ΕλληνικάAlbania has completed the legal framework for a regulated online sports betting market, but the licensing competition has not opened. In response to questions put to it this month, the Ministry of Finance confirmed that all implementing acts have now been approved and that the system is legally ready, while stating expressly that the licensing process has not yet officially opened. The decision to open the competition rests with the Licensing Commission; only once that decision is taken will the Gambling Supervisory Authority publish the notice inviting applications.
For an international operator this is the most favorable moment in the cycle and the most frequently wasted. Under Decision No. 194 of 26 March 2026, applications must be submitted within forty-five calendar days of the date specified in the competition notice, in a single phase, against a published scoring methodology. The statutory eligibility conditions are demanding and several of them cannot be satisfied quickly. An operator that begins work when the notice appears will be assembling a corporate structure, evidencing three years of multi-jurisdiction turnover and integrating a platform to Albanian technical standards inside six weeks. That is not a realistic timetable, and it is the reason this article exists.
Albania’s return to regulated sports betting
Albania prohibited sports betting in 2019, closing a market that had operated through more than four thousand physical betting shops. The prohibition did not remove demand. Activity moved to offshore sites and informal channels, and the policy question over the following years became not whether Albanians would bet but whether the state would see any of it. One industry estimate puts the unregulated market at around €2.5 billion in annual turnover.
The reversal came with Law No. 18/2024, adopted by Parliament on 15 February 2024, amending Law No. 155/2015 on gambling in the Republic of Albania. It lifted the five-year prohibition on sports betting, but on a deliberately narrow basis: betting is permitted online only. Land-based betting shops remain prohibited, and the physical gambling estate continues to be confined to casinos in five-star hotels. The model the legislature chose is a small, digital, closely monitored market rather than a return to the pre-2019 environment, and every feature of the licensing regime follows from that choice.
Where the law stands in August 2026
Two years elapsed between the amending law and the completion of the secondary legislation, and it is worth being precise about what is now in force and what is not.
On 11 March 2026 the Council of Ministers adopted the technical standards and minimum operating rules for the platforms, websites and applications operated by licensed operators. These govern platform infrastructure, player identification, and billing and payment procedures, and require betting transactions to be recorded and monitored in real time by the competent Albanian state bodies. On 26 March 2026 the Council of Ministers adopted Decision No. 194, establishing the evaluation criteria, timelines, competitive procedure and scoring methodology for the grant of online sports betting licenses. That decision entered into force on 30 March 2026 following publication in the Official Gazette, and it is administered by the Gambling Supervisory Authority in cooperation with the Licensing Commission.
The Authority has since confirmed that the framework comprises eight subordinate acts in total, Council of Ministers decisions and instructions taken together, and classifies them as the 2026 Regulatory Package. The last two were approved on 26 June 2026. Of these, Decision No. 488 governs the circumstances, procedures and time limits for the suspension or revocation of an online sports betting license, and the second deals with the administration of the special fund created from gambling activity. Completion of the framework should not be read as the launch of the market: none of these acts announces a tender date, awards a license or names an operator.
What has not happened is the competition itself. As at August 2026 no notice has been published, no application window has opened, and no date has been announced. The framework is complete and dormant. An operator reading commentary that describes Albania as an open market should treat that description as premature; equally, an operator waiting for the market to open before beginning work will be preparing an application against a published deadline rather than in advance of one.
The licensing model
The license available is a single category, online sports betting, granted by the Gambling Supervisory Authority following a competitive procedure administered in cooperation with the Licensing Commission established under Article 17/1 of the Gambling Law, which together with a technical secretariat organizes the competitive and evaluation procedures. The statutory cap is ten licenses nationwide. Decision No. 194 establishes a single-stage competitive procedure: applications are submitted complete in one phase and are subject to formal verification, technical assessment and comparative evaluation, with no sequence of negotiations or clarification rounds. Applications may be made by joint-stock companies, including authorized consortium structures acting through a designated representative, which is a point of flexibility that operators considering a partnered entry should note early.
