AGIMEG — Scommesse online: 2025 spesa +6,3% (online sports-betting raccolta down 2.8% from EUR 14.3bn in 2024 to EUR 13.9bn in 2025, while spesa rose 6.3% from EUR 1.6bn to EUR 1.7bn; Lottomatica above 30% of the online betting spend market, Sisal 17%, Snaitech 10.7%). Tier: trade-press tabulation of ADM operator returns. This is the figure that breaks the assumption that everything online is compounding at 16%.
• Osservatorio dei Conti Pubblici Italiani, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore — Valerio Ferraro, Il gioco d’azzardo in Italia: vizio privato e pubblica virtù?, 19 June 2026 (raccolta 7.3% of GDP and losses 0.97%; EUR 143bn returned to players in 2025, so 87 cents per euro staked; machines 19% of stakes and about half the tax; online 60% of stakes and under 13% of tax; tax-to-raccolta from 19.4% in 2006 to 6.9% in 2025; regional per-head staking from Campania EUR 3,862 to Trentino-Alto Adige EUR 1,786 against an Italian average of EUR 2,792; Campania losses EUR 482 per head against EUR 371; the southern preference for online skill games running 80% above the North; EUR 32.2m of ring-fenced prevention funding, under 0.3% of the take; Italy above Spain, France, the UK and Germany on losses per head and per unit of GDP; household food spending of EUR 193.7bn and INPS Assegno unico of EUR 19.7bn). Tier: independent academic public-finance analysis. Note that its per-head figures are computed on the full resident population despite being labelled as adults.
• Avviso Pubblico — I dati ufficiali sul gioco d’azzardo in Italia nel 2025 (2025 raccolta by product: AWP EUR 14.9bn against EUR 15.9bn in 2024, VLT EUR 16.5bn, fixed-odds sports betting EUR 19.1bn, fixed-odds and solitaire games EUR 77.2bn, bingo EUR 1.49bn, instant lotteries EUR 12.9bn; regional raccolta led by Lombardy, Campania, Lazio, Sicily, Apulia and Emilia-Romagna; VLT halls concentrated in Lombardy, Campania, Lazio, Piedmont and Apulia). Tier: civil-society tabulation of ADM product data — reliable tables, prohibition-leaning framing that headlines turnover.
• AGIMEG — MEF: nel 2025 raccolta giochi a 165 miliardi (2025 by product: machines raccolta EUR 31.5bn generating EUR 5.3bn of erario, close to half the gambling take; bingo EUR 1.5bn and EUR 180m; sports betting EUR 19bn and EUR 623m, of which EUR 13.9bn online; Lotto EUR 8bn and EUR 1.6bn; lotteries EUR 13bn and about EUR 2bn)
• PressGiochi — ADM pubblica il Libro Blu 2022 (2022 growth of +22.39% raccolta, +20.91% winnings, +31.56% spesa, +33.40% erario; winnings-to-raccolta of 86.08% in 2021 and 85.03% in 2022, which ADM attributes to players returning to entertainment machines with less remunerative payouts; erario EUR 11.22bn in 2022 against EUR 8.41bn in 2021; machines 54.77% of gambling tax in 2022). Note: the headline of this article states EUR 22.3bn of 2022 spesa, which does not match the growth rates in its own text; see the methodology section.
• Unimpresa, Centro Studi — Giochi, raccolta a 165 miliardi (+5%), crescita passa dal web, on Corte dei Conti Rendiconto dello Stato 2025 data (of the EUR 21.9bn lost in 2025, EUR 11.5bn to the State and EUR 10.4bn to the supply chain; erario EUR 11.47bn against EUR 11.56bn in 2024, −0.7%; online raccolta EUR 100.8bn, above 60% of the market, physical below EUR 65bn). Tier: business-association analysis of a primary audit-institution dataset.
