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Gambling Laws in Italy 2026: What the Ad Ban Really Did

Italy banned gambling advertising to make Italians gamble less. Seven years on Italians stake about a quarter more in real terms than they did in 2019 and lose about as much — while the number of licences on which those losses may lawfully be taken online has fallen by three quarters, from 208 concessions running on extensions in mid-2025 to 52. That is the fact this page is built on. An advertising ban does not remove demand; it removes the one instrument a challenger has for buying a customer who has never heard of it. Italy did not de-market gambling. It de-marketed new entrants, and then priced the licence accordingly.

Be precise about that first number, because most coverage is not. In cash euros Italian player losses are 12% higher than in 2019; after Italian consumer prices rose about 19% over the same six years, they are roughly 6% lower in real money. The growth is in turnover, not in what the house keeps. What the evidence will carry is the negative claim, and it is enough: the ban did not shrink Italian gambling. Every figure below is attributed to a named, dated source, and every figure we calculated ourselves is labelled and shown with its working.

Is gambling legal in Italy in 2026?

Yes, for adults aged 18 and over, and only through an operator holding a concession from ADM. Sports and horse betting, online casino and card games, poker, bingo, lotteries, Lotto, AWP slot machines and VLT terminals are all lawful when offered under concession. The structure is older and stricter than the licensing regimes of northern Europe: Article 718 of the Criminal Code criminalises gambling in general, Legislative Decree 496/1948 reserves its organisation to the State, and ADM then contracts that reserved activity out through periodic public tenders.

There is a second layer that catches most foreign readers. A physical venue also needs a police authorisation under Articles 86 and 88 of the consolidated public security laws, the TULPS. The concession makes the game lawful; the TULPS licence makes the premises lawful. Lose either and the shop closes.

Allowing anyone under 18 to take part in a public game with money prizes is prohibited by Article 24, paragraph 20 of Decree-Law 98/2011. The operator of the venue faces an administrative fine of EUR 5,000 to EUR 20,000 and closure of up to thirty days; where the breach involves Article 110(6) machines, the offender is also suspended from the operators’ register for one to three months.

Myth 1: an advertising ban shrinks a gambling market

Italy is the cleanest test anyone has run, and the money did not go away. The received wisdom is intuitive: cut off the marketing and demand falls. Article 9 of Decree-Law 87/2018 is about as complete a cut-off as a democracy has attempted, and here is what happened to the money on the other side of it.

Read the shape rather than the headline. Losses dipped by a third in 2020 when Italy shut its bars, bingo halls and betting shops, recovered through 2021 and 2022, and have since settled about 12% above the 2019 figure and 15% above 2018 in cash terms. Compounded, 2019 to 2025 is roughly 2.0% a year; the market also grew 2.4% in 2019 itself, the first full calendar year in which the advertising prohibition applied (16Best analysis of ADM spesa figures). Nominal growth of 2% a year through an inflationary period is not a boom.

Turnover tells a louder story: EUR 110.5bn staked in 2019, EUR 165.33bn in 2025, a nominal compound rate of 6.9% a year. The gap between the two growth rates is itself informative — Italians are staking far more money on games that give most of it straight back, which is what a shift from slot machines to online casino tables looks like in the accounts. The channel split says the same thing twice: remote turnover passed EUR 100bn for the first time in 2025 at EUR 100.88bn, up 9.5% on the year and now above 60% of the national total, while the physical network slipped below EUR 65bn from EUR 65.3bn in 2024.

Put the loss figure in a body. Spread across Italy’s 58,934,177 residents at 1 January 2025, the EUR 21.87bn lost in 2025 is EUR 371 per resident for the year, or about EUR 1.02 a day from every person in the country, newborns included (16Best analysis of ADM spesa against the Istat population). Article 9 has been in force for every day of that year. It is not visible in the per-person number.

It is worth being blunt about where that money goes, because it explains why nobody in Rome is in a hurry. Of the EUR 21.9bn Italians lost in 2025, EUR 11.5bn went to the Treasury and EUR 10.4bn to the supply chain — concessionaires, operators, distributors, tobacconists and betting-shop agents. The State is the majority claimant on Italian gambling losses, taking about 53 cents in every euro lost (16Best analysis of the Unimpresa study of Corte dei Conti data for 2025 against ADM spesa). And the take is drifting down, not up: state gambling revenue came to 6.9% of turnover in 2025, a three-year low, and the EUR 11.47bn collected was 0.7% less than the EUR 11.56bn of 2024 — on turnover that rose 5%.

Now the part that is honest and inconvenient. The ban did not run its experiment in a clean room. Between 2019 and 2025 Italy also lived through a pandemic that closed the entire physical network for months, a tax regime that punishes machines several times harder than online games, a wave of regional distance rules squeezing betting shops out of town centres, and a concession reform that rewrote the online market from the ground up. Every one of those moves the same numbers in the same direction. Anyone claiming that Italy’s advertising ban caused the online shift is reading a correlation with four other candidates standing next to it. And the same discipline applies in reverse: the ~6% real fall in player losses cannot be credited to Article 9 either, when Covid alone removed a third of the sector’s revenue in a single year. What the data will carry is the narrow negative claim, and only that: the ban did not reduce the volume of gambling in Italy — real turnover is a quarter higher than before it — and what Italians lose has drifted a few per cent below where it started, in a period that contained a national lockdown.

What exactly does the Decreto Dignità prohibit?

Any form of advertising, including indirect advertising, of games or bets with money prizes, on any medium — and from 1 January 2019, sponsorship too. Article 9 of Decree-Law 87/2018 names sporting, cultural and artistic events, television and radio broadcasts, daily and periodical press, publications, billboards, and digital and telematic channels including social media. The sponsorship limb reaches visual and acoustic mentions and on-screen overprinting of a name, trademark, symbol, activity or product whose advertising the article prohibits. Advertising contracts already running on 14 July 2018 could see out their terms, capped at one year.

AGCOM, the communications regulator, published implementing guidelines as Delibera 132/19/CONS, adopted in April 2019, defining advertising as any communication disseminated for payment or other consideration, or for self-promotion, aimed at inducing the recipient to buy. The guidelines fix who is liable: the client, the owner of the medium or website, and the event organiser. Liability does not stop at the operator.

Two lines of litigation have tested how far Article 9 reaches, and they point in opposite directions.

