New Zealand’s Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) has opened the first stage of its online casino licensing regime, inviting expressions of interest (EOIs) from operators seeking one of 15 available licences. The window took effect on 17 July 2026 under the Online Casino Gambling Act 2026, the law that ends the country’s long-standing ban on locally licensed online casino gambling.
Secretary for Internal Affairs Paul James issued the invitation through a notice in the New Zealand Gazette. Operators have until 14 August to lodge their submissions through the Government Electronic Tender Service (GETS), the state procurement portal the DIA is using to run the process.
The EOI is a screening step, not the licence itself. It filters applicants before a competitive auction later in the year, and the government has fixed the total number of licences at 15. No single operator can hold more than three, a cap designed to stop the market consolidating around one or two large names from the outset.
What the EOI requires
The fee to submit an EOI is NZ$19,000 (US$11,100) and is non-refundable. Applicants must also show access to at least NZ$7.5 million (US$4.4 million) in capital, a threshold that sets a floor on who can realistically bid.
The Gazette notice sets out what each submission must contain: brand and platform details, ownership structure, and detailed information on every relevant person behind the applicant. Operators must disclose their existing licences and those held by associated individuals, the source of their funds, and whether the company or any associated person has breached or been investigated for potential breaches of gambling laws in other jurisdictions.
The DIA has built a short question-and-answer step into the timeline. Interested parties can submit questions about the EOI phase through GETS until 5pm on 31 July, with the department due to respond by 5pm on 5 August, nine days before the submission deadline.
The road to an auction
The EOI phase is the first of several stages. Once submissions close, the DIA plans to move to a competitive auction in September, where qualifying operators bid for the capped pool of licences. Successful bidders will then be invited to file full licence applications from October, subject to detailed suitability and compliance checks.
On the department’s current schedule, licences are expected to be issued in early 2027, aligning with the planned launch of the regulated market. That timeline leaves a narrow runway between the auction and go-live, and any operator that clears the EOI still faces a full vetting round before it can take a bet.
Channelling an existing market
The government first signalled its intention to license and regulate online casinos in July 2024. Officials have framed the reform as a response to an existing problem rather than the creation of a new one. New Zealanders already gamble on offshore sites that operate outside any domestic oversight, pay no local tax, and answer to no New Zealand regulator.
Speaking at the Regulating the Game conference in Sydney earlier this year, James said the move to regulate was not about introducing online gambling to New Zealanders but about channelling a market that already exists towards safe, licensed sites. Internal Affairs Minister Brooke van Velden has stressed that the framework is built around consumer safety and balance rather than maximising tax revenue, a positioning that mirrors the harm-reduction language used across other newly regulated markets.
The 15-licence cap makes New Zealand one of the more tightly controlled online casino markets to open in recent years. Where jurisdictions such as Canada’s provincial markets have licensed dozens of operators, Wellington is deliberately limiting supply. The DIA confirmed the cap earlier this year, and the auction format means the value of a licence will be set by how many credible operators compete for the fixed number on offer.
For international operators, the calculus is straightforward: a small, English-speaking market with high disposable income and an established base of players already active offshore, set against a NZ$19,000 entry fee, a NZ$7.5 million capital test, and no guarantee of winning at auction. The volume of unlicensed online gambling worldwide, which the Gambling Consultancy International put at $5.9 trillion in wagers in 2025, is the backdrop the government is trying to pull spending away from.
The immediate test is how many operators put NZ$19,000 on the table by 14 August. The size of the EOI field will be the first real signal of appetite for a market that has, until now, existed only in its unregulated form.
Source: Department of Internal Affairs
