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Gambling Laws in Spain 2026: The Ad Decree a Court Struck Down — 60 Sourced Data Points

On a Tuesday in April 2024 the Spanish Supreme Court took a red pen to the country’s gambling advertising rules and deleted parts of five articles. It did not rule that the restrictions were bad policy. It ruled that a government cannot impose them by decree when parliament never gave it that power — and that single procedural point, not the merits, is why Spain’s crackdown collapsed while Italy’s advertising ban, written into a decree-law that parliament converted into statute, has not moved a comma in eight years.

That is the argument this page is built on, and it is testable. Spain and Italy ran versions of the same experiment within two years of each other. Italy’s instrument had statutory rank. Spain’s did not. One survived every challenge; the other was partly struck down inside four years, and as at 29 July 2026 Spain has still not replaced the annulled provisions with anything. Every figure below is attributed to a named, dated source, and every figure we calculated ourselves is labelled and shown with its working.

What is the timeline of Spanish gambling regulation?

Fifteen years in ten moves, and the pivot is the fifth one. Read the status column carefully: Spanish coverage routinely files a consultation as a law and an annulment as a repeal.

What does the 2011 Gambling Act actually do?

It nationalised the part of Spanish gambling that travels down a wire, and left the rest with the regions. Ley 13/2011 covers gambling of ámbito estatal — games offered across the whole territory, in practice online and by electronic means. Everything with a street address stayed regional: casinos, bingo halls, gaming arcades, betting shops and the machines in bars are licensed by each of the 17 autonomous communities and the cities of Ceuta and Melilla, each with its own statute, its own venue rules and its own inspectorate.

The licence architecture has two layers. A licencia general covers a family of games — betting, contests, other games — runs for 10 years and is renewable for the same period (article 10.6). Within it, each individual product needs a licencia singular, granted for a minimum of one year and a maximum of five, renewable in like periods (article 11.5). Operators must serve Spanish customers from a specific .es site; doing otherwise is a very serious infringement under article 39(i).

Two provisions matter more than their length suggests. Article 6.2(a) bans participation by minors and by the legally incapacitated, and 6.2(b) bans anyone who has asked to be excluded — the statutory basis for the national self-exclusion register created by article 6.3. And article 7 makes advertising conditional: promotion of gambling is prohibited unless the operator holds a licence that authorises it, and any advertising network, agency, broadcaster or platform carrying the ad must verify the licence first, on pain of an infringement of its own under article 40(d).

Note what article 7 does not do, because everything on this page turns on it. Its second paragraph says the conditions and limits on advertising “shall be established by regulation” and lists the topics: unsolicited electronic marketing, the placement of advertisements in media, sponsorship of sporting events that are themselves the subject of betting, hoardings at those events, and television contests. It sets no limit itself. It hands the pen to the government and names the paper.

What did Royal Decree 958/2020 prohibit, and when did each part bite?

It was, on the day it landed, one of the two or three strictest advertising regimes in Europe — and it was written entirely as secondary legislation. Approved on 3 November 2020 and in force from 5 November 2020, RD 958/2020 did five separate things that operators felt immediately.

• Broadcast window. Gambling advertising on audiovisual services was confined to 01:00–05:00, with additional carve-outs around children’s programming and the reinforced protection slots of the audiovisual law.
• Sponsorship (article 12). No operator naming of sports facilities, no shirt or kit sponsorship, no substituting an operator’s name for a team’s. Contracts already signed ran to 30 August 2021 — a few summaries say 31 August — so the shirts went blank at the start of the 2021–22 season.
• Promotions (article 13). Promotional activity aimed at attracting new customers was prohibited outright. In practice this killed the Spanish welcome bonus for close to three years.
• Public figures (article 15). No people or characters of public relevance or notoriety in gambling advertising. Existing endorsement contracts ran only to 1 April 2021.
• Digital placements (articles 23, 25, 26). A general prohibition on commercial communications through information-society services, with narrow exceptions, plus specific restrictions on video-sharing platforms and social media.

One part of the decree never made it to 2024 at all, and it is regularly confused with the annulment. Title II, the active information and player-protection policies, was repealed — not struck down — when Royal Decree 176/2023 of 14 March 2023 took effect on 15 September 2023 and rehoused that machinery in a dedicated safer-gambling decree. A repeal by a later government instrument and an annulment by a court are different legal events with different consequences, and English-language summaries mix them constantly.

What exactly did the Supreme Court annul in April 2024?

Parts of five articles — seven paragraphs in all — on the ground that the government had gone further than the statute allowed it to go. Judgment 527/2024 of 2 April 2024, Third Chamber, Third Section, on ordinary appeal 3/2021 brought by the operators’ association Jdigital, is final and not subject to further appeal. The General Council of the Judiciary announced it on 10 April 2024; the operative part was published in the Boletín Oficial del Estado on 25 May 2024 as BOE-A-2024-10500.

It was not alone. Three separate challenges to RD 958/2020 were decided by the same chamber inside three weeks, and the two that get almost no coverage matter for a reason: they show the annulment was not one association’s lucky day.

Scope note: articles 13.1, 13.3 and 23.1 were annulled twice over, by two different claimants on two different appeal numbers. That is why counts of “how many articles fell” differ between summaries, and it is why the correct citation is a judgment date plus a recurso number, never “the April 2024 ruling”. Note also who the claimants were: the licensed operators’ association and the professional football league — the two constituencies the decree had taken money from. A rule that binds only the licensed can, in practice, only be challenged by the licensed.

Scope note: this is a partial annulment, not a repeal of the decree and not an overturning of “Spain’s advertising ban”. RD 958/2020 remains in force minus the provisions listed above, and the restrictions in the lower half of the table have applied continuously since 2020–21.

Why did those articles fall while the sponsorship ban survived?

Because sponsorship was the one restriction parliament had actually named in the statute, and the others were not. The court’s reasoning is a hierarchy-of-norms point: advertising is an expression of commercial freedom, restrictions on it require cover in a norm of legal rank, and a regulation may develop what a statute has decided but may not invent restrictions the legislature never contemplated.

Put article 7.2 of Ley 13/2011 next to the outcome and the pattern is hard to miss. Article 7.2 delegates the setting of advertising conditions and expressly lists, among the matters to be regulated, unsolicited electronic marketing, the insertion of advertisements in media, and — in sub-paragraph (c) — sponsorship of sporting events that are the object of betting. It says nothing about welcome bonuses and nothing about celebrities.