• Platforms cannot hide behind hosting immunity. By Delibera 541/20/CONS of 22 October 2020 AGCOM fined Google Ireland EUR 100,000 — EUR 50,000 for each of two monitored days — because a search for “casino online” on 14–15 November 2019 returned a sponsored result for an offshore casino. TAR Lazio sided with Google in judgment 11036/2021, applying the hosting-provider exemption in Article 16 of Legislative Decree 70/2003. The Consiglio di Stato, Section VI, reversed on 13 May 2024 in judgment 4277/2024, holding that a service that indexes, promotes and is paid in proportion to the visibility of third-party content is an active host and cannot claim the exemption. Reports of the ruling differ on the quantum — some read it as confirming the EUR 100,000, others as recasting the conduct as a single EUR 50,000 violation — so treat the liability finding, not the number, as the holding. Ordinance 1947/2024 carried the same reasoning into a parallel Meta case.
• And Luxembourg has now agreed. On 16 July 2026 the Court of Justice of the European Union, Second Chamber, ruled in C-421/24 Google Ireland v AGCOM that the hosting exemption does not apply where the platform has entered a commercial partnership with a creator that involves examining the channel’s content and metadata — an active, non-neutral role. The underlying sanction was AGCOM’s EUR 750,000 penalty over gambling promotion in a partner creator’s YouTube videos. Article 9 now reaches the largest intermediaries in Europe, confirmed at EU level.
• But a hyperlink is not automatically an advertisement. In a later appeal the Consiglio di Stato annulled an AGCOM sanction for alleged indirect advertising after TAR Lazio had treated a hyperlink inside an article as promotional, holding the content merely informative. That is the line Italian publishers now work to: information about gambling is lawful, inducement to gamble is not, and the boundary is decided case by case.

Myth 2: the ban applies to everyone

It does not. Article 9 carves out national deferred-draw lotteries, local charity games and ADM’s own responsible-gambling logos. The exemption for lotterie nazionali a estrazione differita under Decree-Law 78/2009 — the category that includes Lotteria Italia, identified each year by ministerial decree — is the single most under-reported clause in Italian gambling law. Local prize games under Presidential Decree 430/2001 are outside the ban as well.

Set that against the structure of the market. Instant lotteries alone took EUR 12.9bn of turnover in 2025 and Lotteria Italia a further EUR 48m. The products that keep a route to the Italian consumer are the ones sold closest to the State; the products whose advertising was extinguished are the ones the State licenses to private firms and then taxes. That is not a conspiracy, it is a drafting choice with a distributive consequence, and it deserves to be stated plainly by anyone describing Italy as having a “total” ban.

Myth 3: Italy opened its online market in 2025

Italy re-tendered its online market in 2025 and closed most of it. This is where the argument on this page stops being an inference and becomes arithmetic. Compare the two tenders side by side.

Scope note, and it matters: both rows count concessions awarded at tender. That is the like-for-like comparison, but it is not the same as the stock in force. Some of the 120 were never activated; equally, older concessions from earlier tenders were still running on extensions alongside them, so that 208 remote concessions were live on paid technical extensions until the procedure closed on 17 September 2025. Against that stock the cut is 208 to 52, or 75%. Against the tender it is 120 to 52, or 57%. Both are true; neither is a count of trading brands, which fell further still when roughly 350 skins went dark.

Now put the advertising ban next to that fixed cost. A EUR 7m entry ticket is survivable if you can convert it into customers; the standard way to do that is to buy awareness. In Italy you cannot. DLA Piper, writing on 12 March 2025 as the Senate’s Culture Commission asked the government to revisit Article 9, put it in one line: the gambling advertising ban “has been frequently seen as a blocker for new entrants that are not known by the general public.” Brand recognition in Italy is no longer purchasable. It can only be inherited from before 2019, or acquired by buying a company that has it.

The concentration figures are consistent with that. In online sports betting in 2025, Lottomatica took over 30% of player losses, Sisal 17% and Snaitech 10.7% — the top three between them about 58% of the segment, on the same spesa basis. Total online betting turnover actually fell 2.8% that year, to EUR 13.9bn, while operator revenue rose 6.3% to EUR 1.7bn.

Be careful about what causes what. The licence count fell because Legislative Decree 41/2024 was designed to cut it — a high fee, one domain per concession, hard compliance thresholds on anti-money-laundering and cyber security. The advertising ban did not write that decree. Its contribution is subtler and, we think, larger: it removed the mechanism by which a new licensee could ever have earned the EUR 7m back, so by 2025 the only bidders for whom the price made sense were firms that already had Italian customers. The Consiglio di Stato answered the legal question — the terms are not an insurmountable barrier — and it was not asked the commercial one.

Myth 4: Italy taxes online gambling hardest

Italy taxes slot machines roughly 2.7 times harder than online casino games, once both are expressed as a share of gross gaming revenue. The confusion is baked into the statute book, because Italy taxes some products on gross margin and others on turnover, and almost every summary compares the two numbers directly as if they meant the same thing.

Scope note: these levies sit on three different bases — gross margin, turnover and residual state margin — and must never be added or ranked against one another without conversion. Corporate income tax is a fourth quantity, on profit. Rates as legislated by Law 207/2024 and set out in the Ufficio Parlamentare di Bilancio schedule reproduced by I-Com in December 2025.

ADM’s own Libro Blu for 2024 confirms the direction from the other end. AWP, VLT and Article 110(7) machines generated 50.31% of all gambling tax revenue that year, on AWP and VLT turnover of EUR 32.6bn — 20.7% of the national total of EUR 157.45bn. That is 2.43 euros of tax for every euro the turnover share would imply (16Best analysis of the Libro Blu 2024 tax share against ADM raccolta). Machine turnover meanwhile fell 29.9% between 2019 and 2024, to EUR 32.6bn, and fell again in 2025.

Scope note on that 2.43: the 50.31% is the machine share of tax including Article 110(7) amusement machines, which are levied on a flat notional base and whose play is not counted in raccolta at all, while the 20.7% denominator is AWP and VLT turnover only. The index is therefore a shade generous to our argument. It is nowhere near a shade away from 1.0, which is the claim.

The 2025 figures reproduce the ratio almost exactly, which is the point — this is structural, not a one-year artefact. Machines took EUR 31.4–31.5bn of turnover — Avviso Pubblico’s product tables give AWP EUR 14.9bn plus VLT EUR 16.5bn, the MEF summary rounds the category to EUR 31.5bn — which is 19.0–19.1% of the EUR 165.33bn staked, and they paid more than EUR 5.3bn of the EUR 11.47bn the State collected from gambling: 46.2% of the tax from 19% of the stake, an index of 2.42 to 2.43 again (16Best analysis of MEF and ADM 2025 figures). Two different years, two different publications, the same multiple. A tax code does that. An advertising ban does not.

