Malta Gambling License Cost: What You Actually Pay in 2026

A Malta gambling license cost is usually quoted as a single number: EUR 25,000 a year. That figure is real. On its own, it is close to useless as a budget.

The Malta Gaming Authority charges in four separate ways, and only one of them is the annual licence fee. Two of the other three are the reason operators who budgeted EUR 25,000 find themselves EUR 40,000 short in year one, and the fourth is not a fee at all — it is capital you must be able to show before anyone reads your application.

Here is what each one is, what it actually costs, and which of them decides whether Malta makes sense for the size of operation you are planning.

The Four Numbers

Every euro the MGA collects from a B2C licensee falls into one of these buckets:

• Application fee — EUR 5,000, one-time, non-refundable. You pay it to be assessed, not to be approved.
• Fixed annual licence fee — EUR 25,000 for a Gaming Service Licence, or EUR 10,000 if you offer solely Type 4 (controlled skill games). Payable upfront, in advance, every year.
• Compliance contribution — a percentage of gaming revenue, paid monthly, with a hard annual minimum and maximum that depend on the game type.
• Minimum issued and paid-up share capital — EUR 100,000 for Type 1 or Type 2, EUR 40,000 for Type 3 or Type 4.

Those are the regulator's numbers, published in the MGA's own guidance note on licence fees and taxation. Everything else you will pay — corporate services, key persons, the system audit, legal work — goes to somebody other than the MGA, and varies too much by structure to quote honestly.

The Compliance Contribution Is the Number That Decides It

This is the part that gets modelled wrong, and it gets modelled wrong in a specific way.

The compliance contribution is a sliding percentage of gaming revenue. Because it is expressed as a percentage, operators file it mentally under "scales with us" — small at launch, larger once we're winning. It does not work that way in the direction that matters. Each game type carries an annual minimum, and the minimum does not care how your first year went.

Run the floor for a slots and table games operation, which is Type 1. The fixed annual licence fee is EUR 25,000. The compliance contribution minimum is EUR 15,000. Before a single player registers, before the software, before the payment provider, before one salary, the MGA is owed EUR 40,000 a year.

That is the real entry price, and it is the number that should decide whether you apply.

The rate bands themselves are gentler than the reputation suggests, at least for casino. Type 1 takes 1.25% of the first EUR 3,000,000 of gaming revenue, then 1.00% of the next EUR 4,500,000, then 0.85%, 0.70%, 0.55%, and 0.40% on the remainder. Fixed odds betting under Type 2 opens at 4.00% on the first EUR 3,000,000 before falling away on the same shape of curve.

Type 4 is the interesting one, because it runs backwards. Controlled skill games start at 0.50% on the first EUR 2,000,000 and climb — 0.75%, 1.00%, 1.25%, 1.50%, 1.75%, and 2.00% on the remainder. Skill games are cheap to start and progressively more expensive to scale. Every other type is the opposite.

Payment is monthly, calculated on the revenue accrued in the reference month, due before the twentieth day of the month that follows. It is a cash-flow item, not an annual bill you can defer to your accountant in January.

Two Reliefs Almost Nobody Mentions

The same guidance note carries two footnotes that materially change the year-one arithmetic, and they are missing from nearly every guide that quotes the fee table above them.

The first: under the Directive on the Calculation of Compliance Contribution, the full minimum compliance contribution is not due from new operators until a full licence period has elapsed. The second: undertakings that qualify as start-ups under the relevant directive get a moratorium of twelve months during which they are exempt from paying compliance contributions at all.

Neither is automatic and neither is a reason to skip the arithmetic — you still need the EUR 25,000 licence fee, and you still need to be standing when the moratorium ends. But an operator who assumed a flat EUR 40,000 in year one may be planning around a number that is materially too high, which is its own kind of budgeting error.

Share Capital Is Not a Cost

Malta requires minimum issued and paid-up share capital of EUR 100,000 for a Type 1 or Type 2 licence, and EUR 40,000 for Type 3 or Type 4. Operators do one of two things with that requirement, and both are wrong.

Some leave it out of the plan entirely, then discover that the application cannot proceed because the money has to be issued and paid up, not pledged. Others add it to the fee total and conclude Malta costs EUR 140,000 to enter, which overstates it badly — that capital is still yours. It sits in your company. It funds the operation.

Where it does bite is liquidity. It is capital that must exist, in the company, at application, and it is not available to be spent on player acquisition while the regulator is looking at you.