Be precise about the digital limb, because it is where a lazy summary goes wrong. Article 7.2(b) does reach placement — “the inclusion of advertisements or other advertising formats in media and other advertising supports” — which is broad enough to cover a social feed. What it authorises is conditions and limits on placement. Article 23.1 of the decree did something else: it imposed a general prohibition on commercial communications through information-society services, with narrow exceptions. A delegation to set conditions is not a delegation to forbid, and that distinction is doing the work in the operative parts.

There is a second, quieter consequence. A legal analysis by PwC Spain argues that because Ley 13/2011 carried no adequate advertising framework until article 7 bis entered into force on 4 November 2022, sanctions imposed under RD 958/2020 for conduct before that date are vulnerable on the same reasoning. Nobody has published a count of how many resolutions that would touch. It is the sort of tail risk that a statute drafted properly the first time does not generate.

What did the crackdown and the annulment do to marketing spend?

Total marketing spend fell 19% in the first fully restricted year and has since risen to an all-time high of EUR 664.40m — but the recovery is concentrated exactly in the categories the court freed. This is the sharpest evidence available anywhere on what the Spanish rules did, because the DGOJ requires licensed operators to report marketing expenditure and publishes it in four separate lines.

Now disaggregate it, because the aggregate hides the finding.

All figures EUR millions, state-licensed online operators, as published in each year’s DGOJ annual market report; 2020 is a published-level gap, and we deal with it in the callout immediately below rather than leaving it blank. The two comparison columns are 16Best analysis: our arithmetic between DGOJ’s published levels. The 2019 components reach us through trade tabulation of the DGOJ 2019 report rather than from a live DGOJ page, so we tested them — the four published year-on-year rates for that year (advertising +7.43%, promotions +10.88%, sponsorship +43.87%, affiliation +23.4%) reconstruct a 2018 total of EUR 332.9m, which is exactly the +11.74% total change DGOJ printed for 2019. Five numbers that would not agree if any one component were wrong.

The player-side series moves with it, and it is the number we would quote first. Aonso-Diego, García-Pérez and Krotter, publishing in Harm Reduction Journal on 13 June 2025 from DGOJ-aggregated operator data, found new online gambling accounts fell from 3.01 million in 2020 to 1.35 million in 2023. DGOJ’s own reports give monthly averages of new accounts across the same window and after it: 112,743 a month in 2023, then 151,898 in 2024 and 169,858 in 2025.

Did any of it change the size of the Spanish market?

Spanish online gross gaming revenue grew faster during the strictest years of the advertising regime than it has since the restrictions were struck down. That is the honest, awkward finding, and it is the reason this page does not argue that advertising rules drive market size.

Run the compound rates over the sub-periods and the sequence is unambiguous. From 2021 to 2023 — the years with no shirt sponsorship, no celebrity endorsement, no welcome bonuses and a four-hour broadcast window — online GGR compounded at about 23.2% a year, from EUR 815.30m to EUR 1,236.75m. From 2023 to 2025, with bonuses and celebrities lawful again, it compounded at about 17.3% a year. Across the whole run from 2019 to 2025 the rate is about 14.7% a year (16Best analysis of the DGOJ series).

Be careful what that does and does not prove. It does not show the restrictions were pointless: the account-creation series says they moved something real, and one number can fall while another rises. It shows that gross gaming revenue is the wrong instrument for reading advertising policy, because it is dominated by the mix shift into online casino — EUR 893.00m of the 2025 total, 52.51%, against EUR 698.13m for sports betting — and by a licensed market still converting land-based demand. Anyone attributing the 2022–23 acceleration to the advertising ban, or the 2024–25 deceleration to the annulment, is fitting a story to a curve with several other hands on it.

Put the marketing number in a body instead. Spain had 2,157,514 active online players in 2025. Operators spent EUR 664.40m reaching them and collected EUR 1,700.55m from them: about EUR 308 of marketing per active player, against EUR 788 of revenue per active player — 39 cents of marketing for every euro the house kept (16Best analysis of DGOJ 2025 figures). That ratio was 56% in 2021 and 33% in 2023. Marketing intensity has recovered, but it is still well below where it stood before the crackdown; the absolute number is at a record only because the market underneath it doubled.

The most recent quarter says the same thing. In the first quarter of 2026 Spanish online GGR reached EUR 454.2m, up 14% year on year, with online casino setting a quarterly record at EUR 247.8m, up 22%, and sports betting at EUR 174.5m, up 5%. Set that 14% against every full year since the decree: +18.1% in 2022, +28.4% in 2023, +17.6% in 2024 and +17.0% in 2025. Two years after the annulment, quarterly growth is running below all four, and the composition is still moving toward casino (16Best analysis of the DGOJ annual series against the DGOJ Q1 2026 report). Marketing tells the same story in miniature: Q1 2026 spend was EUR 184.7m, up 12% — EUR 91.1m of promotions, EUR 73.6m of advertising and EUR 17.4m of affiliation, the last of those up 30%. The advertising-to-promotions ratio in that quarter is 0.81, still nowhere near the 1.42 of 2019. If the advertising rules had been the binding constraint on this market, none of that is the shape you would expect.

What has the government done since the annulment?

It has announced a replacement three times and enacted none of it. The consumer-affairs ministry has been explicit that it wants the annulled restrictions back and that they now need statutory rank. Getting them there is a different problem.

• The customer-services route (2025) — failed. Amendment 176, tabled by the governing PSOE and Sumar groups, would have written into law a ban on people of public relevance in gambling advertising, a prohibition on acquisition promotions with offers limited to customers whose accounts were at least 30 days old, and a ban on sponsored results in search engines. Ley 10/2025 of 26 December 2025 was published on 27 December 2025 with no gambling provision. Its final provisions amend the unfair-competition, consumer, financial-system and telecommunications statutes, and nothing else. Anyone who tells you Spain re-banned welcome bonuses in December 2025 is describing an amendment, not a law.
• The warning-message route (2025–26) — in procedure. On 1 October 2025 the ministry announced tobacco-style risk warnings for gambling advertising: that a player has a 75% probability of losing money, and that total player losses exceed total winnings fourfold. The instrument is a DGOJ resolution with technical annexes, adopted under articles 10 and 11 of RD 958/2020 — articles the Supreme Court left intact. The procedure opened on 2 October 2025 with a 30-day consultation and a three-month adaptation period after publication. We could not confirm final publication as at 29 July 2026.
• The statutory route (2026) — a consultation. From 18 May to 22 June 2026 the DGOJ ran a prior public consultation on amending Ley 13/2011 itself, covering celebrities and influencers, acquisition promotions, and organic and paid search visibility, alongside extending the regulatory perimeter to technology suppliers. A prior consultation is the first step of Spanish rulemaking. It precedes a preliminary draft, which precedes Council of Ministers approval, which precedes a second hearing, which precedes parliament.

