Latvia Sets Saeima Vote on Tighter Gambling Rules
Latvia's Budget and Finance Committee has waved through a package of gambling amendments. The full Saeima now gets to decide on them. Raising the minimum gambling age, capping online play, new licensing conditions. The committee backed the changes to the Gambling and Lotteries Law on Wednesday 21 October.
Age is the headline. Minimum gambling age goes from 18 to 21, and retail lottery purchases would be restricted to over-21s too. Land-based venues would face a mandatory shutdown window, closing between 6am and 9am. No implementation date has been set for any of it.
Online is where the drafting gets serious. Players would be capped at 21 hours of gambling in any 24-hour period. The cap is tracked across every online gambling licence a customer holds. Shared data, in other words. Not siloed operator records. Latvia wants a common verification standard for online customers, which forces operators to plug into a central system that flags and manages addiction risk. Personalised smartcards or equivalent tech sit behind it.
Retail gets squeezed as well. Visitor registration would extend beyond casinos to other premises. Gaming halls would need at least 25 machines, up from 20. Façades and signage would fall under uniform rules. For affiliates, the machine minimum is the quiet one. Fewer, larger halls means fewer retail partners to promote, and the traffic shifts further online, where the 21-hour cap lives.
All of this lands on top of an institutional shake-up. Earlier this year Latvia merged gambling regulation with tax supervision, folding the Lottery and Gambling Supervision Inspectorate into the State Revenue Service. The standalone regulator is gone. The SRS carved out separate divisions: one for licensing and compliance, another for remote and on-site inspections. Duplication was the Finance Ministry's argument. One body, better oversight, as online takes a bigger share of the market.
Finance Minister Arvils Ašeradens announced the restructuring in September 2025, alongside higher gambling duties from January 2026. Interactive gambling tax rises from 12% to 15%. Betting and wagering duties go from 15% to 18%. Annual machine duty climbs from €6,204 to €7,440. Roulette, card and dice table duty from €33,696 to €40,440.
The politics are unsettled. Evika Siliņa's centre-right New Unity government collapsed this year. Andris Kulbergs led United List to victory in the 3 October 2026 election, emerging as the largest force in the Saeima but short of a majority, so coalition partners will take control of the chamber. Under Siliņa, the Saeima had already ordered gambling reforms concluded by 2026, with a legal framework in place by 2027. Whether Kulbergs pushes for further changes is an open question.
Industry isn't uniformly opposed. The Latvian Chamber of Commerce and Industry backs individual risk monitoring but rejects the higher machine minimum, the online time restriction and the extra data requirements. Committee chair Aiva Vīksna conceded the proposals need updating to reflect current market conditions. The incoming parliament must now decide whether to carry the bill forward, and how to square stronger player protections with the risk that heavy restrictions push players toward illegal operators. No vote date has been confirmed.