Romania Online Casino License in 2026: What It Really Costs

The cheapest number attached to a Romania online casino license is the EUR 3,500 file-analysis fee, and almost every guide leads with it. The numbers that decide whether you should apply are different ones: a EUR 300,000 annual licence fee, an authorisation tax of 30% of gross gaming revenue with a floor of EUR 480,000 per year, a EUR 500,000 annual contribution to responsible-gambling programmes, and a guarantee fund of EUR 5,000,000 for online casino activity. Before your platform records its first bet, the recurring statutory bill is roughly EUR 1.28 million a year.

That is not a market for testing an idea. It is a market for operators who have already proven their model somewhere cheaper and now want access to Romanian players inside the law — and for them, it works. Romania is an EU member with a single national regulator, a licence that runs ten years, and an enforcement machine that actively removes unlicensed competitors from the market.

One more thing has changed since the guides of a few years ago were written. The old advice — incorporate anywhere in the EU, appoint a local representative, apply from abroad — is dead law. Since the 2023 amendments, a licence is granted only to a company registered in Romania or to an EU/EEA/Swiss entity that has registered a permanent establishment in Romania. An earlier version of this page carried the local-representative advice and quoted share capital from 30,000 lei. Both parts are now wrong, which is exactly why this rewrite exists.

What changed between 2023 and 2026

Romanian gambling law is built on Government Emergency Ordinance no. 77/2009, but the version that governs the market today has been rewritten in three waves.

GEO no. 82/2023 (confirmed by Law no. 107/2024) is the structural one. It introduced the establishment requirement — Romanian company or Romanian permanent establishment of an EU/EEA/Swiss entity — and raised the fee architecture across the board. It is the ordinance that ended remote licensing from abroad.

GEO no. 80/2024 adjusted the regime again, including how outstanding fees are treated when an operator surrenders a licence after the rules change under it — a clause that tells you something about how often the rules change.

Law no. 141/2025 is the fiscal one. From 1 August 2025 the online authorisation tax rose from 21% to 30% of gross gaming revenue, with the annual minimum raised to EUR 480,000. The same package gave the regulator new enforcement instruments, which it has been using: in October 2025 the National Gambling Office blacklisted Polymarket by name, and ordered Google and Meta to pull sponsored ads for unlicensed operators.

Through all of it, the regulator itself — Oficiul National pentru Jocuri de Noroc (ONJN), the National Gambling Office — has stayed in place. Proposals to fold it into the tax agency circulated in the Romanian press during 2025; as of the end of that year ONJN was still issuing orders, running inspections, and maintaining the licence registers. Treat the reorganisation talk as political noise until a law says otherwise.

The two licences ONJN issues

Romania separates the permission to exist from the permission to operate, and it licenses suppliers as well as operators.

A Class 1 licence is the B2C organiser's licence. It is valid for ten years. On its own it earns you nothing: you also need an annual authorisation, which for online gambling covers the entire activity on one platform, reachable through one or more domain names. A useful quirk: the online casino authorisation includes online slots and online poker, so one authorisation covers the full casino vertical.

A Class 2 licence is for B2B suppliers, and the obligation reaches further than most people expect. ONJN has issued Class 2 licences to:

• software and game providers;
• platform management, hosting and data-centre providers;
• live casino streaming providers;
• certification laboratories, auditors and conformity-assessment bodies;
• payment processors;
• marketing affiliates; and
• manufacturers and distributors of gaming equipment for the land-based sector.

The process is document-driven. With minor exceptions, licensing runs as a closed-box procedure: you submit the file, the Supervisory Committee — which meets roughly twice a month — decides on the documents alone, and complete documentation must be lodged at least nine business days before the meeting. The licence and authorisation take effect on the first day of the month after approval, with the taxes paid in advance. The state collects before you operate, not after.

What a Romania online casino license costs

These are the statutory figures under GEO no. 77/2009 as amended, current after Law no. 141/2025. The full framework is summarised in the ICLG Gambling 2026 Romania chapter, written by a Bucharest law firm, and in the CMS expert guide.

Two of these deserve a closer look, because they behave differently from how they read.