Meanwhile the enforcement that is working runs on the statute, not the decree. On 25 November 2025 the ministry announced sanctions against 26 licensed operators — Betfair, 888 and Codere among them — totalling more than EUR 3m for serious infringements, alongside six unlicensed foreign operators fined EUR 5m each for very serious infringements with their sites blocked. Press reports add the two figures to give more than EUR 33m across 32 operators; both descriptions are of the same action. Those penalties sit on article 39(a) of Ley 13/2011, which makes operating without a licence a very serious infringement carrying EUR 1m to EUR 50m, and article 42 generally. In April 2026 the same powers reached a media producer: the company behind the streaming show Zona Gemelos was fined about EUR 10,000 for promoting an unlicensed operator, under the article 7.3 duty to verify a licence before carrying gambling advertising.

Scale that against the year the annulment landed. Across 2024 the ministry imposed EUR 142.721m of gambling sanctions — EUR 65.325m in the first half and EUR 77.396m in the second — of which EUR 75m fell on fourteen foreign operators serving Spanish residents without a licence: thirteen at EUR 5m each and one at EUR 10m for reoffending. In the same twelve months the entire licensed sector’s marketing budget was EUR 526.30m. Total gambling sanctions imposed therefore ran at about 27% of what the licensed market spent on marketing, and the unlicensed-operator slice of them at about 14% (16Best analysis of the two published totals. Keep the two apart: EUR 142.721m is all gambling sanctions, licensed and unlicensed; EUR 75m is the unlicensed subset. And sanctions imposed are not sanctions collected, so read either as a measure of enforcement intensity rather than of cash). None of that enforcement depends on RD 958/2020. It sits on the statute, which is exactly why it has not been annulled.

How is online gambling taxed in Spain?

Twenty per cent of net gaming revenue for almost everything an online operator sells, ten per cent in Ceuta and Melilla, and a regional surcharge of up to a fifth on top. Article 48 of Ley 13/2011 sets it out, and the base matters as much as the rate.

Scope note, and it is the one most often botched: the 20% and the 22% are not comparable. The 20% falls on stakes less prizes; the 22% on the state pools falls on stakes. On a game returning 90% to players, a 22% turnover levy is worth 220% of gross gaming revenue — the same arithmetic trap we set out on German online slots, where a 5.3% turnover tax works out at roughly 133% of GGR at 96% return to player. Note also that the 22% on the state pools is 22% in Ceuta and Melilla too — it is the one line in the table the enclave discount does not touch. Autonomous communities may raise the article 48 rates by up to 20% of their stated level, but only in respect of operators fiscally resident in their territory, and only on the share of the base attributable to their own fiscal residents.

The Ceuta and Melilla wedge is the most consequential line in the table. An operator with tax residence in and genuine establishment in either city pays 10% instead of 20% on its online GGR — it keeps an extra ten cents of every euro of margin. Applied to the whole 2025 online market, the standard 20% rate on EUR 1,700.55m of GGR would be worth at most about EUR 340m before regional uplifts, before the reduced rate, and before the non-subjection of lotteries (16Best analysis; treat this as a ceiling on the online component of the tax, not as collections). The Spanish tax authority has issued binding rulings on what “really established” requires, because the incentive to claim it is exactly that large.

What protections apply to a player in Spain?

You must be 18 and identity-verified, you can bar yourself nationally through the RGIAJ, and since September 2023 the operator has to watch how you play and intervene. Article 6.2(a) of Ley 13/2011 sets the age limit; article 6.3 created the Registro General de Interdicciones de Acceso al Juego, a single national self-exclusion register that blocks a registered person from every licensed operator at once and can be joined electronically, including through the DGOJ’s Stop Juego application.

The register sits across the federal fault line, and that took a decade to patch. The RGIAJ covers state-licensed online gambling; the autonomous communities run their own registers for the venues they license. A Council of Gaming Policies agreement announced on 15 July 2021 — when the RGIAJ held about 60,000 registrations — allowed each region either to merge its database into the national register or to interconnect on mutual recognition, so that one exclusion reaches both channels. Ley 23/2022 added a statutory duty to automate that interconnection.

The operational protections now live in Royal Decree 176/2023, in force from 15 September 2023, with a second tranche of articles from 15 March 2024. Its core mechanics: players set a session duration and a loss ceiling before playing, with automatic disconnection when either is reached; operators must run detection protocols that flag an intensive player — net losses of EUR 600 or more a week for three consecutive weeks — and separately an at-risk player, then send mandatory protective messaging and monitor behaviour; at-risk players may not be sent promotional activity at all; and credit-card deposits are prohibited for intensive and at-risk players, with at-risk players restricted to personal payment instruments.

The next change closes the loophole that the federal structure of the licensing regime created inside a single player’s wallet. Deposit limits have until now been defaults applied by each operator separately — EUR 600 a day, EUR 1,500 a week and EUR 3,000 a month — so a player holding accounts with five operators had five times the headroom the rule was written to impose. Real Decreto 520/2026, de 24 de junio, approved by the Council of Ministers on 23 June 2026 and published in the BOE on 25 June 2026, replaces that with a single set of caps managed by the regulator and applied to the sum of a player’s deposits across every licensed operator: EUR 700 a day, EUR 1,750 a week and EUR 3,300 over any four continuous weeks. Players may set lower limits themselves, and may ask for an increase after three months, which takes effect three working days later. It amends both RD 1614/2011 and article 9.2 of RD 176/2023, and the joint-limit system does not apply until 25 March 2027, nine months after publication — with the amended guarantee amounts from 1 January 2027 and two technical amending provisions, articles 1.1 and 1.3, in force from 26 June 2026. The regulation itself gives the reason for the change: roughly a third of Spanish online players hold accounts with more than one operator.

Look at the headline numbers rather than the headline. The individual per-operator caps went up — EUR 600 to EUR 700 a day — while the effective ceiling for a multi-account player went sharply down, because one limit now covers every account at once. That is a tightening dressed as a loosening, and it is the clearest illustration on this page of why the instrument and the scope of a rule matter more than its number.

Note the sequence, because it is the counter-example to this page’s own thesis and we would rather state it than have it pointed out. RD 176/2023 is also a royal decree — secondary legislation, same form as RD 958/2020 — and it has not been annulled. Form is not the problem. The problem is whether the enabling statute authorised the specific restriction, and article 8 of Ley 13/2011, on consumer protection and responsible gambling policies, gave the safer-gambling decree a far firmer footing than article 7.2 gave the advertising one.

How does Spain compare with the markets we have mapped?

Spain is the only one of these markets where the advertising regime was cut down by a court, and the reason is visible in the column that nobody prints: the rank of the instrument.