So the plainest explanation for Italy’s move online is not the advertising ban at all. It is a tax code that charges a bar slot machine two and a half to three times what it charges an online blackjack table on the same accounting basis, applied to an ageing physical network that regional distance rules were simultaneously pushing out of town. That is the honest competing hypothesis, and this page is not going to pretend it away. Note where it leaves the argument, though: it explains the channel shift. It does not explain why the number of firms competing in the winning channel went down while the channel grew.

Myth 5: Italian gambling law is national

The tax, the concessions and the advertising ban are national. Where a betting shop or a slot machine may physically stand is decided by twenty regions and roughly eight thousand municipalities. This is the distanziometro: a minimum distance, generally between 300 and 500 metres, between a gambling venue or machine and a list of luoghi sensibili — schools, hospitals, places of worship, youth centres, cash-for-gold shops, and in some regions military barracks.

Operators have litigated this patchwork for a decade and have mostly lost. The Constitutional Court held in judgment 108/2017 that regional distance rules fall within the regions’ health-protection competence, and in judgment 27/2019 that it was not unreasonable for a region to expand the list of sensitive places, including to military barracks. Administrative courts have treated 500 metres as proportionate. The result is a country in which the same national concession is commercially viable in one municipality and unusable in the next.

This patchwork is also why the land-based reform has not happened. The unresolved point in the negotiation between the government, the regions and local authorities is precisely the distanziometri and opening hours — alongside a regional demand for a share of gambling tax revenue, estimated by the Conferenza delle Regioni at around EUR 294m a year, against which the 2026 Budget Law provided a one-off EUR 80m.

What is actually law in 2026, and what is only a draft?

The online reform is enacted; the land-based reform is a delegation with a deadline of 29 August 2026 and no decree behind it. Italian gambling coverage collapses these states constantly, so here they are separated.

Read those last two rows together, because the pattern is the interesting part. Parliament has been pushed at Article 9 from both directions inside eight months — a governing-party senator trying to delete the word “indirect” in December 2025, opposition deputies trying to bolt enforcement onto sports funding in July 2026 — and the statute has not moved a comma either way. Anyone telling you Italy has reopened gambling sponsorship in football is describing an amendment, not a law. Anyone telling you the ban is being tightened is describing a rejected one.

What are the rules for a player in Italy?

You must be 18, you must be identity-verified, you can block yourself from every licensed operator at once through the RUA, and winnings from a licensed betting or casino account are not taxed in your hands. Age 18 is set by Article 24(20) of Decree-Law 98/2011, with the fine and closure falling on the venue rather than the player. Online accounts require identification, and operators must run anti-money-laundering checks under Legislative Decree 231/2007, with customer identification and reporting duties to the Financial Intelligence Unit.

The self-exclusion register — the Registro Unico degli Auto-esclusi, RUA, held by ADM and operated on the state technology platform — is free and is activated with SPID or the electronic identity card. Legislative Decree 41/2024 replaced a single blunt option with three: exclusion across every concessionaire, exclusion from one concessionaire, or exclusion by game category. The new architecture became fully operational on 1 February 2026. A separate control arrived weeks later: under ADM’s revised gaming-account protocol (PACG 3.2), cash top-ups made at a physical retail point are capped at EUR 100 a week per account and reported to the tax register through the retailer’s ID. Testing opened 5 March 2026, the production environment on 16 March, and concessionaires became responsible for enforcing the block on 13 May 2026.

Italian law does not criminalise the player. What a player gives up by using a site without an Italian concession is the RUA block, the deposit and session controls, the audited game software, and any route to ADM if something goes wrong.

Myth 6: the ban handed the market to the black market

The unlicensed market is real and large, but the headline figures compare a modelled turnover estimate with a published revenue figure, which overstates it by about a factor of seven. You will see “Italy’s illegal gambling market is EUR 25bn” set against “the legal market is EUR 21.5bn” as though the two were the same quantity. They are not. The first is money staked. The second is money lost.

The most careful estimate we have found is the work of the Fabio Gobbo Industrial and Financial Research Group at LUISS Guido Carli with the research firm Prisma, presented in May 2026, which puts illegal Italian gambling at EUR 29.8bn of gross gaming turnover: EUR 25.4bn online (85.16%), EUR 2.58bn in betting (8.66%), EUR 1.28bn in machines (4.30%) and EUR 559.86m in lotteries (1.88%). The authors used three estimators — an OLS model, a two-way fixed-effects panel and a random forest — reading positive residuals as unexplained economic activity, then applied corrective multipliers for online and betting. Annual fiscal damage is put at EUR 1.28bn to EUR 1.4bn depending on which write-up you read, and the authors say themselves that the work carries the usual limits of measuring an unobserved economy.

Even the dataset behind it is quoted two ways. AGIMEG’s report of 13 May 2026 describes a regional panel running 2015–2023; the presentation coverage syndicated from 26 May 2026 describes the same EUR 29.8bn as coming from a 2015–2024 panel and pairs it with a total legal-plus-illegal collection of EUR 187.2bn, which is the 2024 legal raccolta of EUR 157.45bn plus the EUR 29.8bn. We treat it as a 2024-anchored estimate for that arithmetical reason and flag the disagreement rather than pick silently.

Read the provenance before you quote the number. The research reached the public at an event organised by Novomatic Italia, a gaming-machine manufacturer and, through the Lottoitalia consortium, a participant in the Italian concession market. A large illegal-market estimate is the single most useful number an incumbent operator can hold when arguing for lighter rules and looser marketing. That does not make the modelling wrong — it is more transparent about its method than most of what circulates in this vertical — but it does mean the figure should never be repeated as a neutral official statistic. ADM has not published a competing estimate.

ADM’s enforcement scaled up alongside, and the curve is steep: 266 unlicensed sites blocked in 2020, 196 in 2021, 259 in 2022, 492 in 2023, 721 in 2024 and a record 1,038 in 2025 — more than doubling in two years — against 31,403 gambling inspections and 28 premises suspended for admitting minors in 2025. Blocking a domain is cheap and the operator behind it can register another by lunchtime, so read the series as a measure of how fast the problem is reproducing rather than of how fast it is being solved.

How does Italy compare with the markets we have mapped?

Italy is the only one of these markets whose defining fight is about promotion rather than about who regulates, what may be offered, or what the rate should be.

