Portugal’s online gambling market generated €337.6m in gross gaming revenue in Q4 2025, up 4.5% year-on-year and 13.6% sequentially, according to data published by the Serviço de Regulação e Inspeção de Jogos (SRIJ). The quarterly figure confirms a pattern that held through most of 2025: online growth accelerating while the land-based segment contracts.
Online Growth Led by Casino
Casino games accounted for 63.4% of total online GGR in the quarter, reaching €214m — a 15.9% increase on Q4 2024. Sports betting generated €123.6m, declining 10.6% year-on-year but rebounding 23.9% from Q3, suggesting a partial normalisation following a weak quarter rather than a structural shift.
Total online betting volume approached €6.5bn during the period, with €5.9bn attributed to casino products alone. Within online casino, slot-style machine games represented 80.4% of all wagering. Football dominated the sports betting vertical at 75.6% of total activity, with Portugal’s Primeira Liga leading individual competition betting at 11.4%, followed by the English Premier League and UEFA Champions League, each at 9.5%.
The online gambling tax (IEJO) collected in Q4 reached €99.3m, up 11.3% year-on-year, tracking closely with the revenue expansion.
Land-Based Segment Declines for Second Consecutive Quarter
Land-based casinos and gaming machine halls generated €69.8m in Q4, down 3.8% year-on-year and 3.5% from Q3. For the full year 2025, land-based GGR fell 1.15%, confirming the channel’s structural underperformance relative to online.
The quarterly decline was driven largely by a 22.7% drop in banked table games and a 5.6% fall in non-banked games. Slot machines — which account for nearly 79% of retail GGR — posted a modest 2.3% increase, limiting further losses but not enough to offset the broader decline. Bingo operations generated €7.2m, up 3.9% quarter-on-quarter but down 2.3% year-on-year.
This divergence mirrors a trend playing out across several European markets. As The iGaming EU reported, Europe’s GGR reached €123.4bn in 2024, with online consistently outpacing retail across major jurisdictions.
Player Metrics: Growth Slowing, Self-Exclusion Rising
The number of registered player accounts reached nearly 4.93 million in Q4, up 4.5% year-on-year. New registrations, however, fell 23.5% to 231,400 — a significant deceleration that suggests the market is maturing rather than expanding its player base at prior rates.
Players under 45 represented more than three-quarters of the user base. Among new registrants, the 18–24 age group was the most active, accounting for 34.9% of new sign-ups. The concentration of new players in the youngest eligible cohort is a data point regulators are likely to weigh alongside the broader slowing in acquisition.
Self-excluded players reached 361,400, a 23.6% increase year-on-year and representing 7.3% of all registered accounts. In the land-based segment, self-exclusion requests at casinos rose 30.67% year-on-year to 196 in Q4, with full-year 2025 requests totalling 756, up 16.13% from 651 in 2024. The pace of self-exclusion growth now exceeds the pace of player account growth — a ratio regulators across Europe have begun to treat as a structural indicator rather than a one-off result. Spain’s approach of introducing tobacco-style warning labels for online gambling is one example of how Southern European regulators are responding to comparable user behaviour data.
Enforcement Activity
SRIJ issued 58 closure notifications to unlicensed operators during Q4 and flagged 116 websites for ISP-level blocking. Since the regulatory framework launched in June 2015, cumulative totals have reached 1,633 closure notifications and 2,747 blocked sites — reflecting sustained enforcement activity against the unlicensed market, a challenge shared across the region as noted in coverage of Italy’s digital firewall initiative against illegal online gambling.
With online GGR up in three of four quarters through 2025 and land-based revenue in persistent decline, Portugal’s regulatory data heading into 2026 presents a clear channel shift. The question for SRIJ is whether the self-exclusion trend and the skew of new registrations toward the youngest player cohorts prompt any adjustment to player protection requirements before the next quarterly report.
Source: Serviço de Regulação e Inspeção de Jogos (SRIJ)