The principal eligibility conditions are set by the amended Gambling Law and are cumulative. The applicant must be a joint-stock company with its headquarters in Albania and registered with the National Business Centre. Share capital must be not less than ALL 40 million, in the region of €400,000. The applicant must declare the source of the capital to be invested in the activity. It must demonstrate experience in the gambling sector in not fewer than three European Union or OECD countries and for not fewer than three years, whether directly or through a shareholder holding not less than thirty per cent of the company’s shares. And the applicant, or at least one of its shareholders, must have generated turnover from gambling activity of not less than ALL 2 billion, in the region of €20 million, in the last financial year.
Two further conditions are easily overlooked because they are operational rather than financial. The applicant must demonstrate the necessary administrative, organizational and reliability capacities, and must have in place an agreement with a provider for the programs, systems, websites and applications required for online sports betting. The second of these means that platform procurement is a licensing condition and not a post-award implementation step: an applicant without a contracted provider is not merely unprepared but arguably ineligible.
Two separate guarantees are required, and published summaries frequently mention only the first. The operator must freeze a fund of ALL 120 million in a dedicated bank account in favor of the Ministry of Finance as security for the payment of winnings, released only by order of the Minister. It must separately freeze a fund of ALL 50 million in a dedicated account in favor of the Gambling Supervisory Authority as security for periodic tax and regulatory obligations, likewise released only by ministerial order. The license fee itself is not a fixed figure. It is the amount offered by the applicant declared winner, subject to a statutory floor of ALL 400 million for the whole licensing period, double the ALL 200 million that applied under the previous law, and a non-refundable application fee of ALL 500,000 is payable on submission whether or not the application succeeds.
The structure of the fee matters commercially. Because the economic offer is itself scored, an applicant is bidding rather than paying a tariff, and the instalment basis means the bid is a commitment across the whole term rather than an entry cost recovered in year one. On duration, published sources indicate that gambling licenses in Albania have historically been granted for a ten-year term, and the instalment structure presupposes a term of some length; the term applying to this category should be confirmed before any financial model is built on it, since it determines the annual cost of the bid.
The effect of these conditions taken together is to exclude start-ups and newly formed vehicles entirely. The turnover and multi-jurisdiction experience requirements are directed at established international groups, and an applicant that does not already satisfy them cannot manufacture compliance within an application window.
How the competition is scored
Decision No. 194 allocates a maximum of one hundred points across five criteria, and the weighting tells an operator more about Albania’s intentions than any policy statement.
Thirty points are available for the economic offer, awarded proportionally by comparison with competing bids. Thirty points are available for industry experience, assessing the demonstrated gambling-sector expertise of the applicant or its qualifying shareholders. Twenty points go to organizational and administrative capacity, evaluating governance structures, internal controls, operational reliability and risk-management systems. Fifteen points go to technological and software capabilities, covering cybersecurity standards, system integrity, international certifications and integration with anti-money-laundering monitoring systems. Five points go to the business plan, which must cover a period of at least three years.
Three conclusions follow for anyone preparing a bid. First, price is not decisive: the economic offer carries thirty of one hundred points, so an applicant cannot simply outbid a better-credentialled competitor, and equally a strong operator should not assume that credentials alone will carry it past an aggressive bidder. Second, sixty-five points sit in experience, organizational capacity and technology, all of which are evidenced by documents that take months to assemble and cannot be improvised in a forty-five-day window. Third, the technology criterion expressly rewards international certifications and demonstrated integration with anti-money-laundering monitoring; an operator holding recognized certifications should ensure they are documented and translated, and one without them should consider whether they can be obtained before a notice appears.
Applicants are ranked in descending order by total score. Where two or more obtain equal points, ranking is determined by lottery conducted by the Licensing Commission on prior notice to participants, and non-attendance does not affect the validity of the process. In a tightly contested round that provision is not academic, and it is a further reason to build a file that clears the field rather than one that merely qualifies.
The mechanics after scoring are worth knowing. The Licensing Commission approves the list of participants, ranked by points, within ten days of the conclusion of the selection process, and the candidate with the highest score is declared the winner. The Minister responsible for finance then approves the grant of the license once the successful applicant has satisfied the guarantee fund requirement within thirty days. An operator that has not arranged the ALL 170 million in combined guarantees before bidding has thirty days to produce it or loses the award.
