Austria to Open Online Gambling Market in 2027 — But Not to Everyone

Key Points

• Austria’s coalition government has passed a draft law that ends Win2Day’s longstanding online casino monopoly, with the market set to open to multiple licensed operators from October 2027.
• Operators that took bets from Austrian players without a local licence during the 18 months before market opening will face a temporary bar on applying; from 2030, that exclusion window stretches to 24 months.
• Online slot stakes will be capped at €5 per spin under a negotiated compromise, stepping back from the €2 limit proposed in the May draft but still halving the current €10 ceiling.

Austria’s three-party coalition has agreed on a draft law that closes out one of the last online gambling monopolies left standing in Europe. The current 15-year licence, held by Austrian Lotteries’ Win2Day brand, expires in late 2027, and the market will open to competing operators from October of that year. Parliament is expected to pass the legislation before the summer recess in July, after which the EU notification process runs for three months, placing the law’s entry into force sometime in autumn.

The draft brings to a close a process that picked up real momentum when the Finance Ministry’s proposals leaked in May 2026. The outline was never seriously in doubt: the monopoly would end, and a multi-licence system would take its place. What nobody had pinned down were the terms on which operators could enter. Those terms are now settled, and for much of the grey market, the details are not straightforward.

A Cooling-Off Period That Divides the Industry

No element of the new framework has drawn more argument than the mandatory cooling-off period targeting operators that served Austrian players without a local licence. Kronen Zeitung, citing sources familiar with the negotiations, reported that any company found to have provided online gambling services in Austria illegally in the 18 months before the market opens will be locked out of the initial licensing round. That window stretches to 24 months for applications submitted from 2030 onwards.

Clearing the cooling-off period does not put an operator in the clear. Any outstanding tax liabilities and unsettled player compensation rulings from previous years must be paid before an application can be filed. Add to that a minimum share capital requirement of €10 million, and the barriers stacking up in front of prospective licensees are as much about money as they are about timing.

Casinos Austria and Tipico-owned Admiral had both pushed for a transition period before the market opened, so the cooling-off rule landed well in those corners of the industry. Patrick Minar, spokesperson for Casinos Austria, whose subsidiary Austrian Lotteries holds the country’s only online gaming licence, told Krone exactly where the company stood: “One day you’re operating illegally, and the next day you’re granted a licence — that’s absurd.”

The Austrian Betting and Gaming Association (OVWG) has reached the opposite conclusion. President Simon Priglinger-Simader argued the cooling-off rule cuts against the very goals the government claims to be pursuing. “The federal government wants to bring players into the regulated market, strengthen player protection and secure tax revenues,” he said. “With cooling off, the opposite happens: tax-paying operators must leave, the black market jumps in, existing revenues collapse and already budgeted additional revenues fail to materialise.”

The problem runs deeper than disagreement over policy design. Austria’s channelisation rate sits at roughly 50%, which means half of all online gambling activity in the country already bypasses the regulated market. Pushing out the operators who have been absorbing that demand, even if they were doing so under EU licences rather than Austrian ones, could hollow out the legal market before a single new licence has been issued. Austrian public affairs consultant Felix Geyer put it bluntly: “The black market will not care. They won’t be applying for licences.”

Stake Limits Land at a Compromise

The other main battleground, the cap on online slot stakes, has also been put to bed, though it took considerable pressure to get there. The May draft had proposed slashing the maximum stake from €10 down to €2, a cut that drew near-universal opposition from across the industry. Casinos Austria, not typically aligned with grey-market operators on much, joined the chorus against it.

The settled figure is €5 per spin, a compromise that trims the current limit without gutting operator margins the way a €2 cap would have. Maximum customer winnings stay at €10,000, scrapping the earlier proposal to bring them down to €2,000, and jackpots remain on the table. Neither concession is especially generous, but both are a material improvement on what the first draft envisaged.

Player protections stay tight regardless of the stake compromise. General players face a weekly deposit cap of €1,680; anyone under 26 is limited to €250 per week. Mandatory breaks and spin-speed restrictions will govern game design, pulling the online product into line with the safeguards Austria already applies to its land-based venues.

Land-Based Sector Also Opens Up

The reform reaches beyond the online market. Austria’s land-based casino sector, locked up entirely by Casinos Austria across all 12 current concessions, will face competition for the first time under the new rules. Thirteen casino licences will go out to tender, available either as standalone awards or bundled into packages, a structure that could open the door to operators who want a single venue rather than a national footprint.

One thing that does not change is the lottery. Win2Day keeps its exclusive rights there, even as its grip on online casino operations ends. The lottery concession is uncoupled from the online casino licence and stays as a monopoly under the new structure.

What Comes Next?

Once parliament votes, the bill enters the EU notification process, which carries a mandatory three-month standstill. Running that over the summer keeps Austria on course for an autumn 2026 entry into force. The formal licensing tender for online operators would kick off in the months that follow, ahead of the Win2Day licence expiry at the close of 2027.

An independent gambling authority will not arrive until 2030 at the earliest, so the Ministry of Finance will run the initial licensing process itself. That is not an arrangement without critics, given the ministry’s long-standing connection to Casinos Austria, which the Austrian state owns in majority through its holding company ÖBAG. The draft does, however, account for delays: existing licences can be extended as a temporary bridge if the tender takes longer than expected, preventing a gap from opening in the legal market.

Austria is not the first country to reach for this particular tool. The Netherlands and Germany both imposed cooling-off requirements ahead of their online market openings in 2021. Dutch regulators required operators to pull out of the market for two years before they could apply for a licence, which pushed PokerStars and bet365’s entry back considerably. Austria’s initial 18-month window is shorter, though the direction is the same.

Expert Analysis

The final text settles the two biggest arguments, but the settlement lands unevenly. Grey-market operators holding EU licences now face a straightforward choice: pull out of Austria immediately and start the cooling-off clock, or keep serving Austrian players and accept a longer wait when the market eventually opens. For a number of them, the combined weight of backdated tax bills, outstanding player claims and the share capital requirement may make that calculation come out negative.

Vienna-based gambling lawyer Arthur Stadler raised this concern earlier in the legislative process, warning that high entry costs paired with tight product restrictions could produce a market that simply does not make commercial sense. Licensed operators constrained by €5 stake limits and €1,680 weekly deposit caps would be competing against unlicensed platforms that carry none of those restrictions. If the numbers do not work, operators will not take the licences, channelisation will go nowhere, and the government’s revenue projections will fall short. The tender process will show fairly quickly how many operators are willing to run those numbers and still sign up.

Austria has opted for a market opening that keeps most of the controls in place. Structured, conditional, and unhurried, the new framework prioritises caution over speed. The government is targeting a channelisation rate of 80%, up from the current 50%. October 2027 is when the test begins.

Further updates on regulatory developments will be available in the Regulation Section.