Scope note: these charges sit on different bases and this is not a rate ranking. Italy’s, Sweden’s, Brazil’s and South Africa’s online figures are gross-gaming-revenue based; Germany’s 5.3% and Italy’s PREU are levied on turnover, so their GGR equivalents depend on the game’s return to player.

Two comparisons are worth holding together. Sweden’s marketing rule is a standard — moderation — which its courts have found hard to enforce; Italy’s is a prohibition with a number attached, which its courts enforce without difficulty but which reaches only the operators already inside the perimeter. And on the tax side, Germany taxes online slots at roughly 133% of GGR while Italy taxes bar slots at something over 69% of GGR: two of Europe’s largest markets have both concluded that machine-style gambling should be taxed on turnover, and both are watching the taxed product shrink.

Why do Italian gambling figures disagree so violently?

Because Italian data has one trap that changes numbers by an order of magnitude, and five smaller ones that change them by a third. Every conflict we hit building this page is one of the following.

• Raccolta is not spesa, and the gap is 7.6 to 1. Raccolta is turnover, everything staked: EUR 165.33bn in 2025. Spesa is what is left after winnings are paid back out — gross gaming revenue, what players actually lost: EUR 21.87bn in the same year. Both are ADM figures for the same market, and they differ by more than EUR 140bn. Any sentence of the form “Italians gambled EUR 165 billion” is true and almost useless; any sentence comparing that to another country’s GGR is simply wrong. This is the single most common error in English-language coverage of Italy.
• ADM’s own 2025 accounts do not close. The bilancio di esercizio defines spesa as raccolta minus winnings and prints all three numbers: raccolta EUR 165.33bn, winnings EUR 135.87bn, spesa EUR 21.869bn. Those cannot all be right — 165.33 minus 135.87 is 29.46, not 21.87, a gap of EUR 7.6bn. The residual implied by the two headline figures is instead about EUR 143.5bn of winnings. We quote raccolta and spesa, which are the figures ADM leads with and every other source repeats, and we do not quote a payout total for 2025 at all, because there is no way to tell from the published summary which of the two winnings figures is the reconciled one. If you see an Italian payout percentage for 2025 quoted to one decimal place, it was computed from one of these two and the author did not check the other.
• The gap is widest exactly where the market is growing. Online fixed-odds games of chance and card games took EUR 77.2bn of turnover in 2025 — on their own, 46.7% of everything staked in Italy — on very high return-to-player. AWP machines took EUR 14.9bn and VLTs EUR 16.5bn on much lower payouts. Ranking products by raccolta therefore ranks them by how fast money recycles, not by how much anyone loses.
• ADM and independent trackers do not agree on 2024. ADM’s own accounts put 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%, and is internally consistent with its own claim of +18.5% between 2019 and 2024. EGBA, meanwhile, gave Italy EUR 21bn of GGR for 2023 with EUR 4.6bn online where ADM’s Libro Blu reports EUR 20.68bn with EUR 4.3bn online. We use ADM throughout and flag the alternatives, because ADM is the tax authority that collects the money.
• Machines can be inside or outside a quoted total. AWP, VLT and Article 110(7) machines were 50.31% of the sector’s tax revenue in 2024 on ADM’s Libro Blu, but MEF data for the same year, as presented by I-Com, puts entertainment machines at 57% of state gambling income. The difference is which receipts count as tax and which as residual state margin — Lotto and lotteries moved between the two categories in the ministry’s own accounts in 2023. Never mix a Libro Blu percentage with an MEF one.
• Accounts are not players. Italy had over 21 million active online gaming accounts in 2024 and 6.2 million new accounts opened in 2025. Neither is a headcount of gamblers: one person can hold accounts with several concessionaires, and the pre-November-2025 skin model actively encouraged it. Per-account spending computed from these totals is a fiction.
• The illegal market is quoted in turnover and compared against revenue. The LUISS–Prisma estimate of EUR 29.8bn is gross gaming turnover. Comparing it with EUR 21.5bn of legal spesa produces the widely repeated and badly wrong impression that Italy’s black market is larger than its legal one. Two channelisation numbers also circulate from the same research — the 16%-of-collection share, which implies about 84% on turnover, and a headline 92% — and they are not on the same base.
• The advertising ban cannot be isolated from Covid, from tax and from the concession reform. 2020 removed a third of Italian gambling revenue by closing venues; the 2025 tax rise and the 2021 PREU rise moved the relative price of channels; Legislative Decree 41/2024 cut licence numbers by design. Any causal claim about the ban that does not carry those three caveats is overclaiming, including any claim in the ban’s favour.
• Passed, in force, extended, proposed and rejected are five different states. Legislative Decree 41/2024 is in force. The land-based reorganisation is a delegation whose deadline moved to 29 August 2026 and which has produced no decree. The 2026 PREU increases were proposed and fell on the confidence vote. Article 9 has been attacked from both sides and amended by neither: Senator Lotito’s December 2025 budget amendment to delete “indirect” was dropped before a vote, and the opposition amendments to Sports Decree-Law 108/2026 that would have tightened enforcement were rejected in the Chamber’s Culture Commission in July 2026. Coverage routinely files the second set under “attempts to relax the ban”; they were the opposite. Sources written mid-passage print the wrong status.
• There are three different ways to count Italian online licences, and they give three different answers. Concessions awarded at a tender: 120 in 2019, 52 in 2025. Concessions in force immediately before the reform, counting earlier tenders still running on extensions: 208, down to the same 52. Consumer-facing brands: several hundred, because one concession could carry dozens of skins until 13 November 2025. Any headline about Italian licence numbers is meaningless until it says which of the three it means.
• Every euro figure here is nominal unless we say otherwise, and the deflator changes the answer’s sign. Istat’s NIC index rose about 19% between the 2019 and 2025 annual averages (−0.1%, +1.9%, +8.2%, +5.6%, +1.0%, +1.5%). Deflate the ADM series by it and 2025 player losses are about 6% below 2019 in real money while turnover is about 25% above it. The 12% and 49% you will see quoted everywhere else are both true and both nominal. We state the nominal figures because that is how ADM publishes them, and we deflate them ourselves rather than let a reader assume real growth.

Who actually produces Italian gambling numbers, and which way does that bend them?

Four ecosystems produce almost everything published about Italian gambling, and each has a direction. This matters more here than in most markets, because the State is simultaneously the regulator, the tax collector and the largest single beneficiary of player losses.