Within seven days of the Licensing Commission’s decision to open the competitive procedure, the Gambling Supervisory Authority publishes the competition notice on its official website, in two international newspapers, and in the Bulletin of Public Notices. Albania is not seeking a closed domestic round. In practice this gives an operator roughly seven days of notice before the forty-five day application period begins to run.
How many licenses will actually be issued
This is the point on which most published commentary is misleading, and it is commercially the most important feature of the Albanian process.
Ten is a statutory maximum, not a number of licenses that will be issued. The decision to open the competition, and the number of licenses for which it is opened, rests with the Licensing Commission. The Commission may open a competition for up to ten licenses; it may equally open one for three, or for one. Market participants in Albania have publicly raised the concern that a first round confined to a small number of licenses would produce an oligopoly or a monopoly, and the opposition has raised questions about the transparency of the procedure, beneficial ownership verification and the source of applicants’ capital.
For an operator assessing Albania, three consequences follow. The competitive intensity of the first round cannot be modelled until the notice is published. A file that would comfortably secure one of ten licenses may not secure one of three. And the scoring methodology in Decision No. 194 becomes the document that matters most, because in a constrained round marginal points decide outcomes. Any serious pre-application work should be built around that methodology rather than around the eligibility conditions alone, which merely establish the right to compete.
Losing the license: suspension and revocation
An operator bidding several million euros should understand how the licence can be taken away, and Decision No. 488 of 26 June 2026 now sets that out. A license may be suspended or revoked where the operator ceases to meet the fundamental requirements of the authorization, fails to set aside the required guarantee fund, or commits specified breaches. Suspension is also available where the operator fails to meet its payment obligations to the Gambling Supervisory Authority or fails to pay amounts owed to winners.
The distinction matters. On suspension the operator is given a period in which to remedy the irregularity; on revocation the license is lost. Proceedings may be initiated by the Authority on the basis of reports, complaints, information from other institutions, or irregularities identified during inspections and financial, technical and electronic checks. Where the evidence supports it, the matter passes to the Licensing Commission, which makes a recommendation, and the final decision rests with the Minister responsible for finance, who must give reasons. The operator must be notified and given the opportunity to respond before any decision is taken.
Repetition is treated cumulatively. A second breach of the same type or in the same category within a three-year period may trigger suspension proceedings, and a third may trigger revocation proceedings. For a group operating across several jurisdictions this makes internal compliance record-keeping in Albania a license-preservation issue rather than an administrative one.
The guarantee fund carries its own sanction. If the successful applicant does not set aside the required amount within the deadline, the Licensing Commission may begin proceedings to suspend or revoke the license it has just won, subject to the applicant’s right to respond and to a hearing. Winning the competition and holding the license are therefore separated by a funding step that must be arranged in advance.
Can foreign operators enter Albania?
Yes, and the framework is in substance designed for them. The requirement of three years’ gambling experience across at least three European Union or OECD jurisdictions cannot realistically be met by a domestic Albanian applicant without international operations, and the ALL 2 billion turnover threshold points in the same direction. The regime contemplates established foreign groups as its natural licensees.
What it does not permit is entry from offshore. The licensee must be a joint-stock company with its headquarters in Albania, registered with the National Business Centre. An international group must therefore incorporate and capitalize an Albanian subsidiary, and the group’s qualifying experience and turnover are brought to bear through the shareholding rather than by the foreign entity applying in its own name. This has structuring consequences that should be resolved before incorporation rather than after: which group entity holds the shares, whether the qualifying turnover sits in that entity or elsewhere in the group, and how the chain of ownership will be evidenced.
Ultimate beneficial ownership disclosure should be assumed to be searching. Beneficial ownership verification and the source of applicants’ capital have been identified publicly as the points on which the integrity of the process will be judged, which makes it likely that they will be examined rigorously rather than formally. A group with a complex or opaque ownership chain, or with capital whose provenance is not readily documented, should treat this as the first workstream rather than a closing formality.
