Romania’s regulated online gambling market has grown into one of Central and Eastern Europe’s most commercially significant, supported by a licensing framework that predates most of its regional peers and a player base that punches well above its economic weight internationally.
ONJN (Oficiul Național pentru Jocuri de Noroc) has issued Class I licences for remote games of chance since 2015 under the framework established by OUG 77/2009. The land-based sector runs alongside under a separate authorisation structure, with slot machine operators, retail bookmakers, land-based casinos, and poker clubs each governed by distinct licence and authorisation fee schedules. The two sectors increasingly compete for the same player wallet, and the data shows online is winning.
The major operators active in the Romanian market include Superbet (the dominant domestic brand, majority-owned by Blackstone), Betano (Kaizen Gaming), Casa Pariurilor, Unibet (Kindred Group), eFortuna, Winbet, Mozzartbet, Stanleybet, Maxbet (now part of Super Technologies), and the state lottery operator Loteria Română. International names including 888, Netbet, and Favbet have also established licensed presences.
Key Developments in 2025
Romania’s gambling sector generated significant regulatory and commercial activity throughout 2025, across compliance enforcement, structural tax reform, and a transformative domestic acquisition.
The most consequential regulatory moment came in February 2025, when the Curtea de Conturi (Romania’s Court of Accounts) published an audit of ONJN covering 2019-2023. The audit concluded that ONJN had never effectively monitored online operators during the entire period, had no real-time access to the server-mirroring data that operators are legally required to maintain, and failed to verify the accuracy of monthly tax declarations. The Court identified 78.86 million lei in undeclared or unpaid authorisation taxes for 2022-2023 alone, plus 37.18 million lei in penalties and interest. Risk-based modelling suggested potential uncollected taxes of up to 1.8 billion lei in 2023 and 1.2 billion lei in 2022. ONJN responded that corrective measures were already being implemented.
On the tax side, Legea 141/2025, enacted in July and effective from 1 August 2025, restructured gambling taxation substantially. Online operators (Class I) face a 30% rate on gambling revenues. Player-level taxation increased progressively, with winnings up to 10,000 lei now taxed at 4% (up from 3%), a 20% rate applied to the portion between 10,000 and 66,750 lei, and 40% on amounts above 66,750 lei. The Ministry of Finance projected the package would generate 1.3-1.5 billion lei in additional annual revenues. Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan, acknowledging the fiscal logic, also warned publicly that overtaxing players risks pushing activity toward unlicensed operators.
The most significant commercial event of the year was the acquisition of Maxbet Online by Super Technologies, the rebranded parent of Superbet Group, announced in early 2026 but executed following strategic groundwork during 2025. The deal consolidated Superbet’s position as Romania’s largest domestic operator and effectively created a new market leader by a wider margin. Super Technologies had previously rebranded from Superbet Group in late 2024, signalling its ambition to expand beyond its Romanian and Polish core into a global play technology platform. Tax pressure on dominant operators is not unique to Romania, but the scale of Superbet’s receipts relative to the total market illustrates the degree of concentration in the licensed segment.
The Curtea de Conturi audit and the Legea 141/2025 tax package together represent a regulatory reset. ONJN enters 2026 under pressure to demonstrate the monitoring capability the audit said it lacked, while operators face a meaningfully higher tax burden on a market that was already growing rapidly.
Online Market Size: From €2.5bn to an Estimated €3bn+
The clearest measure of Romanian online gambling scale comes from the National Bank of Romania (BNR). Florian Neagu, director of the BNR’s Financial Stability Department, confirmed that Romanians spent 12.5 billion lei (approximately €2.5bn) on online gambling via card transactions in 2023. The figure covers 84 million card transactions to online betting, casino, and lottery operators, and excludes Revolut top-ups and cash-based or voucher channels. The true gross spend figure is higher.
Gambling accounted for 12.5% of all Romanian online card payments in 2023, making it the single largest category of online card spend, ahead of financial services top-ups and payment transfers. Romania’s GDP represented 0.33% of global GDP in 2023. Its share of the global online gambling market, estimated at approximately €80bn that year by Spherical Insights & Consulting, was 3.1%. The ratio is approximately 10-to-1.
Year-on-year, Romanian online gambling card transaction volumes grew 21% in 2023 versus 2022, with spend up 16%. Neagu’s analysis projected that a market growing at roughly 15-16% annually would double in approximately five years. The global online gambling market is forecast to reach €100bn by 2025, with Eastern Europe cited among the highest-growth regions.
Based on the 2023 BNR baseline of €2.5bn and the documented growth trajectory, the Romanian online gambling market is on course to reach or exceed €3bn in total online player spend by 2026. That estimate accounts for continued player base expansion, the licensing of new operators, the growth of mobile-first gambling behaviour, and the structural tailwinds from a young, digitally active population. It does not account for the potential channelisation impact of the Legea 141/2025 tax changes, which introduce meaningful new cost pressure on the regulated market from August 2025.