Scope note: these charges sit on different bases and this is not a rate ranking. Spain’s, Italy’s, Sweden’s and Brazil’s figures are gross-gaming-revenue based; Germany’s 5.3% is levied on turnover, so its GGR equivalent depends on the game’s return to player.

The Dutch row is the one that keeps the thesis honest. The Netherlands restricted advertising by decree too, phased sponsorship out over two years, and has not had its rules annulled — because the parent statute contemplated exactly that. So the rule is not “decrees are fragile”. It is that a restriction survives to the extent the legislature authorised it, and Spain’s legislature authorised sponsorship rules and nothing else on the list. Set that against our sports betting laws by country hub, which ranks markets by channelisation rather than by how strict they read on paper: the strictness of a marketing regime tells you very little until you know whether it will still exist in four years.

Why do Spanish gambling figures and legal summaries disagree?

Because five separate things get conflated, and two of them change the answer by a factor of four or more. Every conflict we hit building this page falls into one of the following.

• “The Spanish gambling market” usually means one fifth of it. DGOJ’s widely quoted GGR — EUR 1,700.55m in 2025 — is state-licensed online only. The ministry’s own annual gambling activity report put total Spanish operator GGR at EUR 8.108bn for 2024, against DGOJ online GGR of EUR 1,454.59m: online was about 18% of the regulated Spanish market that year (16Best analysis of the two published figures). Any sentence comparing Spain’s EUR 1.7bn to another country’s whole-market number is out by roughly five times.
• GGR, turnover and deposits are three different quantities. DGOJ’s margen de juego is stakes less prizes. Deposits in 2025 were EUR 4,322.46m and withdrawals EUR 3,013.63m — neither is revenue, and amounts wagered are larger again because money recycles. In article 48 the distinction is legislated: most online products are taxed on net income, but the state football pools are taxed at 22% of gross income, which is not a higher rate than 20% of net — it is a different tax.
• “The April 2024 ruling” describes one of three. The Third Chamber decided three challenges to RD 958/2020 within seventeen days — 2 April (recurso 1/3/2021, Jdigital), 4 April (1/2/2021, Jdigital) and 19 April 2024 (1/1/2021, Liga Nacional de Fútbol Profesional) — and articles 13.1, 13.3 and 23.1 were annulled twice over. There are therefore five plausible dates in circulation for one legal event: three judgment dates, the CGPJ press note of 10 April 2024, and three separate BOE publication dates of 25 May, 31 May and 8 June 2024. Cite a judgment date with its recurso number or cite nothing.
• “Spain’s advertising ban was overturned” is wrong in both directions. The Supreme Court annulled parts of five articles of RD 958/2020. It did not repeal the decree, and the sponsorship prohibition in article 12 and the 01:00–05:00 broadcast window have applied continuously since 2020–21. Separately, Title II of the same decree was repealed by RD 176/2023 in 2023 — a repeal by a later decree, not a court ruling. Summaries that describe the market as “deregulated” have merged two unrelated events.
• Passed, in force, proposed, lapsed and annulled are five states. Ley 13/2011, RD 958/2020 as amended, RD 176/2023 and article 7 bis are in force. Amendment 176 lapsed — Ley 10/2025 contains no gambling provision. The 2026 reform is a prior public consultation, not a bill. The warning-message resolution is in procedure. Sources written mid-passage print the wrong status, and several English-language trackers still describe the 2026 consultation as a law.
• Marketing definitions and restatements. DGOJ’s marketing spend covers four lines — advertising, promotions, sponsorship and affiliation — for state-licensed online operators only. It excludes everything the autonomous communities regulate. It also restates, and the drift is systematic rather than random. DGOJ reports 2022 as −19.26% on 2021, which implies a 2021 total of EUR 460.79m against the EUR 460.04m published a year earlier; and 2023 as +7.55% on 2022, implying EUR 374.50m for 2022 against a published EUR 372.04m. Work it line by line and almost all of the first gap sits in one place: the 2022 report’s −85.67% for sponsorship implies 2021 sponsorship of about EUR 20.31m, not the EUR 18.96m published in the 2021 report — a EUR 1.35m restatement, the largest in the series, landing on the single line this page’s argument leans on. We flag it rather than bury it: our “sponsorship is 31% below 2021” becomes 36% below on the restated vintage. The direction is unchanged either way, and against 2019 — a level nobody has restated — it is 37% below. The same drift shows at the top of the series — divide the published 2025 marketing total by the published 2024 one and you get +26.2% against DGOJ’s printed +25.84%, and 2025 GGR computes to +16.91% against a printed +16.99%, while 2024 GGR reconciles exactly at +17.61%. The differences are a few tenths of a point and consistent with each annual report restating its predecessor. Compute from the absolutes, say that you did, and never put a computed change and a printed one in the same sentence (16Best analysis of the DGOJ published levels against DGOJ published percentages). And “promotions” are bonuses granted, which is a cost line, not an advertising buy: reading the 2025 jump as a surge in television spending would be wrong.
• The same enforcement action is reported two ways. The ministry’s 25 November 2025 release headlines 26 operators and more than EUR 3m; press coverage headlines 32 operators and more than EUR 33m. Both are right — the second includes six unlicensed operators fined EUR 5m each and blocked. Add them and you get one action, not two.
• Player counts differ by a rounding of definition. The ministry’s August 2025 release gives 1,991,550 active online players for 2024; DGOJ’s own annual report gives 1,992,889. The gap is trivial, the lesson is not: never mix an active-player count with an account count. One person can hold accounts with several operators, so per-player spending computed from account totals overstates the number of people and understates the spend of each.

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

Three ecosystems supply almost everything published about Spanish gambling, and each has a direction of travel.

• The DGOJ and its ministry. Primary, unusually granular — very few regulators publish operator marketing spend at all, let alone split four ways — and also a political actor with a stated position. The department that publishes the marketing data is the department that tabled the amendment to ban welcome bonuses, and its August 2025 press release pairs a 21.63% rise in players with the return of bonuses in the same breath. The data are the best available. The framing is an argument.
• Industry bodies and trade press. Jdigital — the association that brought the appeal — AZARplus, Infoplay, SoloAzar and Sector del Juego are where DGOJ figures surface in usable detail, and are largely the reason a year-by-year marketing series is quotable at all. CEJUEGO’s annual Anuario del Juego en España, presented on 16 December 2025, is the fullest picture of the land-based sector nobody else counts. All of them are funded by the sector and lean toward regulatory relief.
• Academic and public-health research. The Harm Reduction Journal study is the only peer-reviewed measurement of the 2020–21 restrictions we found, and its framing is harm reduction. It is also the source of the single most useful number here, which is why we quote it and then triangulate it against DGOJ’s own monthly averages rather than repeating it alone.