AML, KYC and player protection
The technical standards adopted in March 2026 place player identification at the center of the platform requirements, and identification is not an operational detail in this market but a licensing condition. Player registration data, identity data and transaction records must be retained, with a three-year retention period reported for the player register maintained by operators. Play is permitted only where the user logs in with an official identity document, including a scanned card, and the systems must incorporate mechanisms to track player activity. Age verification is mandatory, and operators should note that Albanian gambling legislation has historically set the minimum age at twenty-one rather than eighteen, which is higher than most European markets and has consequences for registration flows built to an eighteen-year standard.
On player protection, the framework provides for a national electronic register of excluded players, self-exclusion by the player, and a mechanism by which family members may request that a person’s access to gambling be blocked. That last feature is unusual and operationally significant: an operator’s account-management architecture must be capable of imposing and lifting account restrictions on a third-party request routed through the register, not only on a request from the account holder, and of blocking registration or re-registration by an excluded person across the platform. Operators are also required to publish information on the risks of addiction, the actual probability of winning, and the structures providing counselling or treatment.
Standard Albanian anti-money-laundering obligations apply alongside the gambling-specific rules, including customer due diligence and the reporting of suspicious transactions. The distinguishing feature of the Albanian model is the requirement that betting transactions be recorded and monitored in real time by the competent state bodies. An operator’s compliance and reporting architecture must therefore be capable of continuous supervised data flow, not periodic returns, and this is a platform question that cannot be resolved by policy documents alone.
On the supervisory picture, the Financial Intelligence Agency reports that between January 2024 and December 2025 it identified twelve cases with typologies connected to sports betting, gambling or operators in the sector, of which four were referred to law enforcement, and that most were flagged by banks. The Agency assesses the gambling sector as carrying medium money-laundering risk. An operator entering Albania should expect its banking counterparties to be the principal source of reporting and should calibrate its own transaction monitoring accordingly.
Payments and the movement of gambling funds
Payments connected with betting may be made only through authorized financial agents. These are understood to comprise second-tier banks, the Albanian postal service, and financial and electronic money institutions licensed by the Bank of Albania. The operator may not accept cash from players in any circumstances. Deposits and withdrawals must accordingly move through the regulated payment layer, and a player account must be capable of being funded and settled only by those means. This is a structural constraint rather than a compliance preference, and it has to be reflected in the payment architecture before launch rather than adapted afterwards.
Two practical consequences deserve attention. First, an operator’s existing payment service providers may not be licensed in Albania, and provider onboarding is not instantaneous; where an application will be scored in part on operational readiness, unresolved payment arrangements are a weakness. Second, the requirement that transactions be recorded and monitored in real time by state bodies extends to the payment layer, which means the integration burden falls on both the platform and the payment stack.
Advertising and customer acquisition
This is the section where operators are most likely to be misled by older material, because the 2024 reform reversed the previous position. Under the earlier regime gambling advertising was prohibited in the media. The amending law expressly permits publicity by licensed online sports betting operators in electronic media and on their own authorized websites, and permits publicity in audiovisual media during the transmission of sporting events and of sports programmes connected to those events, but only within the time window from 22:00 to 08:00, and only on the conditions set by the law and by the regulation approved by the Licensing Commission after obtaining the opinion of the audiovisual media authority.
Three limits apply within that permission. Publicity is prohibited during news bulletins and during informative programmes connected with politics. It must not be addressed to minors. And it must visibly carry the statutory warning that gambling creates dependency and that prolonged play requires caution.
Sponsorship is also permitted, and this is commercially significant. Licensed operators may sponsor sports teams and may advertise at venues where sporting activity takes place, with one express exclusion: sporting events in any discipline in the under-21 categories. An acquisition model for Albania therefore looks quite different from one built for a prohibition market, and an operator that has written off broadcast and sponsorship inventory on the strength of pre-2024 commentary has misjudged the opportunity.