Official Tax and Fiscal Data
ONJN’s most recently detailed public report covers 2022. Total gambling-specific taxes collected across all products and channels that year reached 2.009 billion lei, from 820 licensed operators. Online gambling generated 1.096 billion lei of that total, approximately 54-55% of all ONJN-regulated gambling tax revenues. Online taxes had more than doubled year-on-year, from 506 million lei in 2021.
The 2022 breakdown by tax type shows the structure of how online operators are taxed: licence fees of 21.9 million lei, authorisation fees of 86.1 million lei, and regularisation taxes of 987.8 million lei across 32 operators. The regularisation tax is the dominant component and the figure most sensitive to revenue growth and underreporting risk. It is also the category where the Curtea de Conturi identified the greatest compliance failure.
For 2023, macro fiscal data derived from ANAF and ONJN sources shows the sector generated approximately 11 billion lei in total player spend, with around 3.3 billion lei flowing to the state budget via gambling-specific taxes, corporate income tax, player winnings taxes, and payroll contributions from the sector’s approximately 23,500 employees.
Company-level financial data compiled by Termene.ro shows licensed gambling and betting operators in Romania reporting aggregate revenues of 11.25 billion lei in 2023, rising to more than 15.5 billion lei in 2024. The top 10 companies accounted for approximately 7.7 billion lei of the 2024 total, confirming a highly concentrated market structure.
The Curtea de Conturi audit provides one further data point on true market scale. The audit references a single operator with receipts of 9.22 billion lei against a total online market of 20.76 billion lei for the audited period. If those figures reflect a single year in the 2019-2023 window, they indicate that gross online gambling receipts are substantially larger than either the ONJN tax base or company turnover figures suggest. The dominant operator is widely understood to be Superbet.
The 2023 OUG tax changes had already lifted sector-specific revenues by an estimated 583.4 million lei across 2023 and 2024, approximately a 40% uplift on the prior regime baseline, per the Ministry of Finance’s nota de fundamentare. Legea 141/2025 goes further, with the government projecting an incremental 1.3-1.5 billion lei per year. Industry commentary cited by Agerpres suggests the baseline for gambling-specific revenues was approximately 5 billion lei before the new measures.
2024 ONJN Activity Report
Romania’s gambling market generated total taxes of approximately 4.302 billion RON (€864.8 million) in 2024, collected from 751 gambling operators and 442 Class II licensed economic operators — a figure that underscores the sector’s significant fiscal contribution to the consolidated state budget. The data, published by ONJN (Oficiul Național pentru Jocuri de Noroc) under the Ministry of Finance, paints a picture of a mature but contracting land-based sector and a thriving online segment. Of particular note is the sheer scale of the slot machine vertical, which alone generated over 1.5 billion RON (€301.6M) in Class A authorization fees across 57,541 positions, even as 139 operators ceased activity during the year.
Online gambling — categorized as “jocuri de noroc la distanță” — emerged as the dominant revenue driver, with total remote gambling taxes reaching 2.286 billion RON (approximately €459.6M). This figure includes 2.13 billion RON (€428.3M) in regularization taxes from 32 operators, reflecting the mechanism by which Romanian GGR-based taxes are reconciled. With 33 online authorizations granted and 3 operators exiting the market, the online segment shows relative stability at the operator level while delivering outsized fiscal returns — a dynamic consistent with broader European online gambling growth trends.
The land-based vertical tells a more complex story of structural contraction. The casino segment recorded authorization fees of just 17.4 million RON (€3.5M) across only 3 gaming halls in Bucharest, while poker clubs generated 2.16 million RON (€434K) in authorization taxes across 9 rooms — 7 operators having ceased activity. Fixed-odds betting (pariuri în cotă fixă) contributed 18.19 million RON (€3.66M) in authorization fees from 14 operators, with 6 having exited. The pattern is consistent: land-based operations are consolidating, with operators choosing not to renew rather than compete in an increasingly cost-intensive regulatory environment.
The “taxa de viciu” (vice tax) levied on slot positions reached 143.1 million RON (€28.8M) across 57,541 positions, while the total regularization taxes across all verticals hit 2.28 billion RON (€458.5M) — the single largest line item in the report and one that reflects the GGR-linked nature of Romanian gambling taxation. Loteria Română, operating as a state monopoly, contributed separately through videolottery fees of 32.14 million RON (€6.5M). Overall, the ONJN data confirms Romania as one of Central and Eastern Europe’s most fiscally productive gambling jurisdictions, though the ongoing operator exits in land-based segments signal that the regulatory cost burden may be accelerating market consolidation faster than anticipated.