The EUR 480,000 minimum converts the 30% rate into something much harsher for a small operation. Thirty percent of GGR equals EUR 480,000 at exactly EUR 1.6 million of annual GGR. Below that line, you pay the minimum anyway — at EUR 800,000 of GGR, the authorisation tax alone is an effective 60% of your gross win. The tax table quietly defines the minimum viable size of a licensed Romanian casino, and it is not small.

The 2% tax on participation fees is not a GGR tax at all. Since 1 January 2019 it applies to the total transferred from players' bank accounts into their game accounts each month — a turnover-side tax on deposits, payable by the 25th of the following month, whatever your hold turns out to be. On top of all this sits ordinary corporate income tax at 16% on profit, with a specific rule for casino activity: a 5% turnover tax applies if the profit tax would come to less than 5% of revenue.

Add the recurring items and the annual statutory floor is EUR 1,280,000 — licence fee, authorisation minimum and responsible-gambling contribution — before the deposit tax, before the guarantee capital is parked, and before you have paid for software, payments, staff or a single ad. For how a full launch budget stacks up beyond the licence line, see our breakdown of online casino startup costs.

What the licence forces on your software

Most licensing guides stop at fees. In practice, a large share of the compliance burden lands on the technical stack, and it is worth knowing before you choose one.

Servers. If your main gaming server sits outside Romania, you must operate safe and mirror servers on Romanian territory. This is not a paper requirement: the regulator's own leadership said in 2025 that real access to operators' mirror servers had been missing and was being fixed, which tells you where supervision is heading — toward the regulator reading your data directly rather than trusting your reports.

Certification and reporting. The remote gambling system must be certified and audited under ONJN Order no. 93/2016, and operators file structured reports under Order no. 47/2016. Adding a new game to an authorised platform passes through its own EUR 250 analysis file. Certified randomness is assumed rather than admired here — game math documentation and a GLI-standard RNG certificate are the entry ticket, the same as in Malta.

Payments. Every payment to a player must run through a payment processor holding its own Class 2 licence, and every payment instrument must carry the identification details of the person using it. That second rule effectively closes the door on anonymous cryptocurrency play — an instrument that cannot identify its holder does not meet the standard.

Self-exclusion. Since 17 June 2025, ONJN Order no. 79/2025 runs a centralised, encrypted database of self-excluded players. Operators must check it before every gaming session and refuse play to anyone listed. Your platform needs this lookup wired into session start, not bolted onto registration.

Your supplier list is a compliance surface. Class 2 licensees are prohibited — under criminal liability — from serving unlicensed operations that target Romania, with targeting defined broadly: Romanian-language content, accepting RON, or allowing access from Romanian IP addresses. If a supplier on your stack also serves the grey market aimed at Romania, that is now their legal problem, and quickly yours.

Advertising is its own compliance programme

Romania has tightened gambling advertising every year since 2023, and the current rules are specific enough to need their own review before you plan a campaign:

• outdoor advertising is capped at 35 square metres per panel;
• unsolicited electronic messages promoting gambling are banned outright;
• bonuses may be advertised only on your own site, on a Class 2-licensed affiliate's site, or by message to active players in your database;
• audiovisual gambling content and ads are banned between 6:00 and 23:00, with a carve-out for betting ads during live sport;
• since 6 October 2025, gambling ads may not feature public figures — politicians, athletes, artists or online personalities whose notoriety could encourage play; and
• ad contracts for billboards and TV carry a 5% promotion fee and must be reported to ONJN within five working days.

Draft laws in Parliament would go further — local-council vetoes over gambling premises, wider outdoor bans, distance rules around schools. Not all of them will pass; the direction of travel is unmistakable.

The player tax, and the market it shapes

Romania also taxes the player, at the moment of withdrawal, with the operator required to withhold. The scale is progressive: 4% on withdrawals up to roughly EUR 2,000, rising through a middle bracket to 40% on the portion above roughly EUR 13,500. A big winner cashing out sees the state take a large bite before the money leaves the platform.

Be honest with yourself about what that does to demand. A withholding tax at withdrawal is visible to players in the worst possible moment, and it is one reason unlicensed sites keep finding Romanian customers. The state's answer has been enforcement rather than relief: over 1,500 domains on the ONJN blacklist with ISPs ordered to block them, takedown orders to platforms under the Digital Services Act with five-hour deadlines, and — per the regulator's 2024 activity report — 14,100 inspections in a single year, fines of about RON 8,772,000 (EUR 1.75 million), 59 licence revocations and 151 suspensions. Playing on an unlicensed site is itself an offence for the player, fined at RON 5,000 to 10,000.