The treatment of affiliates, influencer promotion and digital marketing beyond the operator’s own authorized sites is not addressed with the same clarity in the material available, and the format and transmission rules are set by a regulation of the Licensing Commission rather than by the statute itself. Those should be verified against the regulation before any acquisition plan is committed, and the promotion of unlicensed operators remains an enforcement matter rather than a marketing one.
Taxation and the economic cost of entry
Gambling in Albania is taxed under Article 52 of Law No. 155/2015, which provides that gross gaming income for all categories of gambling is taxed at fifteen per cent, save where otherwise provided by special law. The base is gross gaming revenue, that is stakes less winnings paid to players, rather than turnover. Corporate income tax and the general Albanian fiscal regime apply alongside the gambling tax.
The purpose of setting this out is not tax planning but market-entry modelling. The cost of entering Albania comprises the bid amount for the license, subject to its statutory floor; the ALL 40 million share capital; the guarantee for the payment of winnings; the technical compliance and integration expenditure required by the March 2026 standards; local corporate establishment and ongoing administration; and then the fifteen per cent gaming tax against gross gaming revenue in operation. An operator that models the license fee alone will materially understate the cost of the market.
Against that, the state’s own expectations are modest, which is itself informative about market scale. Public estimates of the annual budget yield from formalization have ranged from around ALL 2 billion to €20 to 22 million. Albania is a small market, and the commercial case for entry rests less on its size than on early position in a capped licensing regime.
Enforcement against the offshore market
The economic value of a capped license depends on whether unlicensed competitors are effectively excluded, and this is the question a licensed operator should ask before bidding rather than after.
Albania has a track record of enforcement activity, and the mechanism is specific rather than general. The Authority confirms that there are at present no licensed online sports betting operators, and that where unlicensed activity is identified the cases are referred to the State Police as a criminal offence under Article 197 of the Criminal Code, while the online addresses are sent to the electronic and postal communications regulator for closure. Enforcement has also included the removal of gambling-related content at scale and the blocking of websites by internet service providers, with figures reported in the hundreds of thousands of content items and over a thousand sites blocked. The technical standards adopted in 2026 were framed with the offshore market expressly in view.
For context on the rest of the sector, the Authority reports one licensed operator in the casino category and nine in the category of casinos located in five-star hotels. The absence of licensed operators is therefore specific to online sports betting rather than symptomatic of the licensing system as a whole.
An operator should nonetheless form its own view on enforcement effectiveness. The prohibition between 2019 and 2024 did not eliminate betting; it displaced it. Whether a regulated market with ten or fewer licensees, prohibited from advertising in the principal media, can win players back from established offshore brands is the central commercial risk of this market, and it is a question about enforcement capability rather than about law.
What international operators should do now
Market entry in a single-stage competitive procedure begins long before the application is filed. On the assumption that the notice will be published without extensive advance warning, the following should be underway now rather than on publication.
The corporate structure should be settled: which group entity will hold the Albanian joint-stock company, how the qualifying experience and turnover are held within the group, and whether the chain of ownership can be evidenced to a regulator examining beneficial ownership closely. Eligibility should be tested rather than assumed, in particular the three-year presence in three European Union or OECD jurisdictions and the ALL 2 billion turnover threshold, and the evidential documents for both should be assembled and translated. The source of the capital to be invested must be documented to the standard applied to source-of-funds enquiries generally, which is a documentary exercise rather than a declaration.
The applicant’s licensing history should be reviewed before it is disclosed rather than after. Regulatory findings, refusals, suspensions or conditions imposed in other jurisdictions bear directly on the industry experience and organizational capacity criteria, which together carry fifty of the hundred points, and an adverse history is better addressed in the application than discovered by the evaluator.
On the operational side, the platform should be assessed against the March 2026 technical standards, with particular attention to real-time transaction reporting, player identification and the payment interface, and international certifications should be collected and translated because the scoring rewards them expressly. The anti-money-laundering programme, player registration architecture and self-exclusion handling should be mapped to the Albanian requirements rather than to a general European template, and the twenty-one year age threshold and the family-request blocking mechanism should be specifically accommodated. Payment providers licensed in Albania should be identified and engaged. The acquisition model should be rebuilt on the assumption that print and audiovisual advertising is unavailable.
