Data · Blog
How Many Online Casinos Are There? It depends what you count.
Licences, brands, domains and blocklists, counted separately.
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The answer moves by five orders of magnitude depending on what you count. A player in Ontario can legally use 84 gaming websites. The licence registers we could read hold about 1,500 licences. The largest affiliate database lists more than 6,000 casinos. Indonesia says it has blocked 3.7 million gambling sites and content items. A web crawler flags 7.7 million sites with gambling content. Every one of those numbers is real, and every step up is a redefinition rather than a discovery.
Short answer: there is no single number. Counted by licences, online casinos run to the low thousands. Counted by listings or domains, they run into the millions. No organisation publishes a dated, methodologically described census of real-money casino brands.
Online casino statistics at a glance
- 84 legal gaming websites in Ontario, run by 49 operators, as of September 1, 2026.
- 666 rows on Curaçao's licence register, 20 October 2026 edition.
- 311 Malta gaming licences at the end of 2025, held by 302 companies, down from 326 in 2023.
- 278 white-label domains across 18 UK licence accounts, 82% of them on just two.
- 6,000+ casinos in the largest affiliate database, with no date and no word on how many are live.
- 7.7 million sites a web crawler tags with gambling content, most of them not casinos.
- $97.7bn to $120.4bn: 2026 global online gambling estimates from three research firms.
The counting ladder: what gets called an online casino
Seven different things get called "an online casino", and published articles switch between them mid-sentence. Each rung multiplies the number through a specific, documented mechanism.
The first row is the only number both small and genuinely meaningful to a reader. If you live in a regulated market, the number of online casinos that exist for you is the number licensed where you live. Everything above it counts businesses you cannot legally use.
One licence, one hundred and fifty casinos
Here is the mechanism, and the evidence is unusually good because Britain publishes a register you can count. A reading of the UK register on 28 September 2026 recorded 278 domains marked "White Label" across eighteen licence accounts, and published the row-level data: Jumpman Gaming 133 rows, ProgressPlay 95, White Hat Gaming 21, SkillOnNet 19, Gamesys Operations 9, Blue Rock Managed Services 1. That is 278, and the top two hold 82.0% of it.
Add the 19 brands Jumpman runs in its own name and a single licence carries more than 150 domain rows, in one of the most tightly regulated major markets on earth. This is explicit policy, not a loophole: the regulator licenses the operator, not the website, and told a freedom-of-information request made in February 2025 that compliance at every site, white-labelled ones included, sits with the licence holder and "cannot be transferred".
Two limits travel with that number. A white-label row records which licensee carries a site, not who owns the brand, and it does not confirm the site is currently open to British players. And the dataset covers eighteen licence accounts rather than the whole market, so the real figure across all UK licensees is higher.
Why you cannot just multiply
The distribution is a power law, not an average. Where regulators publish both numbers you can divide one by the other yourself. Ontario lists 49 operators against 84 gaming websites, which is 1.7 sites per operator, both printed at the top of its own directory, accurate as of September 1, 2026. Brazil counts 85 licences against 191 active brands, which is 2.2. These ratios are our arithmetic, not figures any regulator publishes. Any article that multiplies a global licence total by one fixed number is inventing its answer.
Offshore the spread is wider still. Curaçao's register lists licensee name, number and type, and no domains or brands at all, so reading it perfectly tells you nothing about how many casinos exist. Reporting on leaked register data in September 2026 counted 646 licensed organisations behind 897 beneficial-owner records covering 767 individuals, with around 30 trust offices fronting them, three of which each administer more than fifty letterbox companies. Reporters attributed roughly 1,000 domains to a single network linked to one software supplier. The authority called that grouping fabricated and said it keeps no such classification. What is disputed there is not the domains, but whether sites sharing a platform are one business.
How many casinos actually get a licence
Malta is the only regulator we found that publishes its full licensing funnel. The figures below are read from Tables 1 and 2 of the authority's own 2025 annual report.
| Malta Gaming Authority | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| New gaming licence applications received | 24 | 28 | 38 |
| New gaming licences issued | 15 | 17 | 19 |
| Applications rejected, withdrawn or cancelled | 21 | 20 | 11 |
| Gaming licences surrendered | 33 | 20 | 28 |
| Licences suspended | 9 | 2 | 1 |
| Licences cancelled | 11 | 8 | 2 |
| Total licences at year end | 326 | 323 | 311 |
Applications are rising and grants are rising with them, but surrenders have outrun grants in each of the last three years, 28 against 19 in 2025, which is why the register has fallen from 326 to 311. The authority frames this itself as an industry moving into a more mature phase.
