Timișoara’s local council voted unanimously on 26 August to stop authorising slot machine halls in the city, closing the retail gambling market to new entrants and setting an end date for the venues already trading there.
The decision blocks any new authorisation for slot venues inside the city limits. Halls that already hold valid permits can keep operating until those permits run out, with the last expiring by 2027. Lottery activity is the only form of gambling the council left in place.
173 locations held gambling authorisations in Timișoara as of spring 2026. All of them now sit on a fixed timetable rather than a renewal cycle.
Mayor Dominic Fritz set out the decision on Facebook. His post, translated from Romanian, reads:
From today it is official: slot halls can no longer be authorised in Timișoara. The Local Council has approved the decision by which we completely ban gambling halls in the city. In Timișoara, only the National Lottery’s lotto activities will operate. The gaming halls currently open in the city will run until the licences they received from Bucharest expire, next year at the latest. Until then, they will close one by one.
How councils got the power
Romanian municipalities could not do this a year ago. An emergency ordinance adopted in February 2026 moved authorisation of land-based gambling venues to the local level, letting councils approve or reject applications and set conditions on where venues can operate. The National Office for Gambling (ONJN) still issues the operating licence, but a venue without local sign-off cannot open.
Diana Stoica, an MP for the Save Romania Union who worked on the measure, described the change at the time it passed.
From now on, local authorities can clearly say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. If they say yes, they can decide exactly where these venues can operate and under what conditions.
Fritz credited USR parliamentarians with the change, writing that they had fought for years to move the decision to local authorities.
Officials estimated that more than 200 localities could use the power to prohibit venues outright. That estimate is being tested faster than most operators expected. Municipalities gained veto powers in the spring, and the first bans followed within weeks.
Timișoara joins a widening list
Iași went further in July, becoming the first Romanian county to ban gaming halls across its whole territory rather than a single municipality. Slatina, Brăila, Ploiești and other councils moved earlier in the year.
Each individual decision covers a small share of national revenue. Taken together they remove the largest urban catchments from the retail estate, and they do it without any change to national gambling law. Operators cannot lobby a single ministry to reverse the trend, because the decisions are being made in dozens of council chambers.
The machine estate is shrinking fast
National authorisation data shows how quickly the retail footprint is contracting. Between February and May 2026, 2,337 slot machine stations were authorised in Romania. In the same period of 2025 the figure was 18,981.
The installed base has followed. Authorised gaming devices fell from 45,659 to 29,014, roughly 64% of the prior year’s total. That decline predates the Timișoara vote and reflects the combined effect of local refusals, higher annual fees per machine and operators choosing not to renew marginal sites.
Romania has been one of Central and Eastern Europe’s larger regulated markets, and its retail slot sector was the part that carried the highest fixed costs. Rent, staffing and per-machine levies apply whether or not a hall is profitable, so venues near the margin close first when a renewal becomes uncertain. The online market has continued to grow while the land-based estate contracts.
What happens next
The immediate question is whether any operator challenges the Timișoara decision in administrative court, as the ordinance gives councils discretion rather than a defined test, which leaves room for procedural challenge. No operator or trade body had responded publicly at the time of the vote.
The second question is where the machines go. Some will move to towns that have not restricted authorisations, which concentrates supply in smaller localities with less political attention. Others will leave the estate entirely.
The licences in Timișoara expire on a rolling basis through 2027. Until then the city has 173 venues that can trade but cannot be replaced.
Source: Timișoara City Hall