• ADM and MEF. Primary, authoritative, and the tax authority’s own accounts — but they measure what the State can see and tax. They publish nothing on the unlicensed market, and their spesa and raccolta definitions are built around collection, not harm.
• Industry trade press. AGIMEG, PressGiochi, JAMMA, Gioconews and Italian Gaming Expo are where ADM data actually surfaces in usable detail, and they are the only reason numbers like the machine-tax share are quotable at all. They are also read and largely funded by the sector, and their framing leans towards regulatory relief. We use them as a transmission channel for ADM figures, not as an independent source of them.
• Operator- and supplier-funded research. The LUISS illegal-market study reached the public at a Novomatic Italia event. I-Com produces the fullest tax and regulatory analysis available in Italian, and works in a policy space funded by the industries it studies. Both are useful; neither is disinterested. Notice which number each ecosystem wants to be large: the illegal market.
• Prohibition-leaning civil society. Avviso Pubblico, Libera and Federconsumatori compile the most complete public tabulations of ADM product data. Their framing runs the other way and headlines raccolta, the biggest available number, which is exactly the scope error described above. Their tables are reliable; their headlines are not the same thing as their tables.

Notice what nobody is funding. There is no well-resourced Italian source whose interest is in the illegal market being small, and no official one that measures it at all. That asymmetry is why we quote the LUISS EUR 29.8bn with its method and its venue attached, and why we express it as a channelisation range rather than as a headline.

Key takeaways

• Gambling is legal in Italy for adults 18 and over, but only under an ADM concession. The Criminal Code prohibits it generally; the concession is what makes it lawful, and a physical venue needs a TULPS licence on top.
• The advertising ban is real, near-total in scope, and still in force in 2026. Article 9 of Decree-Law 87/2018 bans direct and indirect advertising on any medium from 14 July 2018, and sponsorship from 1 January 2019, at a penalty of 20% of the deal value with a EUR 50,000 floor. Three carve-outs survive — national deferred-draw lotteries, local prize games and ADM’s own responsible-gambling logos — so “total” is the wrong word. It has been pushed at from both directions and moved neither: a Forza Italia budget amendment to delete “indirect” was dropped in December 2025, and opposition amendments that would have tightened enforcement were rejected in July 2026.
• It did not shrink the market, and the real-terms numbers are not what either camp quotes. Player losses rose from EUR 19.45bn in 2019 to EUR 21.87bn in 2025 and turnover from EUR 110.5bn to EUR 165.33bn, both nominal. Deflated by Istat’s roughly 19% cumulative inflation, real losses are about 6% lower than 2019 and real turnover about 25% higher. Italians are staking a quarter more and the house is keeping slightly less — and Covid, the tax differential and the concession reform all sit between Article 9 and that outcome.
• What fell is the number of firms allowed to compete. 120 online concessions at EUR 200,000 in 2019 became 52 at EUR 7m in 2025, held by 46 operators on one website each, with around 350 skins switched off on 13 November 2025. Against the 208 concessions actually running on extensions until September 2025, that is a 75% cut in live licences. The State took 15.2 times more money from 57% fewer licences at tender.
• The ban and the licence price compound each other. A EUR 7m entry ticket is only recoverable if you can acquire customers; the standard tool for that is banned; so the price selects for firms that already had Italian customers before 2019. DLA Piper called the ban a blocker for entrants unknown to the general public, and the Consiglio di Stato, in a ruling reported on 6 November 2025, dismissed the anti-competitive challenge to the tender on the narrower ground that the terms did not make a viable bid impossible for an average operator.
• The concentration is visible in the revenue. Lottomatica, Sisal and Snaitech took about 58% of online sports betting revenue in 2025, and the segment’s hold rose from 11.2% to 12.2% of every euro staked while stakes fell 2.8%.
• Tax, not advertising, is the cleanest explanation for the move online. AWP machines pay at least 68.6% of gross gaming revenue in PREU against 25.5% for an online casino; machines took 20.7% of turnover and paid 50.3% of the sector’s tax in 2024, and about 19% of turnover for 46.2% of the tax in 2025 — a tax-to-turnover index of roughly 2.43 in both years. Machine turnover is down 29.9% since 2019. Say this out loud before attributing the channel shift to Article 9.
• Follow the money to the end and the State is the counterparty. Of the EUR 21.9bn Italians lost in 2025, EUR 11.5bn went to the Treasury and EUR 10.4bn to the licensed supply chain — about 53 cents of every euro lost is a tax receipt. That is the constraint every reform proposal runs into.
• Half the reform does not exist yet. The online sector was reorganised by Legislative Decree 41/2024. The land-based sector is running on paid concession extensions to 31 December 2026 under a delegation that expires 29 August 2026, deadlocked on the regional distanziometri and on how much gambling tax the regions should keep.
• The lesson generalises, and it is not an argument for gambling advertising. A prohibition on promotion is a prohibition on entry. If the policy goal is less gambling, Italy shows an advertising ban alone will not deliver it; if the goal is a competitive licensed market, an advertising ban plus a seven-figure licence fee will not deliver that either. Italy got neither, and ended up with a smaller, richer, more concentrated set of licensees serving a demand that has not gone anywhere.

Frequently asked questions

Is online gambling legal in Italy in 2026?

Yes. Online sports betting, casino games, poker, bingo and slots are legal in Italy for adults aged 18 and over, provided the operator holds a concession from the Agenzia delle Dogane e dei Monopoli. Gambling is generally prohibited by Article 718 of the Italian Criminal Code and reserved to the State by Legislative Decree 496/1948, so the concession is what makes the activity lawful rather than merely permitted. The online concession framework was rewritten by Legislative Decree 41/2024, published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale on 3 April 2024, and ADM awarded 52 new nine-year concessions to 46 operators on 17 September 2025 at a one-off fee of 7 million euros each, plus an annual charge of 3 per cent of net gaming revenue. Those 52 replaced 208 older remote concessions that had been running on paid technical extensions, a fall of three quarters in live licences. Since 13 November 2025 each concession may operate only one website, which ended the practice of running dozens of separately branded skins under a single licence.

What does the Decreto Dignita ban, and is gambling advertising still illegal in Italy?