Inside that funnel sits the only published refusal rate we found anywhere in online gambling regulation. In 2025 Malta's Supervisory Council approved 17 new gaming licence applications and rejected two, on the grounds that what the applicants submitted was false, misleading, inaccurate or materially incomplete. That is a refusal rate of about 11%, alongside 1,266 due diligence screening checks carried out in the same year.
One nuance the headline numbers hide: 24 of the 38 applications and 12 of the 19 licences granted were B2B, for firms supplying the industry rather than operating casinos. Only 7 of 2025's new licences went to consumer-facing operators.
Curaçao: count the register yourself
Curaçao is more than a third of any global tally, and most published counts of it are second-hand: 617 licences in late July 2026 by one consultancy's count, 646 licensed organisations in the leaked data. The authority publishes the register itself as a dated PDF. The 20 October 2026 edition runs to 666 numbered rows, tagging each licensee B2C or B2B, with issue and expiry dates and a status column. We counted it. Anyone quoting a Curaçao figure without an edition date is working from someone else's summary.
Blocklists measure enforcement policy, not casinos
No regulator, academic body or vendor publishes a worldwide count of unlicensed casinos with a stated method. What exists instead are national blocklists, routinely quoted as if they counted businesses. They do not. They count blocking events, cumulatively, rarely de-duplicated, and one operator may hold hundreds of mirror domains precisely to survive them. Indonesia's ministry, for example, reports 3.7 million gambling sites and content items blocked between October 2024 and July 2026, a single figure that mixes whole sites with individual pieces of content.
Britain is the clearest case, because its disruption reporting counts in both units on the same page. It referred 798 websites to search engines across the four quarters from July 2024 to June 2025, and 616 were removed. On a separate cumulative tally running from April 2024, it referred 447,778 individual URLs, of which 287,961 were removed. Both are the regulator's own figures. They differ by a factor of about 560, and they are not two measurements of the same thing: one counts sites, the other counts addresses, and the periods do not match. That gap between units, rather than either number, is the finding. The Commission last updated the page on 12 March 2026 without giving the cumulative tally an end date, so it cannot be turned into a rate.
The top two bars count websites; the bottom two count addresses. Any article that quotes a URL figure as a count of gambling sites is reading the wrong pair of bars.
Almost everyone plays legally. Half the money does not.
Channelisation rates, the share of play going to licensed operators, measure players or revenue, not sites, and the two can sit far apart. The Dutch regulator put channelisation at about 94% of players in the first half of 2025, but only 49% of gross gaming revenue, and says the player figure is likely an overestimate. No arithmetic turns either rate into a count of unlicensed casinos.
What all those casinos are worth
Market size is modelled, not measured. The three research houses that publish a 2026 figure are $22.7bn apart, and the two that publish a 2025 figure are $11.7bn apart, on a year that has already finished.
| Source | 2026 figure | What the page actually says |
|---|---|---|
| Mordor | $120.4bn | The only one that defines its basis: gross gaming revenue, wager turnover excluded. Europe 47.7% of 2026. |
| IMARC | $106.4bn | No basis stated. Its own 2025 figure is $99.67bn. Europe 49.1% of 2025. |
| Grand View | $97.7bn | No method stated for 2026. Gives $88.0bn for 2025 and an 11.0% growth rate for 2026 to 2033. Europe "over 41%" of 2025. |
Underneath all three sits a floor you can add up yourself. The American Gaming Association reported $10.74bn of US iGaming and $16.96bn of sports betting revenue for 2025. Britain reported £8.3bn of remote casino, betting and bingo gross gambling yield to March 2026, about $11.1bn. Two markets, $38.8bn. That is a floor, not an estimate: the AGA's betting line is not split into online and retail, the conversion rate is ours, and neither figure includes lotteries. "Roughly $100bn to $120bn" is defensible. A point estimate is not.
| Figure | What it is |
|---|---|
| 84% | Of British online casino revenue comes from slots alone: £4.8bn of £5.7bn, year to March 2026. |
| 39% → 16% | Of British adults gambled online in the past four weeks, before and after excluding lottery-draw-only players, January to May 2026. |
The comparison that lands hardest: British online casino alone now out-earns the entire land-based sector, £5.7bn against £4.9bn for every arcade, betting shop, bingo hall and casino combined. Every land-based casino in Britain together produced £934m, roughly a fifth of what online slots took, and the country lost 208 betting shops in the same year.