Notice the gap. There is no well-resourced Spanish source whose interest lies in the advertising restrictions looking ineffective and none whose interest lies in them looking effective without also wanting them reinstated. That is why this page leans on the one series both camps have to accept — the regulator’s own marketing accounts, published annually, split by line, and legible against a court judgment that named the articles.

Key takeaways

• Gambling is legal in Spain for adults 18 and over. Online is licensed nationally by the DGOJ under Ley 13/2011 — a 10-year general licence plus one-to-five-year singular licences per game, served from a .es site. Land-based is licensed by the 17 autonomous communities and the two autonomous cities.
• The advertising crackdown was real and it was secondary legislation. RD 958/2020 restricted the broadcast window to 01:00–05:00, banned shirt and stadium sponsorship, banned welcome bonuses, banned celebrity endorsement and heavily restricted digital placements, phased in between November 2020 and August 2021.
• On 2 April 2024 the Supreme Court annulled parts of five articles, on delegation grounds, not on the merits. Judgment 527/2024 struck arts. 13(1), 13(3), 15, 23(1), 25(3) and 26(2)–(3) for want of legal cover. It is final. It did not repeal the decree and it did not touch sponsorship or the broadcast window. And it was one of three judgments in seventeen days: recurso 1/2/2021 on 4 April annulled art. 23(1) a second time, and recurso 1/1/2021, brought by the professional football league, on 19 April annulled arts. 13(1) and 13(3) a second time, on the same reasoning.
• The survivor tells you the rule. Article 7.2 of Ley 13/2011 expressly delegated sponsorship of sporting events subject to betting — and the sponsorship article survived. It said nothing about bonuses, celebrities, search or social — and those provisions fell. Durability tracks what parliament wrote, not how strict the rule was.
• The annulment is visible line by line in the regulator’s marketing accounts. Against 2021, 2025 promotions are up 78% and advertising up 19%, while sponsorship — the upheld restriction — is down 31%. Against 2019, the last pre-decree year, promotions are up 169% and advertising up 33%, and sponsorship at −37% is the only line still below where it started — 51% below its 2020 peak once that year is reconstructed. Read it in levels, not growth rates: sponsorship was actually the fastest-growing line of 2025 at +140%, because EUR 5.45m is a small base. Total marketing spend is at a record EUR 664.40m, though marketing as a share of GGR, 39%, remains well below the 56% of 2021.
• The decree changed the shape of the budget, not its size. Operators spent EUR 372.01m on marketing in 2019 and EUR 372.04m in 2022 — a difference of about EUR 30,000 — while the ratio of advertising to promotions flipped from 1.42:1 to 0.69:1 and has stayed there. Spend compounded at 0.0% a year over 2019–2022 and at 21.3% a year over 2022–2025.
• The restrictions did move the player-acquisition number, and the annulment moved it back — partly. New accounts: 3.01 million in 2020, 1.35 million in 2023, about 2.04 million in 2025 on our annualisation of DGOJ monthly averages. Roughly a third below the pre-decree level, two years after the court ruled.
• Market size is the wrong evidence and we will not pretend otherwise. Online GGR compounded at about 23.2% a year in 2021–23 under the strictest regime and about 17.3% a year in 2023–25 after it was cut back. Covid, the casino mix shift and a growing licensee count all sit between the rules and that curve.
• Two years on, Spain has replaced nothing. The December 2025 attempt to legislate the restrictions failed — Ley 10/2025 carries no gambling provision. The 2026 initiative is a prior public consultation that closed on 22 June 2026. The only measure the government has actually advanced is a warning-message resolution built on articles of RD 958/2020 the court left standing.
• What has moved is player-side, not seller-side. RD 176/2023 has been in force since September 2023, and Real Decreto 520/2026 of 24 June 2026 will give each player one deposit limit across every operator — EUR 700 daily, EUR 1,750 weekly, EUR 3,300 per four continuous weeks — from 25 March 2027. Spain has spent two years unable to legislate on how gambling is sold and perfectly able to legislate on how much a player may deposit.
• Enforcement, by contrast, is working — because it runs on the statute. The 25 November 2025 action fined six unlicensed operators EUR 5m each and blocked their sites under article 39(a), and reached 26 licensed operators for serious infringements. Statutory powers do not get annulled for want of statutory cover.
• The lesson generalises, and it is not an argument for advertising gambling. If a government wants a marketing restriction to last, it has to persuade a legislature, not merely a cabinet. Italy did and its ban is eight years old. Spain did not and lost half of its regime in under four. That is a drafting story with a policy consequence, and it is the one thing about Spain that other jurisdictions can actually copy.

Frequently asked questions

Is online gambling legal in Spain in 2026?

Yes. Online sports betting, casino games, slots, poker, bingo and contests are legal in Spain for adults aged 18 and over, provided the operator holds a licence from the Direccion General de Ordenacion del Juego under Ley 13/2011, de 27 de mayo, de regulacion del juego. Operators need a general licence for each family of games, valid for ten years and renewable, plus a singular licence for each individual game type, valid for between one and five years, and they must serve Spanish customers from a website under the .es domain. Land-based gambling is a separate matter: casinos, bingo halls, arcades, betting shops and machines in bars are licensed by each of the 17 autonomous communities and the cities of Ceuta and Melilla, not by the national regulator, so the rules on venues, distances and opening hours differ from region to region.

Did Spain overturn its gambling advertising ban?

Not as a whole. On 2 April 2024, in judgment 527/2024, the Third Chamber of the Spanish Supreme Court partly upheld an appeal by the operators association Jdigital and annulled parts of five articles of Royal Decree 958/2020: article 13, paragraphs 1 and 3, on promotions aimed at acquiring new customers, which is what ended the prohibition on welcome bonuses; article 15, on the appearance of people or characters of public relevance in gambling advertising; article 23, paragraph 1, a general prohibition on commercial communications through information society services; article 25, paragraph 3, on video sharing platforms; and article 26, paragraphs 2 and 3, on social media. The rest of the decree stands. In particular the sponsorship prohibition in article 12, which covers shirts, kit, stadium naming and team naming, and the rule confining gambling advertising in audiovisual media to the hours between 01:00 and 05:00, were not annulled and remain in force. The judgment is final and cannot be appealed. It was also not the only one: the same chamber decided two further challenges to the same decree within seventeen days, annulling article 23, paragraph 1 again on 4 April 2024 in recurso 1/2/2021, also brought by Jdigital, and article 13, paragraphs 1 and 3 again on 19 April 2024 in recurso 1/1/2021, brought by the Liga Nacional de Futbol Profesional. The three operative parts were published in the Boletin Oficial del Estado on 25 May, 31 May and 8 June 2024.