Article 9 of Decree-Law 87/2018, known as the Decreto Dignita and converted by Law 96/2018, prohibits any form of advertising, including indirect advertising, of games or bets with money prizes and of gambling, on any medium, including sporting, cultural and artistic events, television and radio, press, publications, billboards and digital and telematic channels including social media. The advertising prohibition took effect with the decree in July 2018 and the sponsorship prohibition from 1 January 2019. The penalty is an administrative fine of 20 per cent of the value of the sponsorship or advertising and in any case not less than 50,000 euros for each violation, and it can fall on the advertiser, the owner of the medium or website, and the event organiser. AGCOM issued implementing guidelines in Delibera 132/19/CONS, and on 16 July 2026 the Court of Justice of the European Union held in case C-421/24, Google Ireland v AGCOM, that a platform loses the hosting-provider exemption where it has a commercial partnership with the creator whose content promotes gambling. The ban remains in force as at 29 July 2026, and Article 9 itself has never been amended. An amendment to the 2026 Budget Law tabled by Senator Claudio Lotito would have deleted the words even indirect from the article, but the health minister opposed it and it was dropped from the proposals put to the vote. Separately, in July 2026 the Chamber of Deputies Culture Commission rejected opposition amendments to Sports Decree-Law 108/2026 that pointed the other way, by conditioning public sports benefits on compliance with the advertising ban.

Are there exceptions to the Italian gambling advertising ban?

Yes, three. Article 9 does not apply to national deferred-draw lotteries under Decree-Law 78/2009, the category identified each year by ministerial decree that includes Lotteria Italia; nor to local prize games under Presidential Decree 430/2001; nor to the safe and responsible gambling logos of the Agenzia delle Dogane e dei Monopoli. The practical effect is that the products sold closest to the State keep a route to the consumer while the products the State licenses to private operators do not, which is why describing Italy as having a completely total advertising ban is not accurate.

How much tax do gambling operators pay in Italy?

It depends on the product and on the base, and the two must not be confused. Since 1 January 2025 under the 2025 Budget Law, Law 207/2024, online fixed-odds sports betting is taxed at 24.5 per cent of gross margin, up from 22 per cent, and online casino, card and skill games at 25.5 per cent, up from 20 per cent. Retail fixed-odds betting is 20.5 per cent of gross margin and bingo halls 20 per cent. Land-based machines are taxed on turnover instead: the PREU is 24 per cent of amounts staked on AWP slot machines and 8.6 per cent on VLTs, rates unchanged since 1 January 2021. Converting the machine rates onto the same basis as the online rates, using the statutory minimum payout of 65 per cent for AWP and 83 per cent for VLT set by Law 160/2019, an AWP machine pays at least 68.6 per cent of gross gaming revenue and a VLT about 50.6 per cent, which is roughly 2.7 times and 2 times the online casino rate respectively. Proposed further PREU increases in the 2026 Budget Law were not enacted.

What is the distanziometro and does it apply across all of Italy?

The distanziometro is a minimum distance, generally between 300 and 500 metres, that regional law requires between a gambling venue or gaming machine and a list of sensitive places such as schools, hospitals, places of worship, youth centres and cash-for-gold shops. It is not a national rule. Every Italian region has legislated on gambling and the rules differ region by region and, in implementation, municipality by municipality, with mayors separately controlling opening hours. The Constitutional Court upheld regional competence in this area in judgment 108/2017 and, in judgment 27/2019, accepted that a region may reasonably expand the list of sensitive places. An agreement reached in the Conferenza Unificata on 7 September 2017 set common criteria but was never implemented by ministerial decree, so it does not bind municipalities. The unresolved conflict over the distanziometri is one of the main reasons the reorganisation of the land-based sector has still not been adopted.

Has Italy reformed its land-based gambling sector?

No. The enabling law for a full reorganisation of Italian gambling, Law 111/2023, produced only Legislative Decree 41/2024 covering remote gambling. The land-based half has never been adopted. Parliament extended the deadline for the delegation from 29 August 2025 to 29 August 2026 through Law 120/2025, and at the same time softened one of the guiding criteria by replacing the required reduction of stake and prize limits with a revision of them. In the meantime the physical-network concessions for gaming machines, betting and bingo, which were due to expire on 31 December 2024, are running on paid two-year extensions to 31 December 2026 granted by the 2025 Budget Law. Tenders that have never been held for those concessions are estimated to be worth around 2 billion euros to the treasury, a figure that looks plausible given that the Lotto concession was awarded to Lottoitalia on 19 May 2025 for 2.23 billion euros against a 1 billion reserve price.

How do I self-exclude from gambling in Italy?

Through the Registro Unico degli Auto-esclusi, the RUA, a single national register held by the Agenzia delle Dogane e dei Monopoli. Registration is free and is completed with SPID or an electronic identity card, and once recorded it applies at licensed operators without the player having to contact each one. Legislative Decree 41/2024 expanded the options from a single blanket exclusion to three: exclusion from all concessionaires, exclusion from one named concessionaire, and exclusion by category of game. The new architecture became fully operational on 1 February 2026. The minimum gambling age in Italy is 18, and allowing a person under 18 to take part in a public game with money prizes exposes the venue to a fine of 5,000 to 20,000 euros and closure of up to thirty days under Article 24 of Decree-Law 98/2011.