The registers are shrinking while the money grows
Most readers expect an explosion of new casinos. In the jurisdictions with clean multi-year series the opposite is happening. Malta went from 326 licences in 2023 to 323 in 2024 to 311 in 2025, a three-year low, in the same year its gaming sector's gross value added rose to €1.42bn, about 6.3% of Malta's economic output, and employment with licensed operators reached 15,039.
- Britain: operators down 1.1% to 2,154, while licensed activities rose 0.4%. Fewer companies, each licensed for more.
- Philippines: online gaming operators down from 74 to 48, with licences stripped from holders not actively operating.
- Italy: online licences cut from 407 to 52 from November 2025.
- Malta: the pipeline has turned B2B, with 24 of 38 applications in 2025 for supplier licences, not operators.
So which direction is the trend? It depends entirely on which rung you measure. Built from licence registers it points down. Built from brand or domain counts it points up. Both are true.
Numbers that do not survive checking
| The claim | What's wrong with it |
|---|---|
| "Tens of thousands of illegal gambling sites" | No publisher attaches a method to that phrasing. The monitoring work it is usually credited to found over 6,200 illegal operators targeting EU consumers in 2024. The report says operators, not websites, which is the whole of the error. |
| "The UK has 2,145 remote licences" | The regulator counts 2,154 operators in total, remote and land-based combined. The quoted figure sits nine away from that total, which reads like a total mislabelled as remote, though nobody publishing it says where it came from. |
| "More than 6,000 online casinos" | It traces to an affiliate database. Casino Guru says it has more than 6,000 casinos in its database, with no date and no word on how many are still live, while its own history page marks 5,000 casinos reviewed in January 2023. A database listing is not a live casino. |
| "7.7 million gambling sites" | A web classifier counting affiliate blogs, spam and parked domains. Its own intake of about 1.99 million new sites in three months shows it is not counting casinos. |
| Any Curaçao figure with no edition date | Several totals circulate, mostly second-hand. The authority publishes the register itself as a dated PDF, with 666 rows on the 20 October 2026 edition. Quote that, and say which edition. |
| "Brazil has X licensed operators" | Different counts circulate. The clearest primary account gives 82 authorised operators holding 85 licences and running 191 active brands, dated 19 February 2026. Quote those three together, with the date. |
What nobody publishes
These are the numbers we could not find published anywhere.
- A dated, methodologically described census of live casino brands.
- Any regulator isolating "online casino" from online betting at licence level in a countable way.
- A de-duplicated operator count behind any national blocklist.
- How long a casino brand lasts before closing or rebranding. No launch or exit dataset is maintained.
- Any authoritative measured global revenue figure. No body sums regulator-reported online revenue worldwide.
- A credible global count of online gamblers. Account totals get presented as headcounts.
How to check any of this
A page arguing that everyone else's numbers are unverifiable has to be checkable itself.
| The claim | How to check it |
|---|---|
| One UK licence fronts 150+ sites | Open the UK regulator's public register and filter an operator's domains by status. It names the licensee, not the brand owner. |
| Ontario's 1.7× ratio | Open the Ontario operator register and read the two totals at the top: 49 operators and 84 gaming websites. |
| Curaçao's 666 rows | Fetch the dated licence register PDF from the authority's site and count the rows. Note the edition date. |
| Any casino's licence | Match three things, not one: the company name in the site footer, the licence number, and the domain. |
| Britain's slots share | Read the regulator's annual industry statistics release. |
| The market-size spread | Open the three research houses' pages on the same day. Check which year each figure is for, and whether the page defines its basis. Only one of the three does. |
Three traps
- A licence is not a casino. One company holds many because every market demands its own. EGBA's nine member operators held 401 online gambling licences between them, up from 321 a year earlier.