Why did the Spanish Supreme Court annul those advertising rules?

Because they lacked sufficient legal cover, not because the court disagreed with the policy. Advertising is an exercise of commercial freedom, and under Spanish constitutional principles restrictions on it must be grounded in a norm of legal rank. A regulation may develop restrictions the legislature has decided upon, but it may not create new ones on its own authority. The court found that the annulled provisions imposed general prohibitions that went beyond anything in Ley 13/2011. Article 7.2 of that law delegates the setting of advertising conditions and expressly names sponsorship of sporting events that are the subject of betting, unsolicited electronic marketing and the placement of advertisements in media, but says nothing about welcome bonuses, celebrity endorsement, search engines or social networks. Article 7 bis, added by Ley 23/2022 with effect from 4 November 2022, sets principles about the content and tone of gambling advertising rather than about who may appear in it, what offers it may carry or where it may be placed.

Are welcome bonuses and celebrity gambling ads legal in Spain now?

Yes, as at 29 July 2026, because the provisions that prohibited them were annulled in April 2024 and have not been replaced. Welcome bonuses and promotions aimed at new customers became lawful again, and the Directorate General for the Regulation of Gambling reported a rise in player numbers alongside their return. The general obligations still apply: commercial communications must respect the social responsibility principles in article 7 bis of Ley 13/2011, operators must hold a licence authorising advertising, media and advertising networks must verify that licence before carrying the advertisement, and Royal Decree 176/2023 prohibits sending promotional activity to players the operator has flagged as at risk. The government has twice sought to reimpose the annulled restrictions at statutory rank. An amendment to the customer services bill did not survive: Ley 10/2025 of 26 December 2025 was published with no gambling advertising provision. A prior public consultation on amending Ley 13/2011 ran from 18 May to 22 June 2026, which is a consultation and not a bill.

How much tax do online gambling operators pay in Spain?

Twenty per cent of net gaming revenue for most online products. Under article 48 of Ley 13/2011, mutual, fixed odds and exchange betting on sport and horse racing, other betting, contests and other games including casino, slots, poker and bingo are taxed at 20 per cent of the amounts staked less the prizes paid. Operators with tax residence in and genuine establishment in the autonomous cities of Ceuta or Melilla pay 10 per cent on the same base, and the Spanish tax authority has issued binding rulings on what genuine establishment requires. Promotional prize draws are taxed at 10 per cent of the market value of the prizes, or 5 per cent in Ceuta and Melilla. State football pools are taxed at 22 per cent of gross income, meaning amounts staked rather than net revenue, which is a different and much heavier basis and should never be compared directly with the 20 per cent rate. State scope lotteries are not subject to this tax at all. Autonomous communities may raise the article 48 rates by up to a fifth in respect of their own fiscal residents.

How do I self-exclude from gambling in Spain?

Through the Registro General de Interdicciones de Acceso al Juego, the RGIAJ, a single national register created by article 6.3 of Ley 13/2011 and held by the Directorate General for the Regulation of Gambling. Registration is free and can be completed electronically, including through the regulator's Stop Juego application, and once recorded it blocks the person from every operator licensed at national level without the need to contact each one. Because land based gambling is regulated regionally, the autonomous communities maintain their own registers; an agreement in the Council of Gaming Policies announced on 15 July 2021 allows each region either to merge its database into the national register or to interconnect on the basis of mutual recognition, so that one exclusion can cover both online and physical venues, and Ley 23/2022 added a duty to automate that interconnection. Separately, Royal Decree 176/2023 requires operators to let players set session duration and loss limits before playing, to detect intensive players, defined as those with net losses of 600 euros or more per week for three consecutive weeks, and at risk players, to send them protective messages, to withhold promotions from at risk players and to block credit card deposits for both groups. Deposit limits are changing too. The defaults have been 600 euros a day, 1,500 euros a week and 3,000 euros a month applied separately by each operator; Real Decreto 520/2026 of 24 June 2026, published on 25 June 2026, replaces them with a single set applied to the total of a player's deposits across all operators, at 700 euros a day, 1,750 euros a week and 3,300 euros over any four continuous weeks, and that system takes effect on 25 March 2027.

What happens if an operator advertises gambling in Spain without a licence?

It is an administrative infringement under Ley 13/2011, and the liability does not stop at the operator. Article 7.3 requires any advertising network, agency, broadcaster, media outlet or information society service that carries gambling advertising to verify that the advertiser holds a licence authorising it, and to refuse the placement otherwise. Article 40(d) makes carrying out promotion, sponsorship or advertising of gambling without the relevant licence, or in breach of its conditions, a serious infringement, whatever medium is used. Organising or operating gambling without a licence at all is a very serious infringement under article 39(a), and article 42 sets fines of up to 100,000 euros for minor infringements, 100,000 to 1 million euros for serious ones and 1 million to 50 million euros for very serious ones, with the possible loss of the licence, disqualification for up to four years and closure of the services supporting the activity. On 25 November 2025 the consumer affairs ministry fined six unlicensed foreign operators 5 million euros each and blocked their sites, alongside sanctions of more than 3 million euros against 26 licensed operators for serious infringements, and in April 2026 it fined the production company behind a streaming show about 10,000 euros for promoting an unlicensed operator.