If you hold approvals across more than one game type, the requirements accumulate — up to a cap of EUR 240,000.

You Probably Don't Need a Maltese Company

This is the most repeated piece of misinformation about Malta licensing, and it survives because it used to be true.

The MGA's application process guidance is direct about the current position: any company incorporated in the EU or EEA is eligible to apply for a gaming licence, provided it meets the share capital requirements and the annual financial statements reporting obligations. An operator already running a company in Ireland, Estonia, or Cyprus is not automatically obliged to incorporate a fresh Maltese entity to hold the licence.

That does not make Maltese incorporation a bad idea — the tax treatment below is the reason most licensees do incorporate there, and local corporate services exist because the compliance load is genuinely easier to carry from inside the jurisdiction. It means the cost of setting up a Maltese company belongs in the "structuring decision" column of your budget, not the "regulatory requirement" column.

The Taxes, Including the One That Changed in 2025

Gaming tax first, because the base is far narrower than people assume — and because the rate is about to change. Malta charges gaming tax only on revenue from Maltese players. Not on your revenue. On the slice of it that comes from a country of roughly half a million people. For an operator targeting Latin America or Asia, that line is frequently close to zero.

Two details decide what you actually owe. The first is the test itself, and for a remote operator it is not where the player happens to be standing: where a gaming service is offered solely by means of distance communication, taxability turns on whether the player is established, has a permanent address, or usually resides in Malta. A Maltese resident on holiday elsewhere still counts. A tourist in Valletta does not.

The second is the rate, and this is the detail that dates every Malta guide written before April 2026. The familiar flat 5% holds only until 30 September 2026. From 1 October 2026, the Gaming Tax (Amendment) Regulations replace it with 15% on Type 1 gaming revenue — casino, live casino, slots — and 10% on Types 2, 3 and 4. Revenue generated inside controlled gaming premises, and activity lawfully classified as a junket, stays at 5%.

For a casino operator that is a tripling, so be precise about what it touches. It applies to the Maltese-player slice only, which for most licensees is a small fraction of the book and for some is nothing at all. Licence fees and the compliance contribution are not affected by the amendment — the regulator changed the tax, not the dues.

Corporate income tax is where the reading gets harder. The headline rate is a flat 35%, and companies incorporated in Malta are taxed on a worldwide basis. The reason Malta is nevertheless described everywhere as a 5% jurisdiction is the full imputation and refund system: on distribution of dividends, shareholders may claim a refund of 6/7ths of the Malta tax paid on the underlying trading profits, which leaves an effective rate near 5%.

That description is now incomplete. On 2 September 2025 the Final Income Tax Without Imputation regulations were published, under which a Maltese entity may instead elect a flat 15% rate on its chargeable income. The 15% is a final tax: no imputation, no refund to anyone. An entity that opts in is locked into the mechanism for at least five consecutive years and cannot opt back out before that period expires.

Which of those two routes is cheaper depends entirely on your shareholder structure, your distribution policy, and whether your group falls within scope of the international minimum-tax rules that prompted the change. That is a question for a Maltese tax adviser and an accountant who has seen your numbers. It is not something to model from a blog post, including this one.

What the Process Costs in Time

The MGA assesses four things: whether the applicant is fit and proper to conduct gaming business, whether the business strategy is viable, whether it meets the statutory requirements and has the operational capacity to keep meeting them, and whether what was applied for has actually been built before going live.

In practice that means a fitness and propriety test covering shareholders, ultimate beneficial owners and key persons, with probity checks run against other national and international regulators. A source of wealth and source of funds review on the UBOs. A financial analysis of the business plan, with forecasts, marketing strategy and growth targets. Then a technical review of the gaming and control system.

Two sixty-day clocks are worth knowing about. An incomplete application is put into a one-time incomplete state for sixty days — miss that window and it is rejected and closed. Once the technical documentation clears review, you get sixty days to implement the system on a live-ready environment, during which you trigger an external system audit performed by an independent third party drawn from the MGA's pre-approved list. That auditor is not free, and their fee is not an MGA fee, which is precisely why it is missing from most cost tables.

One trap to plan around: a major change during the application — a shift affecting more than 75% of equity ownership, control or funding, or a change big enough to require a new business plan — means a fresh application, with a fresh application fee. Restructuring mid-application is expensive.

