Dutch regulator KSA: deposit limits shrank online market, while players open multiple accounts

The Netherlands' gambling regulator, the Kansspelautoriteit (KSA), has published two reports on the licensed market. One covers the whole of 2025 and the first half of 2026 across all licensed gambling, and the other looks only at the online sector. Together they point to a contraction in online gambling, visible in both tax collections and player behaviour.

The backdrop is a rule introduced in October 2024, when the Dutch government set mandatory monthly deposit limits. Young adults are capped at €300 a month, while everyone aged 24 and over is capped at €700.

In 2025, the first full year under the limits, online gross gaming revenue fell by 18.2% for casino and 30.2% for sports betting. The KSA notes that the sports betting decline was partly exaggerated by a high comparison base, since the previous year included UEFA Euro 2024.

The effect on player behaviour continued into January to June 2026. Total active player accounts rose 7.2%, from 1.38 million in the second half of 2025 to 1.48 million. Over the same comparison, however, the number of individual players slipped from 830,000 to 820,000, a fall of 1.2%. Monthly active individual players dropped 3.9%, from 510,000 to 490,000. The share of adults gambling online stayed flat at 5% to 6%.

The gap between rising accounts and falling individual players suggests that Dutch players are opening accounts with several licensed operators, apparently as a way around the deposit limits.

The reports also reveal a mismatch in channelisation. Between 94% and 97% of customers play exclusively or partly on licensed platforms, according to the KSA. Yet the regulator estimated that licensed providers took only 59% of revenue in the first half of 2026. One reading of these figures is that the 3% to 6% of players using unlicensed sites lose considerably more on average than those who stay with licensed operators.