Sources

• Boletín Oficial del Estado — Ley 13/2011, de 27 de mayo, de regulación del juego, consolidated text (article 6.2(a) and 6.3 — the 18+ prohibition and the RGIAJ; article 7 — the advertising licence requirement and the article 7.2 delegation naming sponsorship of sporting events subject to betting; article 7 bis — the statutory content principles; article 10.6 — 10-year general licences; article 11.5 — singular licences of one to five years; article 39(a) and (i), article 40(d) and article 42 — infringements and the fine scales; article 48 — the gaming activities tax, the 20% and 10% rates, the 22% gross-income rate on state pools, the non-subjection of state lotteries and the regional uplift of up to 20%). Tier: primary consolidated legislation.
• Boletín Oficial del Estado — Real Decreto 958/2020, de 3 de noviembre, de comunicaciones comerciales de las actividades de juego (entry into force 5 November 2020; article 10 safe-gambling principle; article 11 protection of minors; article 12 sponsorship; article 13 promotional activities; article 15 persons of public relevance; articles 23, 25 and 26 on information-society services, video-sharing platforms and social media; the transitional provisions running sports sponsorship contracts to 30 August 2021 and public-figure contracts to 1 April 2021). Tier: primary legislation.
• Consejo General del Poder Judicial — El Tribunal Supremo anula varios artículos del Real Decreto 958/2020, 10 April 2024 (Sala Tercera; appeal by the Asociación Española de Juego Digital; annulment of arts. 13.1, 13.3, 15, 23.1, 25.3 and 26.2–3 for lack of sufficient legal cover; other challenged provisions upheld as having sufficient cover and proportionate limits). Tier: primary judicial communication.
• Boletín Oficial del Estado — Sentencia de 2 de abril de 2024, de la Sala Tercera del Tribunal Supremo, BOE-A-2024-10500, published 25 May 2024 (Sección Tercera; recurso 3/2021; operative part declaring null arts. 13.1, 13.3, 15, 23.1, 25.3 and 26.2–3, dismissing the remainder, no costs).
• Boletín Oficial del Estado — Sentencia de 4 de abril de 2024, de la Sala Tercera del Tribunal Supremo, BOE núm. 132, published 31 May 2024 (recurso 1/2/2021, Asociación Española de Juego Digital; article 23.1 of RD 958/2020 declared null, all other claims dismissed, no costs) and Sentencia de 19 de abril de 2024, BOE núm. 139, published 8 June 2024 (recurso 1/1/2021, Liga Nacional de Fútbol Profesional; article 13, paragraphs 1 and 3, declared null). These two judgments are the basis for our statement that the annulment came in three decisions rather than one, and that three provisions fell twice. Tier: primary judgments as published in the official gazette.
• Boletín Oficial del Estado — Real Decreto 520/2026, de 24 de junio, por el que se modifican el Real Decreto 1614/2011 y el Real Decreto 176/2023, para la introducción de un sistema de límites de depósito conjuntos por jugador, BOE núm. 154 of 25 June 2026 (joint per-player deposit limits of EUR 700 daily, EUR 1,750 weekly and EUR 3,300 over four continuous weeks, applied across all operators and managed by the regulator; the ability to set lower limits and to request an increase after three months effective three working days later; amendments to arts. 13, 36 and 43 and annexes I and III of RD 1614/2011 and to art. 9.2 of RD 176/2023; entry into force 25 March 2027, with the guarantee amounts from 1 January 2027). Tier: primary legislation. Approved by the Council of Ministers on 23 June 2026.
• Dirección General de Ordenación del Juego, 2019 annual online gambling market report, as tabulated by the Spanish sector press (2019 GGR EUR 748.24m; 2019 marketing spend of EUR 372m, split publicidad EUR 182.98m, promociones and bonuses released EUR 128.98m, patrocinio EUR 20.69m and afiliación EUR 39.36m, with year-on-year rises of 7.43%, 10.88%, 43.87% and 23.4% respectively, and a total up 11.74% on 2018). This is the pre-decree baseline behind our 2019-indexed figures, our EUR 372.01m against EUR 372.04m comparison and the 2019–2022 compound rate, so we state its provenance weakness plainly: unlike every other year in our series, we could not open a live DGOJ page carrying the 2019 components, only the regulator’s figures as tabulated by the sector press. We therefore tested them arithmetically — the four components sum to the published EUR 372.01m, and deflating each by its published year-on-year rate rebuilds a 2018 total of EUR 332.9m, which reproduces the +11.74% total change DGOJ printed for 2019 to two decimal places. That is five figures agreeing that would not agree if one component were wrong. Tier: regulator data reaching us through trade press.
• Ministerio de Derechos Sociales, Consumo y Agenda 2030 — Consumo impuso más de 140 millones de euros en sanciones a operadores del juego durante 2024 (EUR 142.721m of gambling sanctions across 2024, EUR 65.325m in the first half and EUR 77.396m in the second; fourteen very serious infringement fines against unlicensed foreign operators totalling EUR 75m, thirteen at EUR 5m and one at EUR 10m for reoffending). Tier: primary ministry statement. Sanctions imposed, not collected.
• Sector del Juego — El juego online en España creció un 14% en el primer trimestre, 17 June 2026 (Q1 2026 GGR of EUR 454.2m, up 14% year on year; online casino at a quarterly record EUR 247.8m, up 22%, with slots EUR 170.6m and live roulette EUR 66.4m; sports betting EUR 174.5m, up 5%; Q1 2026 marketing spend of EUR 184.7m, up 12%, comprising EUR 91.1m of promotions, EUR 73.6m of advertising and EUR 17.4m of affiliation, the last up 30%). Tier: sector press reporting the DGOJ quarterly report. A quarter is not a year: we use it as a freshness check on direction, not as a trend.
• Osborne Clarke — What is the current framework on the advertising of gambling activities in Spain after the Supreme Court’s partial annulment? (which restrictions survive: time and content limits in audiovisual media, reinforced protection slots, the requirement that the operator hold a licence authorising advertising, and intermediary verification duties). Tier: law-firm analysis of a primary judgment.
• Cuatrecasas — El TS anula varios artículos del RD de comunicaciones comerciales (the hierarchy-of-norms reasoning: restrictions on advertising as an exercise of commercial freedom require a norm of legal rank; a regulation may develop but not extend legislative restrictions).
• Boletín Oficial del Estado — Ley 23/2022, de 2 de noviembre, por la que se modifica la Ley 13/2011, BOE 3 November 2022, in force 4 November 2022 (insertion of article 7 bis; the duty to interconnect the state and regional self-exclusion registers).
• Boletín Oficial del Estado — Real Decreto 176/2023, de 14 de marzo, por el que se desarrollan entornos más seguros de juego, BOE 15 March 2023 (in force 15 September 2023, with articles 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, 23 and 30 from 15 March 2024; session duration and loss limits; the intensive-player threshold of EUR 600 of net weekly losses over three consecutive weeks; at-risk player detection; the ban on promotions to at-risk players; credit-card and payment-method restrictions; repeal of Title II of RD 958/2020).