Online Traffic: Competitive Landscape
Semrush traffic data for the tracked Romanian online gambling domain set covers approximately 42.1 million combined monthly visits across 17 domains.
| Domain | Monthly Visits | Mobile % | YoY | Market Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| superbet.ro | 9,600,000 | 78.05% | +32.15% | 22.81% |
| lotostats.ro | 4,840,000 | 99.57% | +57.37% | 11.50% |
| betano.com | 3,890,000 | 79.24% | -8.55% | 9.25% |
| loto.ro | 2,460,000 | 90.86% | -7.28% | 5.85% |
| casapariurilor.ro | 2,070,000 | 89.13% | +15.73% | 4.92% |
| efortuna.ro | 1,660,000 | 88.81% | +29.36% | 3.94% |
| unibet.ro | 1,560,000 | 86.19% | -25.95% | 3.71% |
| getsbet.ro | 1,340,000 | 92.59% | +3.37% | 3.18% |
| winbet.ro | 1,070,000 | 58.39% | -3.71% | 2.54% |
| mozzartbet.ro | 904,030 | 63.44% | -33.50% | 2.15% |
| maxbet.ro | 819,720 | 91.31% | +47.50% | 1.95% |
| favbet.ro | 719,130 | 74.78% | +157.16% | 1.71% |
| princesscasino.ro | 695,030 | 88.98% | -24.87% | 1.65% |
| stanleybet.ro | 574,960 | 86.21% | +57.74% | 1.37% |
| netbet.ro | 503,760 | 83.74% | +16.92% | 1.20% |
| 888.ro | 466,190 | 89.54% | +718.61% | 1.11% |
| winner.ro | 430,970 | 88.28% | +9.50% | 1.02% |
Source: Semrush
Top Five Operators
Superbet holds 22.81% of tracked traffic with 9.6 million monthly visits, making it the largest operator by this measure by a substantial margin. Its 32.15% year-on-year growth is notable given it is expanding from an already dominant base. Following Super Technologies’ acquisition of Maxbet Online in early 2026, Superbet’s combined Romanian position is wider still. At 78.05% mobile traffic, its audience is predominantly app-based.
Lotostats.ro ranks second with 4.84 million visits and 99.57% mobile traffic, but its profile is distinct from direct operators. The domain functions primarily as a statistics and results aggregator, capturing high-intent traffic that feeds through to licensed operator platforms. Its 57.37% year-on-year growth reflects the value of informational content as an acquisition channel in the Romanian market.
Betano.com holds third place with 3.89 million monthly visits but is the only top-five domain in decline, down 8.55% year-on-year. Betano, operated by Kaizen Gaming, remains a major force in Romanian sports betting and casino. The traffic loss likely reflects competitive pressure from Superbet’s continued expansion rather than any fundamental weakness in the Romanian operation specifically.
Loto.ro, operated by Loteria Română, draws 2.46 million visits but is down 7.28% year-on-year. The state lottery’s declining web traffic is consistent with the structural trend of lottery products losing audience share to private-sector sports betting and casino online. Its 90.86% mobile rate confirms the issue is product relevance, not access.
Casa Pariurilor rounds out the top five at 2.07 million visits and 15.73% growth, tracking above the rate of several better-resourced international competitors in the same tier. Its sustained performance in Romanian sports betting reflects consistent local market positioning.
Mobile Dominance and Challenger Growth
The Romanian online gambling market operates predominantly on mobile. Fourteen of the 17 tracked domains show mobile traffic above 74%, and five sit above 88%. Only Winbet (58.39%) and Mozzartbet (63.44%) fall materially below the market norm, which may reflect differences in product mix or user demographics.
The fastest-growing domain in the tracked set is 888.ro, up 718.61% year-on-year off a low base, reflecting the impact of a significant market entry push. Favbet.ro (+157.16%), Stanleybet.ro (+57.74%), and Maxbet.ro (+47.50%) confirm the mid-tier of the market is growing faster than several top-tier incumbents.
The sharpest declines belong to Mozzartbet.ro (-33.50%), Unibet.ro (-25.95%), and Princesscasino.ro (-24.87%). Unibet’s position is worth watching. Kindred Group declined to renew its Italian licence in late 2024 and has been rationalising its European footprint. Whether Romania becomes a priority or a further rationalisation candidate is an open question following the group’s strategic repositioning.
Channelisation Risk in 2026
The combination of the Curtea de Conturi audit findings and the Legea 141/2025 tax changes frames the central question for the Romanian online gambling market in 2026. ONJN demonstrated, on its own regulator’s evidence, that it could not adequately monitor the licensed market during a period of relatively low taxation. It now enters a higher-tax regime with those questions unresolved.
The Dutch market provides a relevant precedent. The Netherlands KSA reported a channelisation rate below 50% in the first half of 2025, with unlicensed operators capturing the majority of GGR despite a licensing framework in place since 2021. Romania’s channelisation data is not published in equivalent granularity, but higher taxes, documented enforcement gaps, and a large, digitally active player base create a similar risk profile.
The government’s projected 1.3-1.5 billion lei in additional annual revenues from Legea 141/2025 will serve as the first real test. Execution figures in ONJN’s 2025 activity report and ANAF fiscal data will confirm whether the licensed market absorbed the tax increase without significant leakage. If those figures fall short of projection, the channelisation debate will shift from a theoretical concern to a documented policy failure, with direct implications for the licensing framework’s future direction.
Source: BNR, ONJN, Curtea de Conturi, Termene.ro, Ministry of Finance
