Romania is a large, fully licensed online market that has spent the last three years getting steadily more expensive. Government Emergency Ordinance No. 77/2009, administered by the National Gambling Office, licenses online casino, betting and poker through a ten-year Class 1 licence with an annual authorisation on top, and reserves online lottery to the Romanian National Lottery under a Class 3 licence. The economics changed sharply on 1 August 2025, when the authorisation tax for online gambling moved to 30 per cent of gross gaming revenue with a floor of EUR 480,000 a year, sitting alongside a flat EUR 300,000 annual licence fee, a EUR 500,000 responsible gambling contribution, a 2 per cent tax on player deposits and guarantee fund requirements of EUR 5 million for online casino. Operators must be Romanian companies or EU, EEA or Swiss entities with a Romanian permanent establishment. Enforcement is active: ICLG records 14,100 inspections in 2024 and a blacklist of 1,546 domains.
Government Emergency Ordinance No. 77/2009 on the organisation and operation of games of chance
Ordonanta de urgenta a Guvernului nr. 77/2009 privind organizarea si exploatarea jocurilor de noroc
Draft restrictions on gambling locations, local authority control and advertising
Class 1 licence (B2C operator)
Class 2 licence (B2B supplier)
Class 3 licence (state lottery monopoly)
The question for the next 12 months is what the 2025 cost base does to the size of the licensed field. A EUR 480,000 tax floor plus a EUR 500,000 responsible gambling contribution puts a hard revenue threshold under viability, which points towards consolidation among smaller licensees. The second thread is the stack of draft laws ICLG lists as pending: local council power to ban gambling outright, minimum distances from schools and a possible blanket ban on outdoor gambling advertising. Any of those would reshape land-based first and online marketing second.
Bucharest handed licensing power to local councils, and they have used it. An entire county has voted to phase out gaming halls, Timisoara has banned them outright, and one operator has said publicly that nobody loses their job.
Vlad-Cristian Soare was dismissed on Friday and Valentin-Ioan Tomescu appointed in his place, both in the same Official Gazette. Soare had been in post fifteen months, and arrived because his predecessor left over audit failures.
From blacklisting 300 illegal sites to launching the first state-funded problem gambling treatment programme, Romania's ONJN has used its opening mandate year to signal it means business. The hard work of sustaining that momentum now begins.
A €1.2 billion market growing at 15% year-on-year and still less than 60% online. Superbet has spotted the opportunity, and it is moving fast.
FDJ United has shifted its online betting and gaming strategy from acquisitions to technology transformation, with CEO Stéphane Pallez outlining accelerated internal platform migration, stack consolidation, and stricter focus on platform control as tax and regulatory pressure intensifies across Europe.
Casino games aggregator St8 has gone live with its first partner in the United Kingdom, following a successful integration with Annexio-owned lottery
Superbet Group has announced a significant management reshuffle that will see its founder, Sacha Dragic, take over as the sole CEO of the operator group,
London, UK - 26th September 2025 - The controversy surrounding Superbet's massive €30 million payout in Romania has deepened significantly, as the game's B2B
Romania’s government, under Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan, has enacted a sweeping fiscal package that includes a controversial increase in gambling taxes,
Oficiul National pentru Jocuri de Noroc
The ONJN website returned HTTP 503 on every retrieval attempt on the access date, so no claim in this record rests on it. The regulator identity, website address and legal basis are corroborated by ICLG 2026, Legal 500 and CMS, all Tier 3. Re-verify against the regulator directly at the next review.
ICLG (International Comparative Legal Guides)
The Legal 500
Legal 500 states the player winnings scale in Romanian lei (4 per cent up to RON 10,000, 20 per cent on the excess to RON 66,750, 40 per cent above) while ICLG states an equivalent scale in euro (4 per cent to about EUR 2,000, 40 per cent above about EUR 13,500). The lei figures are recorded as the primary statement because they are the statutory currency.