Get through it and the licence is valid for ten years, which is the single most underrated feature of the Maltese regime. The annual fees continue. The application does not.

Where This Sits in a Launch Budget

Take the MGA dues at their floor for a casino operation — EUR 5,000 once, then EUR 40,000 a year — and add the things that are not MGA fees: the system audit, the key persons, corporate services, the accountant who files the financial statements, and EUR 100,000 of share capital that has to be sitting still. A first-year Malta figure that starts with EUR 150,000 in cash requirement is not pessimistic.

Then notice what is not in that number: the platform, the games, the payment integrations, the back office, and the staff to run all of it. The licence buys you the right to operate. It does not buy you anything to operate with. We have broken the rest of that stack down in the online casino startup cost breakdown and the turnkey online casino price guide, and the payments layer — the one that surprises people almost as reliably as the compliance contribution — in the casino payment processing article.

Here is the position we will take, at the risk of talking an operator out of the most prestigious licence in the industry: for most people reading this, Malta is not the right first licence.

It is the right licence when you are entering regulated European markets, when banking and payment partners are refusing you without a tier-one regulator behind you, and when EUR 40,000 a year in regulatory dues is a rounding error against your marketing budget. It is the wrong licence when you are testing a market, when your revenue projection for year one is under half a million, or when the same capital would be better spent on the product. Those operators are better served by a lighter jurisdiction — the trade-offs are laid out in our guide to obtaining an offshore gambling license — or by a model that does not require a gambling licence at all, which is why the US sweepstakes route has taken the share of our inquiries that it has.

Choosing between those routes before you have spent EUR 5,000 on an application fee is the entire point of the exercise. Our guide to which online gambling license you actually need walks the jurisdictions side by side, and the configuration wizard will tell you what the software side of the same launch costs in about two minutes.

None of the above is legal or tax advice. Fees change, directives are reissued, and both the 2025 income-tax election and the October 2026 gaming-tax rates have moved ground that had been stable for years. Verify the current figures against the MGA's remote gaming services page before you commit to anything, and take Maltese professional advice on the structure.

FAQ

What is the total Malta gambling license cost in year one?

For a Type 1 casino licence, the MGA's own dues come to EUR 5,000 for the application plus EUR 25,000 in fixed annual licence fee plus a compliance contribution with a EUR 15,000 annual minimum — around EUR 45,000 in the first year, subject to the start-up reliefs. Outside the MGA you also need EUR 100,000 in paid-up share capital, the external system audit, key persons and corporate services.

Is the EUR 25,000 licence fee the same for every operator?

For a B2C gaming service licence it is fixed at EUR 25,000 regardless of size, and it is charged per licence rather than per game type. An operator offering solely Type 4 controlled skill games pays EUR 10,000. B2B supply licences start at the same EUR 25,000, with a EUR 10,000 rate for back-office supply, and move onto a revenue-banded scale after the first year.

Do I have to set up a company in Malta?

Not necessarily. The MGA accepts applications from any company incorporated in the EU or EEA, as long as it meets the share capital and financial reporting requirements. Most licensees still incorporate in Malta for tax and practical reasons, but that is a structuring decision rather than a regulatory obligation.

How long is an MGA licence valid?

Ten years. Annual fees and the monthly compliance contribution continue throughout, but the full application process is not repeated each year.

How much is Malta's gaming tax, and what does it apply to?

Only to revenue from Maltese players — for a remote operator, players established, permanently addressed or usually resident in Malta. Revenue from players anywhere else is outside the charge, which is why the line is negligible for most licensees. The rate is 5% until 30 September 2026; from 1 October 2026 it becomes 15% for Type 1 casino revenue and 10% for Types 2, 3 and 4, with controlled gaming premises and junkets staying at 5%.

Is Malta's corporate tax really 5%?

The statutory rate is 35%. The commonly quoted 5% is the effective result of the shareholder refund system, where 6/7ths of the Malta tax paid is refunded on distribution. Since September 2025 an entity can instead elect a flat 15% final tax with no refund, locked in for at least five years. Which is cheaper depends on your structure, and needs advice from a Maltese tax practitioner.

What is the cheapest MGA licence?

A Type 4 controlled skill games licence carries the lowest Malta gambling license cost: EUR 10,000 fixed annual fee, a EUR 5,000 compliance contribution minimum, and EUR 40,000 share capital. It is also the only type whose contribution rate rises as revenue grows rather than falling, so the saving narrows at scale.