• Istituto Superiore di Sanità, via Quotidiano Sanità — Gioco d’azzardo. Indagine Iss: 18 mln gli italiani coinvolti, di questi 1,5 milioni sono problematici, and Italian Gaming Expo — Istituto Superiore Sanità: serve una nuova indagine sul gioco, 14 July 2026 (about 18 million adults, 36.4% of the adult population, gambling in the previous year and about 1.5 million with a problem profile, from a survey of more than 12,000 adults and nearly 16,000 students aged 14–17; the replacement tender worth more than EUR 900,000, bids closing 6 August 2026, fieldwork October 2026 to September 2027). Tier: national primary epidemiological survey — the strongest harm evidence Italy has, and eight years old.
• Istat — Bilancio demografico mensile, gennaio 2025 (resident population 58,934,177 at 1 January 2025). The adult population used for the per-adult figures — between 50.2 and 50.5 million depending on how the 15–19 age band is split — is a modelled estimate from the published age structure, not an Istat headline figure, and we quote the low end of the resulting loss range. It is flagged as an estimate wherever it is used.
• Statutory rates and payout floors — Law 160/2019 (2020 Budget Law), article 1 comma 732, setting minimum payouts of 65% on AWP and 83% on VLT from 1 January 2020; PREU at 24.0% of AWP turnover and 8.6% of VLT turnover throughout 2024 and 2025, unchanged between the two years and rising to 23.5% and 9.5% from 1 January 2026; imposta unica at 25.5% of margin on online games of chance, 24.5% on online and 20.5% on retail fixed-odds betting from 1 January 2025. Tier: primary statute. Cross-check: 24.0% of EUR 15.9bn of AWP turnover plus 8.6% of EUR 16.7bn of VLT turnover is EUR 5.25bn, against the EUR 5.2bn CGIA reports ADM collected from machines in 2024 — which is how we know the AWP and VLT turnover split is right.
• European Central Bank — Euro foreign exchange reference rates, US dollar (2025 annual average of about US$1.128 to the euro, used for every dollar conversion on this page)
• Assopoker, Gazzetta Matin, Italian Gaming Expo and Gioconews — 2025 accounts of Casinò di Venezia (EUR 117.8m net gaming revenue, 767,727 admissions), Saint-Vincent (EUR 74.375m, +1.47%), Campione d’Italia (EUR 61.035m, +14.4%) and Sanremo (EUR 58.7m of revenue, EUR 7.8m operating profit). Tier: individual company accounts, each on its own reporting basis; our EUR 312m total is a sum of four differently defined figures and should be read as scale, not as a sector statistic.
• AGIMEG — Riordino gioco fisico: riduzione punti gioco, AWP, VLT, distanziometro e limiti orari and Gioconews — Riordino gioco fisico: Governo vuole intesa a breve (the proposal to cut AWP from about 250,000 to 200,000 and VLT from about 55,000 to 45,000; a national distanziometro of 100 metres for certified and 200 metres for uncertified outlets; EUR 80m refinancing the fund for reorganising the physical network in the 2026 Budget Law and a standing 5% share of receipts offered to the regions; the 29 August 2026 delegation deadline set by the last extension under law 120/2025), together with AGIMEG — Riordino gioco fisico, Il Sole 24 Ore: la riforma si ferma ancora (the implementing decree unapproved as of mid-2026, with the distance rules named as the blocking clause). Tier: trade-press reporting of a draft decree and of parliamentary and press accounts of it — a proposal, not law, and the distances have already changed once during drafting
• 16Best — Gambling laws in Italy (the Decreto Dignità advertising ban, the concession reform, the PREU and imposta unica rates, and the first published account of the unreconciled ADM winnings line), Gambling in South Africa statistics (the 4.96% hold and 20.1× turnover multiple used for comparison), Gambling in Germany statistics, Sports betting laws by country, How much money do casinos make and Gambling loss statistics (the global figures of about US$712bn of gross gaming revenue and about US$132 lost per adult per year)