Sources

• Agenzia delle Dogane e dei Monopoli — Articolo 9, comma 1, del decreto-legge 12 luglio 2018, n. 87 (scope of the advertising prohibition; the exclusions for national deferred-draw lotteries under D.L. 78/2009, local prize games under D.P.R. 430/2001, and ADM responsible-gambling logos; sponsorship limb from 1 January 2019)
• AGCOM — Divieto di pubblicità sul gioco d’azzardo online con vincite in denaro (legal basis in Article 9 of D.L. 87/2018 as converted by Law 96/2018; guidelines adopted by Delibera 132/19/CONS; liability of the client, the medium or website owner and the event organiser)
• Avviso Pubblico — Legge n. 96 del 2018: le disposizioni sul contrasto del disturbo da gioco d’azzardo and La pubblicità del gioco d’azzardo: ricostruzione della normativa e della giurisprudenza (conversion of the decree; the 20% of sponsorship value sanction with a EUR 50,000 minimum per violation; the one-year run-off for contracts live on 14 July 2018)
• I-Com (Istituto per la Competitività) — Prospettive del settore dei giochi in Italia: fiscalità e interventi regolatori in vista del 2026, December 2025 (raccolta series 2018–2024; spesa series 2017–2024; physical vs distance raccolta 2019–2024; the Ufficio Parlamentare di Bilancio tax schedule; the 2025 Budget Law rate changes; AWP and VLT raccolta of EUR 32.6bn in 2024, down 29.9% on 2019; the delegation deadline moved to 29 August 2026 by Law 120/2025; the Conferenza delle Regioni estimate of EUR 294m and the EUR 80m in the 2026 Budget Law; the Lotto tender reserve of EUR 1bn against a winning bid above EUR 2.2bn — ANSA puts the final figure at EUR 2.23bn). Note: this paper puts 2024 spesa at EUR 22.99bn against ADM’s EUR 21.577bn — see the methodology section.
• 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, −0.73% on 2024; 1,038 illegal sites blocked, against 721 in 2024, 492 in 2023, 259 in 2022, 196 in 2021 and 266 in 2020; 31,403 inspections; 28 premises suspended over minors). Note: the same summary defines spesa as raccolta minus winnings and gives winnings as EUR 135.87bn, which does not reconcile with the raccolta and spesa headlines — see the methodology section. Tier: primary agency accounts, reported by trade press.
• AGIMEG — ADM, Libro Blu 2019 and Libro Blu ADM: nel 2023 spesa giochi 20,7 miliardi (2018 spesa EUR 18.99bn; 2019 spesa EUR 19.45bn on raccolta of EUR 110.5bn with EUR 11.4bn to the treasury; 2022 spesa EUR 20.4bn and erario EUR 11.2bn; 2023 spesa EUR 20.7bn, +1.6%, raccolta EUR 147.68bn, +8.53%, erario EUR 11.6bn, with online spesa above EUR 4.3bn of which casino and card games EUR 2.368bn and sports betting EUR 1.612bn)
• AGIMEG — Libro Blu ADM: nel 2021 spesa per il gioco online a 3,7 miliardi di euro and Libro Blu ADM: nel 2021 spesa del gioco fisico a 11,8 miliardi (online spesa of EUR 1.8bn in 2019 rising to EUR 3.7bn in 2021, with physical spesa of EUR 11.8bn in 2021 — the two components of the 2021 point on our chart)
• PressGiochi — Libro Blu ADM: nel 2020 dai giochi entrate per 7,24 mld (the Covid year: raccolta EUR 88bn, down 20.05%; spesa down 33.23% on 2019; state revenue down 36.27% — the derivation behind the 2020 point on our chart)
• 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 margin in 2025, EUR 11.5bn to the State and EUR 10.4bn net to the supply chain, up about EUR 400m on 2024; erario EUR 11.47bn against EUR 11.56bn in 2024, −0.7%; gross yield 6.9% of turnover, a three-year low; online raccolta EUR 100.8bn, above 60% of the market, physical below EUR 65bn). Tier: think-tank analysis of a primary audit-institution source.
• AGIMEG — MEF: nel 2025 raccolta giochi a 165 miliardi (2025 by product: apparecchi raccolta EUR 31.5bn generating over EUR 5.3bn of erario, about 46% of the total; 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)
• 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, Lotteria Italia EUR 48m; 6.2 million new gaming accounts opened)
• JAMMA — ADM, Libro Blu 2024: gli apparecchi generano oltre la metà del gettito and Libro Blu 2024: oltre 21 milioni di conti attivi (machines at 50.31% of the sector’s tax revenue and 49.95% of physical-channel raccolta in 2024, down 3.26% on 2023; more than 21 million active online accounts in 2024 against 18.7 million in 2023)
• AGIMEG — Scommesse online: 2025 spesa +6,3%, dati operatori and Gaming Report — Scommesse 2025, la classifica definitiva (online betting raccolta EUR 13.9bn in 2025, down 2.8% from EUR 14.3bn; spesa EUR 1.7bn, up 6.3% from EUR 1.6bn; shares by spesa — Lottomatica above 30%, Sisal 17%, Snaitech 10.7%)
• AGIMEG — Giochi online: bando per assegnare 120 concessioni and PressGiochi — Gioco online: ADM pubblica l’elenco degli aggiudicatari (2018 tender under Article 1(935) of Law 208/2015, notice in the EU Official Journal of 10 January 2018; 120 concessions at EUR 200,000, expiring end-2022; EUR 24m to the treasury; award determination 15911 of 11 February 2019)
• Italian Gaming Expo & Conference — Riordino gioco online: Adm ufficializza, 46 operatori per 52 concessioni, Adm impone ai concessionari il dominio unico dal 13 novembre and Licenze ok e attive entro maggio 2026, tranche da 3 milioni (award of 17 September 2025; EUR 4m first instalment within 35 days and EUR 3m before go-live; single domain from 13 November 2025)
• AGIMEG — Gioco online, Consiglio di Stato: valido il bando ADM (Consiglio di Stato, Section V, 6 November 2025, dismissing the appeal of Plivio S.r.l. and Sogno di Tolosa Ltd against the EUR 7m fee, the investment requirements and the single-brand rule; the finding that the terms were not an insurmountable barrier for an average operator; 51 competitors in the procedure)
• Radio Città Fujiko — Skin eliminate e concessioni più selettive: il 2025 segna l’anno zero dell’online and PressGiochi — Dal 13 novembre stop alle skin (52 concessions to 46 operators; EUR 364m of direct state revenue; around 350 skins ceasing collection from 13 November 2025)
• DirittoalDigitale — Licenze di gioco online in Italia: 46 operatori ammessi alla Fase 2 and PressGiochi — Giochi online: ADM pubblica la proroga tecnica — onerosa — delle concessioni (208 remote concessions running on paid technical extension until the award procedure closed on 17 September 2025, replaced by the 52 effective 13 November 2025; concession terms — EUR 4m on award and EUR 3m before go-live, nine years, an annual 3% of net gaming revenue, and 0.2% of GGR capped at EUR 1m a year for responsible gambling)
• ANSA — A Lottoitalia la concessione del Lotto per 2,23 miliardi, 19 May 2025 (nine-year Lotto concession awarded to the IGT-led Lottoitalia consortium at EUR 2.23bn against a EUR 1bn reserve, ahead of Sisal at EUR 2.208bn; handover 29 November 2025)
