Portugal’s regulated online gambling market generated €651.9 million in gross gaming revenue (GGR) in the first half of 2026, a record for the period and a 14% increase on the same six months of 2025, according to data from the Serviço de Regulação e Inspeção de Jogos (SRIJ), the country’s gambling regulator.
Two quarters of steady growth
The total builds on a first quarter that already ran ahead of 2025’s pace. SRIJ recorded €323.7 million in Q1 2026 GGR, up 13.7% from €284.7 million in Q1 2025. Subtracting that from the H1 total puts Q2 2026 revenue at roughly €328.2 million, an increase of about 14% on the €287 million SRIJ reported for Q2 2025. Growth held at a similar rate across both quarters, with no sign of the slowdown that hit some other European markets earlier in 2026.
The first half extends a run of consecutive year-on-year records SRIJ has logged since Q4 2025, when the regulator’s quarterly report also came in above the equivalent period a year earlier. Two full quarters into 2026, that streak remains unbroken.
Casino still outweighs sports betting
SRIJ has not yet published a product-level breakdown for the full half-year, but the Q1 2026 split gives the clearest recent picture of where the money is coming from. Online casino games, including slots, roulette, blackjack and poker, produced €204.2 million, or 63.1% of the quarter’s total. Fixed-odds sports betting brought in €119.5 million, or 36.9%. That ratio is close to the full-year 2025 split, when casino products generated an estimated €758.9 million against €447.4 million for sports betting, roughly 63% to 37%, suggesting the balance between the two verticals has held into 2026.
The two products grew at very different speeds within Q1. Online casino revenue rose 20.3% year-on-year, while sports betting was up a comparatively modest 4%. Both slipped from Q4 2025 levels, casino down 4.6% and sports betting down 3.3%, a pattern consistent with the post-holiday quiet that typically follows Portugal’s peak festive betting period. If casino continues outgrowing sports betting through the second half, its share of the market’s total GGR is likely to keep edging above the 63% mark it has held for the past two reporting periods.
On pace to beat 2025
Portugal’s four licensed-market quarterly reports added up to roughly €1.206 billion in GGR for the whole of 2025. With €651.9 million already booked in the first six months of 2026, the market is on track to pass that full-year total well before December if the growth rate seen in Q1 and Q2 continues into the second half. Portugal has run a licensed online gambling regime since 2015, and SRIJ’s quarterly reports have shown revenue climbing in most periods since.
SRIJ has paired that growth with tighter player-protection infrastructure. A centralised online self-exclusion portal covering all licensed operators went live on 8 April 2026, replacing operator-by-operator exclusion lists with a single national register. The change came roughly a month before Q2 closed, giving SRIJ its first partial quarter of data under the new system.
Q3 2026 will also be the first full quarter to capture the FIFA World Cup, which ran from 11 June to 19 July across the United States, Mexico and Canada. Only the tournament’s opening weeks fell inside Q2, so its full effect on Portuguese sports betting handle has yet to show up in a quarterly report. Whether that lifts sports betting’s share back above its recent 37%, and whether the centralised self-exclusion register changes the shape of the market, will become clearer when SRIJ publishes its Q3 2026 figures later this year.
Source: Serviço de Regulação e Inspeção de Jogos (SRIJ)
