How is Europe's illegal gambling market measured?

By discovering the sites actively marketing into each market, verifying them against each register, grouping them into operators, and cross-referencing the list with third-party traffic data to estimate audience. Regulus Partners then modelled revenue from that base.

How many European markets were analysed in the Euromat study?

28: the EU member states except Malta and Luxembourg, plus the United Kingdom, Serbia and Montenegro.

How are illegal gambling websites identified?

From the channels players use, in the local language: search, media, advertising and app stores. Each site found is checked against the official register; those absent from it and actively targeting the market are the black-market sites.

What did Helios contribute to the study?

The site and traffic discovery: identifying the sites marketing into each of the 28 markets and cross-referencing them with traffic data. Regulus Partners produced the market analysis and country profiles.

Research

Europe's illegal online gambling market: 2026 analysis

Published 2026-09-16 · By Helios

How large is Europe's illegal online gambling market?

Research by Regulus Partners and Helios for Euromat estimates Europe's illegal online gambling market at around 12 billion euros in net revenue in 2025, roughly a quarter of all online gambling across the 28 markets analysed, and about three times its 2019 size. The analysis covers the EU27 minus Malta and Luxembourg, plus the United Kingdom, Serbia and Montenegro, and projects around 13 billion euros for 2026.

The study

The online gambling Black Market in Europe was published by Regulus Partners on behalf of Euromat, the European association of gaming and amusement machine operators, in 2026. Regulus Partners produced the market analysis and the country profiles. Helios carried out the site and traffic discovery on which the market measurement rests: identifying, market by market and in local languages, the sites actively marketing to players in each jurisdiction, and cross-referencing that list with third-party traffic data to establish scale.

Coverage of the study describes it as drawing on more than a thousand hours of analysis combining digital marketing and web traffic data with the macroeconomic and regulatory context of each market.

Key findings

Around 12 billion euros in net revenue in 2025, roughly 25 percent of all online gambling in the 28 markets
About three times the 2019 figure, a compound annual growth rate of roughly 18 percent, with around 13 billion euros calculated for 2026
The licensed-but-offshore grey market halved over the same period, from about 3 billion euros to 1.5 billion
978 unique sites identified across the 28 markets, 709 of them with measurable traffic
2,569 site-country traffic pairs: the average captured site drew players from four countries
Every jurisdiction except Montenegro had more than 40 active black-market sites marketing into it; the largest markets had around 140
In Bulgaria, Croatia, Italy, the Netherlands, Serbia and Spain, black-market sites outnumbered licensed operators
The 25 largest site groups accounted for around 64 percent of captured black-market traffic; the largest single group for around 12 percent
Around 60 percent of the sites found had comparatively little traffic each, a long tail run through affiliate networks and built to be replaced

How the market was measured

The measurement has three layers. First, discovery: for each of the 28 markets, Helios identified the sites actively marketing themselves to players in that market, using local-language search and the other public channels a player in that country would meet. A site counts for a market only if it is reaching that market, not merely reachable from it.

Second, verification and grouping: each site was checked against the jurisdiction's register of licensees, and sites sharing branding, affiliate identifiers, redirect paths or infrastructure were grouped into the operator families behind them. That is how the study can describe concentration at the top and disposable domain families at the bottom rather than a flat list.

Third, scale: the site list was cross-referenced with third-party web traffic data, per site and per country, to estimate audience and to produce the site-country pairs on which the revenue modelling by Regulus Partners is built. Traffic to a site without an appropriate licence does not itself prove wrongdoing; the study is explicit on that point, and so is Helios.

What the market looks like

The ecosystem splits into a concentrated, professionalised core and a very long tail, and each half defeats a different kind of enforcement. The core has recognisable brands, sponsorship and products built to differentiate; its clearest common factor is cryptocurrency, which both sidesteps payment blocking and offers something almost no European jurisdiction licenses. Most of these operators hold licences in jurisdictions with light scrutiny and opaque ownership.

The tail runs on affiliate networks, review and bonus sites that are cheap to create and hard to act against, and on domains designed to be regenerated once blocked: numbered domain families with thousands of siblings, brand families localised per market with national suffixes and local language. One national blocklist in the study had grown past 11,000 entries.

Why markets grow

The study's explanation is policy friction. Black markets form where regulation removes choice, bans or distorts products, taxes consumers directly, restricts spending or bans advertising, pushing engaged players toward supply outside the regulated market. Filip Jelavić of Helios put it plainly in the coverage: online gambling black markets do not happen by accident, they result from government policies that create consumer friction. Austria is the worked example, with a black market grown to more than 35 percent of the total, around 500 million euros in 2026, under an online gaming monopoly and stake-based betting tax.

Limitations

Discovery captures sites actively marketing in a period; a site that stopped marketing before the window or started after it is not counted
Traffic figures are estimates from third-party data and carry the uncertainty of that data
Presence of traffic from a country to an unlicensed site does not by itself establish wrongdoing; it establishes reach
Operator grouping rests on observed shared signals and analyst judgement, and can undercount operators that keep their brands apart

Frequently asked questions

How is Europe's illegal gambling market measured?: By discovering the sites actively marketing into each market, verifying them against each register, grouping them into operators, and cross-referencing the list with third-party traffic data to estimate audience. Regulus Partners then modelled revenue from that base.
How many European markets were analysed in the Euromat study?: 28: the EU member states except Malta and Luxembourg, plus the United Kingdom, Serbia and Montenegro.
How are illegal gambling websites identified?: From the channels players use, in the local language: search, media, advertising and app stores. Each site found is checked against the official register; those absent from it and actively targeting the market are the black-market sites.
What did Helios contribute to the study?: The site and traffic discovery: identifying the sites marketing into each of the 28 markets and cross-referencing them with traffic data. Regulus Partners produced the market analysis and country profiles.

Coverage and sources

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