• DLA Piper — Italy to lift gambling advertising ban? A key moment for market entry, March 2025 (the ban “has been frequently seen as a blocker for new entrants that are not known by the general public”; the Senate Culture Commission resolution asking the government to review the legislation)
• Gazzetta Ufficiale — Decreto legislativo 25 marzo 2024, n. 41 and Legge 30 dicembre 2024, n. 207 (Legge di Bilancio 2025) (the online reorganisation and the definition of remote gambling; the 2025 rate changes)
• FiscoOggi — Ufficiali le nuove regole per i giochi a distanza (from 1 January 2025 the single tax on remote skill, card, fixed-odds and bingo games rises to 25.5% on sums not returned to players; fixed-odds sports and horse betting at 20.5% retail and 24.5% remote on the difference between stakes and winnings)
• Gioconews — Awp e Vlt: nuovo incremento del Preu, sale al 24% e 8,6% and Avviso Pubblico — Legge di Bilancio 2020 e Decreto fiscale: sintesi dei provvedimenti relativi al gioco d’azzardo (PREU at 19.25% and 6.25% from 1 September 2018 under Article 9(6) of D.L. 87/2018, rising to 24% and 8.6% from 1 January 2021; statutory minimum payout cut to 68% AWP and 84% VLT from 1 January 2019 by Law 145/2018, then to not less than 65% and 83% from 1 January 2020 by Article 1(732) of Law 160/2019)
• JAMMA — Manovra di Bilancio 2026, fiducia senza modifiche: stop agli emendamenti su PREU e gioco d’azzardo and Camera, DL Sport: respinti emendamenti M5S e PD su divieto pubblicità giochi e rincaro imposta scommesse (the 2026 Budget Law PREU amendments fell on the confidence vote; the Chamber’s VII Culture Commission rejected M5S, PD and AVS amendments to Sports Decree-Law 108/2026 in July 2026). Note the direction: those Sports Decree amendments would have tightened the advertising ban and raised betting tax, not relaxed either. The proposal to relax Article 9 was Senator Lotito’s December 2025 budget amendment, reported by Today.it and opposed by Health Minister Schillaci.
• Avviso Pubblico — Gioco d’azzardo: la legislazione regionale e gli interventi dei Comuni and Il Consiglio di Stato conferma la sanzione di Agcom a Google and Legge della Regione Sicilia per la prevenzione e il trattamento del disturbo da gioco d’azzardo (all regions legislated; distances generally 300–500m; Sicilian regional law 24/2020 of 21 October 2020 setting 300m in municipalities under 50,000 residents and 500m at or above that, measured by shortest pedestrian path, with fines of EUR 2,000–10,000; Constitutional Court 300/2011, 220/2014, 108/2017 and 27/2019; the 2017 Conferenza Unificata agreement never implemented by decree; Consiglio di Stato judgment 4277/2024 reversing TAR Lazio 11036/2021 on the Google sanction, with ordinance 1947/2024 applying the same reasoning to Meta)
• Diritto Mercato Tecnologia — Il Consiglio di Stato conferma la prima sanzione irrogata da Agcom a Google quale hosting provider attivo (AGCOM Delibera 541/20/CONS of 22 October 2020 fining Google Ireland EUR 100,000, EUR 50,000 for each of two monitored days, over a sponsored search result for an offshore casino on 14–15 November 2019; Consiglio di Stato Section VI, judgment 4277/2024 of 13 May 2024, active-host reasoning). Note: this commentary reads the judgment as confirming EUR 100,000 while Avviso Pubblico reads it as recasting the conduct as a single EUR 50,000 violation, which is why we state the liability finding rather than the amount.
• Corte di giustizia dell’Unione europea — Second Chamber, judgment of 16 July 2026, case C-421/24, Google Ireland v AGCOM, with reporting by Il Sole 24 Ore (the hosting exemption does not apply where the platform has a commercial partnership involving examination of the creator’s content and metadata; underlying AGCOM sanction of EUR 750,000 over gambling promotion on YouTube). Tier: primary court judgment.
• AGIMEG — Gioco illegale Italia a 29,8 miliardi: 85% online, 13 May 2026, and Novomatic Italia — Novomatic Italia e Fortune presentano la ricerca Prisma e LUISS sul gioco non regolato (LUISS Guido Carli, Gruppo di ricerca industriale e finanziaria Fabio Gobbo, with Prisma: EUR 29.8bn of illegal gross gaming turnover, EUR 25.4bn or 85.16% of it online, EUR 2.58bn betting, EUR 1.28bn machines, EUR 559.86m lotteries; about 16% of a total collection of EUR 187.2bn; estimated fiscal damage EUR 1.28–1.4bn a year; a separately quoted channelisation rate of 92%; OLS, two-way fixed effects and random forest estimators with corrective multipliers; the authors’ own caveats). Note: AGIMEG describes the panel as 2015–2023, the presentation coverage as 2015–2024, and the EUR 187.2bn total is only consistent with 2024 legal raccolta — see the methodology section. Tier: modelled academic estimate of an unobserved market, presented at an event organised by Novomatic Italia.
• Sogei and ADM — Registro Unico delle Autoesclusioni and Registro unico autoesclusioni, ADM (the RUA; registration free via SPID or CIE; the three exclusion types introduced by Legislative Decree 41/2024 and the system fully operational from 1 February 2026)
• JAMMA — ADM pubblica il protocollo PACG 3.2: limite 100 euro alle ricariche in contanti da PVR and Sky TG24, 19 March 2026 (weekly EUR 100 cap on cash top-ups of an online gaming account made at a physical retail point, reported to the Anagrafe Tributaria via the PVR identifier; test environment 5 March 2026, production 16 March 2026, concessionaire responsibility for the block from 13 May 2026)
• Medicoeleggi, consolidated text — Decreto-legge 98/2011, articolo 24, Norme in materia di gioco (paragraph 20 prohibiting participation by under-18s; paragraph 21 fine of EUR 5,000 to EUR 20,000, closure of up to thirty days, and suspension from the operators’ register for one to three months where Article 110(6) machines are involved)
• Chambers and Partners — Gaming Law 2025: Italy (Article 718 of the Criminal Code; Legislative Decree 496/1948; the ADM concession plus TULPS Articles 86 and 88 two-tier authorisation; anti-money-laundering duties under Legislative Decree 231/2007; the two-year extension of concessions to 31 December 2026)
• Istat — Indicatori demografici, 31 March 2025 (resident population of 58,934,177 at 1 January 2025, the denominator for our per-resident figures)
• Istat, consumer price index for the whole nation (NIC) — annual average variations, as tabulated by Rivaluta and cross-checked against Istat’s inflation archive (2019 +0.6%, 2020 −0.1%, 2021 +1.9%, 2022 +8.2%, 2023 +5.6%, 2024 +1.0%, 2025 +1.5% — the deflator behind our real-terms figures; sources differ between 5.6% and 5.7% for 2023, which moves the cumulative 2019–2025 figure by about a tenth of a point and does not change any conclusion here). Tier: national statistical office series, accessed through a secondary tabulation.