• Boletín Oficial del Estado — Ley 10/2025, de 26 de diciembre, por la que se regulan los servicios de atención a la clientela, BOE 27 December 2025 (we checked the final provisions: they amend Ley 3/1991, Real Decreto Legislativo 1/2007, Ley 44/2002 and Ley 11/2022. There is no provision amending Ley 13/2011 and no gambling advertising provision — the basis for our statement that the December 2025 attempt failed).
• AZARplus — Así es la enmienda de PSOE y SUMAR sobre el juego en el proyecto de ley de servicios de atención a la clientela, May 2025 (amendment 176: prohibition of persons of public relevance in gambling advertising, promotions limited to customers with accounts at least 30 days old, and a ban on sponsored results in search engines). Tier: industry trade press reporting a parliamentary document.
• Dirección General de Ordenación del Juego — La DGOJ abre a consulta pública la modificación de la Ley de Regulación del Juego (prior public consultation open 18 May to 22 June 2026, covering celebrities and influencers, customer-acquisition promotions and search-engine visibility). Tier: primary regulator announcement. Note the stage: a prior consultation precedes the preliminary draft, which precedes a second hearing and then parliament.
• Ministerio de Derechos Sociales, Consumo y Agenda 2030 — Consumo obligará a los portales de apuestas online a mostrar un cartel advirtiendo sobre los riesgos del juego, 1 October 2025, and Dirección General de Ordenación del Juego — Información pública sobre el proyecto de resolución por la que se aprueban las especificaciones técnicas del mensaje relativo a los efectos dañinos derivados de la ludopatía (the three warning messages, including the 75% probability of losing money and losses exceeding winnings fourfold; adopted under articles 10 and 11 of RD 958/2020; procedure opened 2 October 2025 with a 30-day consultation and a three-month adaptation period). Status at 29 July 2026: in procedure; we could not confirm final publication.
• Ministerio de Derechos Sociales, Consumo y Agenda 2030 — Consumo alerta de que el número de jugadores ha aumentado más de un 20% con los bonos de bienvenida, 4 August 2025 (players up 21.63% in 2024; 1,991,550 active online players; 459,266 new players; total operator GGR of EUR 8.108bn for 2024; online GGR EUR 1.454bn, up 17.6%; the Supreme Court annulment as the reason bonuses returned; the amendment to the customer-services bill). Tier: ministry press release — primary data with an explicit policy position.
• Ministerio de Derechos Sociales, Consumo y Agenda 2030 / DGOJ — Consumo sanciona a 26 operadores de juego con más de 3 millones de euros por infracciones graves, 25 November 2025, with reporting by elDiario.es (26 licensed operators including Betfair, 888 and Codere sanctioned for serious infringements; six unlicensed operators fined EUR 5m each with their sites blocked; press totals of more than EUR 33m across 32 operators describe the same action).
• Ministerio de Derechos Sociales, Consumo y Agenda 2030 — Consumo sanciona a la productora de ‘Zona Gemelos’ por publicitar un operador de juego ilegal, April 2026 (a media producer sanctioned for promoting an unlicensed operator; reported at about EUR 10,000 by Yogonet).
• Dirección General de Ordenación del Juego, annual online gambling market reports, as tabulated by Infoplay (2025 report, published 13 March 2026), Infoplay (2024), Sector del Juego (2023), AZARplus (2022) and AZARplus (2021) (GGR: EUR 748.24m in 2019, EUR 815.30m in 2021 at −4.17% on 2020, EUR 962.96m in 2022, EUR 1,236.75m in 2023, EUR 1,454.59m in 2024 and EUR 1,700.55m in 2025; marketing spend: EUR 460.04m in 2021 with publicidad EUR 204.99m, promociones EUR 194.95m, afiliación EUR 41.14m and patrocinio EUR 18.96m; EUR 372.04m in 2022 with EUR 134.05m, EUR 194.13m, EUR 40.95m and EUR 2.91m; EUR 402.78m in 2023 with EUR 147.95m, EUR 199.89m, EUR 50.63m and EUR 4.31m; EUR 526.30m in 2024 with EUR 203.00m, EUR 261.53m, EUR 56.32m and EUR 5.45m; EUR 664.40m in 2025 with EUR 244.17m, EUR 347.20m, EUR 59.95m and EUR 13.08m; 2,157,514 active players and a monthly average of 169,858 new accounts in 2025, against 151,898 in 2024 at +34.73% and 112,743 in 2023; deposits EUR 4,322.46m and withdrawals EUR 3,013.63m; casino 52.51% of 2025 GGR at EUR 893.00m, up 22.15%, and betting EUR 698.13m, up 14.92%). Also the source of the year-on-year percentages DGOJ printed for each marketing line, which we use to derive the 2020 components and to document the restatements: 2021 advertising +1.61%, promotions −1.14%, affiliation +6.69%, sponsorship −29.31%, total −0.92%; 2022 −34.49%, −0.42%, +0.09%, −85.67%, total −19.26%; 2023 +9.24%, +2.84%, +21.70%, +38.43%, total +7.55%; 2024 total +30.36%; 2025 +19.43%, +32.70%, +6.27%, +140.15%, total +25.84%. Tier: primary regulator data reaching us through industry trade press.
• Aonso-Diego G, García-Pérez Á, Krotter A — Impact of Spanish gambling regulations on online gambling behavior and marketing strategies, Harm Reduction Journal, 13 June 2025 (new online gambling accounts of 3.01 million in 2020 against 1.35 million in 2023, a fall of 55%, from DGOJ-aggregated operator data). Tier: peer-reviewed study.
• PwC España, Periscopio Fiscal y Legal — Juego online y publicidad: la nulidad de las sanciones derivadas del Real Decreto 958/2020 anteriores a noviembre de 2022 (the argument that article 7.2 of Ley 13/2011 was a generic delegation without essential criteria until Ley 23/2022 introduced article 7 bis on 2 November 2022, and the consequences for earlier sanctions; Constitutional Court judgment 169/2023 of 22 November 2023). Tier: law-firm legal opinion, not a court holding.
• Jocprivat — Derogado al completo el Título II del Real Decreto 958/2020 (the repeal of Title II, on active information and user-protection policies including the safe-gambling officer in article 29, on the entry into force of RD 176/2023 — a repeal by a later decree, distinct from the 2024 annulment).
• Ministerio de Derechos Sociales, Consumo y Agenda 2030 — Consumo y comunidades autónomas alcanzan un acuerdo para coordinar los registros de autoprohibidos, 15 July 2021 (Council of Gaming Policies agreement allowing regions to merge with or interconnect to the RGIAJ; about 60,000 registrations at that date), with the DGOJ’s RGIAJ page and the Stop Juego application.
• Wetten.overheid.nl — Besluit ongerichte reclame kansspelen op afstand, Staatsblad 2023, 120, in force 1 July 2023, with the Netherlands Gambling Authority’s notice (untargeted advertising banned from 1 July 2023; programme and event sponsorship from 1 July 2024; sports sponsorship from 1 July 2025 — the comparison row in our table).
• CEJUEGO — Anuario del Juego en España 2025, presented 16 December 2025 (2024 data: juego real of EUR 11,888m, about 0.78% of GDP; 31 million residents gambled with money; 5.8% of 18–75 year-olds played online). Tier: industry-association yearbook — the fullest count of the regionally regulated land-based sector, produced by the sector.
• LOYRA Abogados — Gambling online tax incentive: Spanish Tax Authority clarifies requisites to apply for Ceuta and Melilla (binding rulings on what tax residence and genuine establishment in Ceuta or Melilla require for the reduced rate).