A debt crisis among young people in Enschede has reopened a Dutch debate that won't go away. With one in five local youngsters in debt, a councillor is pushing for the legal online gambling age to climb to 24, a level that would be unprecedented in Europe.
A councillor in Enschede has reopened one of the more politically charged debates in Dutch gambling regulation, calling for the national legal age for online gambling to be raised from the current 18 to 24. Meryam Sümer of the Christian Democratic Party has framed the proposal as a response to a specific and worsening debt problem among young people in her municipality, but the implications of any such change would extend far beyond the local context that prompted her intervention.
The data Sümer has cited from her own city makes the underlying social concern difficult to dismiss. One in five young people in Enschede is currently in debt. The municipality recorded 12,145 reports of problematic debt during 2025, and 960 of those cases involved individuals at risk of eviction or having essential utilities disconnected. The municipality engaged with approximately 4,000 residents facing financial difficulties, representing around one-third of cases, considerably above the Dutch national average engagement rate of approximately 20%.
Sümer has identified the combination of easy credit, particularly buy-now-pay-later products, and widespread access to online gambling as central drivers of these financial pressures. Her broader argument is that young people frequently lack the financial sophistication to manage the combination of subscriptions, instalment purchases and gambling offers that increasingly target them through social media and mobile games. The intervention she has proposed addresses gambling specifically, but the wider concern about how multiple consumer financial products are converging on young consumers reflects a debate that is becoming more prominent across European policy discussions.
The advertising dimension of the issue is particularly significant in the Netherlands. The country has maintained strict gambling advertising controls since 2013 through the Decree on Gambling Recruitment, Advertising and Addiction Prevention, with the regulations strengthened in 2022 to ban gambling advertisements in public places. Crucially, the existing rules already prohibit advertising aimed at individuals under 24. Despite that prohibition, a recent study found 31 of 277 Meta platform adverts, or 11.2% of those examined, targeted age groups that included people aged 18 to 23. That implementation gap between the rule and its enforcement on social media platforms is itself an argument that something more fundamental than incremental advertising restrictions may be required to protect young people from gambling marketing.
Sümer has acknowledged that an outright ban on gambling for young people would be preferable in principle but is unlikely to be politically feasible in the near term. The focus on age increase rather than prohibition reflects a pragmatic recognition of what kind of policy change might actually move through the Dutch legislative process. The aim, as she has described it, is to reduce the temptations young people face during a period of life when their financial decision-making is still developing.
This is not the first time the Dutch government has considered raising the gambling age. In February 2025, former state secretary for legal protection Teun Struycken proposed increasing the age limit for online slots to 21, alongside age-based deposit limit restrictions. That proposal generated significant pushback from the KSA, with the regulator's chairman warning publicly that raising the age limit could simply drive young players toward the unlicensed black market where no safeguards apply. The KSA's position has been that minors and young adults already face active recruitment by unlicensed operators that would only intensify if the legal market became less accessible to them.
That concern about black market migration is particularly acute in the current Dutch context. The country's regulated online market shrank by 18.5% in 2025, with the KSA's own estimates placing the illegal online market at €617 million in the first half of the year compared to €600 million for the legal sector. Adding further restrictions to who can legally gamble in the regulated market without simultaneously addressing the accessibility of unlicensed alternatives risks accelerating an already concerning channelisation problem.
The parliamentary debate that followed Struycken's proposal a month after its introduction produced alternative suggestions. Christian Union leader Bikker raised concerns about the practical enforceability of an age increase confined to one vertical such as slots, proposing instead a blanket age limit of 21 across all gambling forms. Struycken himself suggested a phased approach to any age change as a way of minimising the black market migration risk that the KSA had highlighted.
The proposal Sümer is now making would go further than any of the previous Dutch policy discussions. Raising the minimum age for online gambling to 24 would be unprecedented in Europe, where 18 has been the standard across virtually every jurisdiction. Whether the Dutch national government has the political appetite to pursue a policy that would put the country significantly out of step with its European neighbours, particularly given the existing channelisation challenges, is the central question Sümer's intervention has now placed back on the political agenda.
The data point that deserves the most attention in this story is not the proposal to raise the gambling age. It is the finding that 11.2% of Meta platform gambling adverts were targeting age groups that include people the existing rules already prohibit being targeted. The Netherlands has spent years building one of Europe's stricter gambling advertising frameworks, and the practical effect of that framework is being undermined by an implementation gap on social media platforms that the regulator has not yet successfully closed. Before raising the legal gambling age to 24, the policy question worth resolving is why advertising rules that already protect this age group are not being effectively enforced. If the existing under-24 advertising prohibition cannot be made to work in practice, raising the gambling age itself to 24 will produce similar enforcement difficulties at the participation level.
When the KSA chairman warned in February 2025 about the black market implications of restricting access to the licensed market for young adults, the channelisation picture in the Netherlands was already deteriorating but had not yet reached its current state. The most recent KSA data showing the legal market shrinking 18.5% while the illegal market grew to approximately equivalent size makes the chairman's earlier warning considerably more pressing rather than less. Any Dutch policy intervention that further restricts legal market accessibility without simultaneously delivering meaningful action against unlicensed operators is highly likely to compound a problem that has already become acute. The political pressure to address youth gambling harm is genuine and the underlying concerns are legitimate, but the policy response needs to be calibrated against the structural reality of where vulnerable players actually end up when the licensed market becomes less accessible to them.
Setting an online gambling age limit of 24 would put the Netherlands in a position of European policy leadership on this question, but it would also create cross-border challenges that the country's existing framework has not had to address at the same scale. Dutch citizens travel and engage with online services that operate from neighbouring jurisdictions. A 23-year-old in Belgium or Germany would be able to gamble legally with operators that a Dutch operator could not accept as customers. Whether that creates a meaningful migration of demand to non-Dutch licensed operators or to unlicensed alternatives accessible from the Netherlands is an empirical question that has not been fully tested at this kind of age threshold differential. The Netherlands' relative geographic and digital integration with the wider European market makes this consideration more significant than it would be for a more isolated jurisdiction, and any age increase proposal will need to engage seriously with the cross-border dynamics it would create.