For a licensed operator this cuts both ways. You carry a tax structure the grey market ignores — and you operate in one of the few markets where the regulator actively removes your unlicensed competitors, orders their ads off Google and Meta, and redirects their traffic to a state IP address.

Who Romania makes sense for

Follow the arithmetic and the profile writes itself. You need EUR 1.6 million of annual GGR for the 30% rate to even apply as written, EUR 5 million parked in a guarantee fund, and EUR 1.28 million a year in statutory payments before operating costs. Romania rewards operators who arrive with capital, a proven product, and a specific plan for Romanian players — and punishes everyone else with a cost floor they cannot dilute.

If you are choosing a first licence for a lean, multi-market launch, this is probably not it. The licence-lane comparison covers how national regimes like Romania sit against established hubs and the offshore route; what is left of the offshore lane after 2024 is its own story, and Curacao's rebuilt regime is the usual starting point for operators not yet ready for a market like this one. A gambling business plan that models the EUR 480,000 minimum against realistic Romanian GGR projections will tell you in an afternoon whether the numbers close.

What Romania offers in exchange is durability: EU membership, a ten-year licence, one regulator, a legal market where your brand can advertise (within the rules above) and your competitors get blacklisted. For an operator committed to the market, those are real assets.

Where the games fit

Whichever licence lane you pick, the game content travels with you — and the regulatory work it brings is the same kind everywhere: certified randomness, documented mathematics, auditable behaviour.

CasinoWebScripts has been building casino games and platforms from Bucharest since 2010 — 16 years inside the same market this article describes. The catalog is 252+ HTML5 titles — slots, table games, video poker, scratch cards — running on a GLI-19 certified RNG, each with full math documentation of the kind certification files are built from. Games are sold outright with 0% revenue share, which matters more than usual in a market that already takes 30% of your GGR: a game you own adds nothing to the percentage leaving your books. We build the software; licensing strategy belongs to you and your counsel.

Frequently asked questions

Is online gambling legal in Romania?

Yes, when operated under an ONJN Class 1 licence with a valid authorisation. Operating without one is a criminal offence for the organiser, and playing on unlicensed sites is an administrative offence for the player, fined between RON 5,000 and RON 10,000.

How much does a Romania online casino license cost?

The recurring statutory items are EUR 300,000 per year in licence fees, an authorisation tax of 30% of GGR with a EUR 480,000 annual minimum, and a EUR 500,000 responsible-gambling contribution — about EUR 1.28 million per year — plus a EUR 5,000,000 guarantee fund for online casino, RON 1,000,000 minimum share capital, and a 2% monthly tax on player deposits.

Can a foreign company get a Romanian gambling licence?

Only through presence. Since GEO no. 82/2023, the licence is granted to companies registered in Romania or to EU/EEA/Swiss entities with a permanent establishment registered in Romania. Applying from abroad through a local representative is no longer possible.

How long does an ONJN licence take and how long does it last?

Class 1 and Class 2 licences run for ten years. The related authorisation is annual. Files are decided by ONJN's Supervisory Committee, which meets roughly twice a month; complete documentation must be submitted at least nine business days before a meeting, and the licence takes effect the first day of the month after approval, taxes prepaid.

What taxes do Romanian online casinos pay?

An authorisation tax of 30% of GGR (minimum EUR 480,000 per year), a 2% monthly tax on participation fees (deposits), a 0.5% cultural-fund contribution, a 5% fee on advertising contracts, and 16% corporate income tax — while withholding a progressive 4% to 40% income tax from player withdrawals on the state's behalf.

Do game and software suppliers need a licence in Romania?

Yes. B2B suppliers — game providers, platform hosts, payment processors, affiliates, certification labs — need a Class 2 licence: EUR 20,000 per year plus a EUR 15,000 annual responsible-gambling contribution, and they are barred under criminal liability from serving unlicensed operations that target Romania.

Nothing here is legal or tax advice — the figures are the statutory rates as amended through Law no. 141/2025, and a market this actively legislated deserves verification with Romanian counsel before you budget. If the numbers above fit your plan and you are weighing what a Romania online casino license means for your software stack, tell us what you are building and we will map the game and platform side of it with you.