Local contracts should be negotiated in draft before the notice appears, not after it. The agreement with the platform and systems provider is a licensing condition; payment agent arrangements, local hosting and data arrangements where required, and local professional engagements all take time to conclude and are difficult to complete inside a forty-five-day window alongside the drafting of the application itself. The application documentation should likewise be assembled in advance: corporate and shareholding evidence, audited financial statements evidencing the turnover threshold, licensing certificates from the qualifying jurisdictions, source-of-capital documentation, the business plan covering at least three years, technical certifications, and the anti-money-laundering and player-protection policies, each in the form and language the authority requires, with legalization and translation completed rather than pending.
Above all, the scoring methodology in Decision No. 194 should be analyzed and the application built to it. In a competition that may be opened for fewer licenses than the statutory maximum, the difference between a compliant file and a competitive one is where the value lies. OIKONOMAKIS LAW, through its Tirana office and its cross-border corporate and regulatory teams, advises international operators on regulatory eligibility analysis, licensing, Albanian corporate structuring, local representation, the preparation and review of applications, anti-money-laundering and compliance frameworks, contractual arrangements, payment and regulatory matters, and continuing legal support after licensing. Further information is available on our corporate law and commercial law pages. Our Tirana office can be reached on +355 45301325 or at al@oikonomakislaw.com.
Frequently asked questions
Can an operator apply for an Albanian sports betting license now? No. The legal framework is complete but the licensing competition has not been opened. The Licensing Commission must first decide to open a round, after which the Gambling Supervisory Authority publishes the call for applications. No date has been announced.
How does an operator obtain a gambling license in Albania? Through a single-stage competitive procedure. Once the call is published, applications must be filed complete within forty-five calendar days, accompanied by a non-refundable application fee, and are then scored out of one hundred points across economic offer, industry experience, organizational capacity, technology and business plan. Applicants are ranked by score, with ties resolved by lottery.
Can a foreign operator hold an Albanian license? Yes, and the eligibility conditions are designed with international groups in mind. The licensee must nonetheless be a joint-stock company headquartered in Albania and registered with the National Business Centre, so an Albanian subsidiary must be incorporated and capitalized. Authorized consortium structures acting through a designated representative may also apply.
How many licenses will be awarded? The statutory maximum is ten. The number actually offered in any round is decided by the Licensing Commission, which may open a competition for fewer. This is the single largest commercial uncertainty in the Albanian process.
What does entry cost? The license fee is bid rather than fixed, subject to a statutory floor reported at ALL 400 million and payable in installments across the term. To that must be added share capital of ALL 40 million, the guarantee for the payment of winnings, the application fee, platform and compliance expenditure, local establishment, and gaming tax at fifteen per cent of gross gaming revenue in operation.
Is land-based sports betting permitted? No. The 2024 reform permits sports betting in online form only. Betting shops remain prohibited, and physical gambling is confined to casinos in five-star hotels.
What tax applies to a licensed operator? Gross gaming income is taxed at fifteen per cent under Article 52 of Law No. 155/2015, that is stakes less winnings paid, rather than turnover. Corporate income tax and the general Albanian fiscal regime apply alongside it.
What should an operator do before the competition opens? Settle the corporate structure and evidence the qualifying experience and turnover; document the source of capital; contract a platform provider, since that agreement is a licensing condition; assemble and translate the application file; and build the bid to the published scoring methodology rather than to the eligibility conditions alone.
Disclaimer: this article sets out the position on Albanian online sports betting licensing as at August 2026 and does not constitute legal advice in an individual case. The licensing competition had not been opened at the date of writing, and the number of licenses to be offered, the application window and the published criteria remain to be announced by the competent authorities. Statutory thresholds, fees, tax rates and regulatory requirements should be verified at the time any application is prepared. Nothing here guarantees the grant of any license, any regulatory outcome, any processing time or any commercial result. Assessment of a specific matter requires advice from a qualified lawyer. No liability is accepted for decisions taken solely on the basis of this article.
Prepared by Christos Oikonomakis, Chairman, OIKONOMAKIS LAW