- A blocklist entry is not a casino. Registers are cumulative, rarely de-duplicated, and inflated by mirror domains that exist purely to survive blocking.
- A database listing is not a live site. No affiliate database states whether it purges closed brands.
What sits behind this
Licence figures come from regulators' own registers wherever one could be read, and from trade press where it could not. The Curaçao row count on this page is our own, read off the authority's dated register PDF. The ownership and trust-office figures in the same section are reporting on a leaked dataset, not something we could verify against the register, and are labelled as such.
Several sources here have a direct commercial interest in the answer. The casino databases are affiliate-funded and earn money referring players to the operators they list. The research houses sell the reports their figures advertise. Where a figure comes from one of those, this page says so. If you find an error, tell us and we will correct it with the date shown.
Online casino numbers: quick answers
How many online casinos are there?
There is no single number. Licence registers hold roughly 1,500 licences across the jurisdictions we could read, the largest affiliate database lists more than 6,000 casinos, and a web crawler tags 7.7 million sites with gambling content. No organisation publishes a dated census of live casino brands.
How many online casinos are licensed in Curaçao?
The Curaçao Gaming Authority's licence register had 666 numbered rows in its 20 October 2026 edition, each tagged B2C or B2B. The register lists licensees, not domains, so one licence can sit behind several casino sites.
How many casino sites can one licence cover?
Many. In September 2026 one UK licence account, Jumpman Gaming, carried 133 white-label domains plus 19 of its own brands, more than 150 domain rows in total.
How big is the online gambling market?
Research firms put the 2026 global online gambling market between $97.7bn and $120.4bn. Only one of them defines its basis. Regulator data from the US and Britain alone adds up to a floor of about $38.8bn.
Do blocked-site counts tell you how many illegal casinos exist?
No. Blocklists count blocking events, often cumulatively and without de-duplication, and one operator can run hundreds of mirror domains. Britain's regulator referred 798 websites in a year but 447,778 URLs since April 2024.
Sources
Every figure above traces to one of these. Where a source is commercially interested, that is stated in the text.
- UK Gambling Commission, industry statistics to March 2026gamblingcommission.gov.uk
- UK Gambling Commission, disruption of illegal online gamblinggamblingcommission.gov.uk
- UK Gambling Commission, gambling participation, January to May 2026gamblingcommission.gov.uk
- UK Gambling Commission, on white labels and licensee responsibilitygamblingcommission.gov.uk
- UK Gambling Commission, public register of licenseesgamblingcommission.gov.uk
- WiseScout, UK white-label register snapshotwisescout.co.uk
- iGaming Ontario, registered operator listigamingontario.ca
- Malta Gaming Authority, 2025 annual reportmga.org.mt
- SoloAzar, the MGA's 2025 figures, including due diligence checkssoloazar.com
- Yogonet, Malta's register shrinks as output climbsyogonet.com
- Curaçao Gaming Authority, online gaming licence register, 20 October 2026 edition (PDF)gamingcontrol.spin-cdn.com
- Finance Magnates, the Curaçao register leakfinancemagnates.com
- Play the Game, the island that licenses betting worldwideplaythegame.org
- GC Authority, Brazil's licences against active brandsgcauthority.com
- Asia Gaming Brief, Indonesia blocks 3.7m gambling sitesagbrief.com
- Kansspelautoriteit, autumn 2025 monitoring report (PDF)kansspelautoriteit.nl
- Yogonet, Italy cuts online licences from 407 to 52yogonet.com
- Focus Gaming News, PAGCOR operators fall to 48focusgn.com
- EGBA, annual activity report 2026 (PDF)egba.eu
- American Gaming Association, 2025 commercial gaming revenueprnewswire.com
- European Casino Association, the 6,200 illegal operators figureeuropeancasinoassociation.org
- BuiltWith, gambling content detectionstrends.builtwith.com
- Casino Guru, about us and company historycasino.guru
- Grand View Research, online gambling marketgrandviewresearch.com
- IMARC Group, online gambling marketimarcgroup.com
- Mordor Intelligence, online gambling marketmordorintelligence.com