Betting licence in Ireland

For most of the last century the licence came from the Revenue Commissioners under the Betting Act 1931, which the Betting (Amendment) Act 2015 extended to remote bookmakers and remote betting intermediaries, including those based outside the State. It was an excise licence, issued centrally by the National Excise Licence Office, and it carried a duty rather than a set of player protections.

That changed with a commencement order signed on 3 February 2026, which brought the licensing provisions of the 2024 Act into force from 5 February 2026. Revenue says plainly that it no longer issues the bookmaker’s licence, and new applications for every betting licence type now go to the GRAI through its Operator Portal, which opened on 9 February 2026. Revenue still collects Betting Duty, so the tax and the permission now sit with two different bodies.

Under section 112 of the Act, an operator applies to the Authority for a Business to Consumer gambling licence in the form the Authority specifies.

You will usually find the licence in the footer of a betting site or in its terms, where the operator names the regulator and gives a licence number. What I check first is whether the name of the company on the terms matches the name on the regulator’s register, because a brand and the company holding the licence are often not the same thing.

The GRAI’s remote betting and remote betting intermediary licences commenced on 1 July 2026, and the regulator keeps a public register of licensees on grai.ie that you can search yourself. A licence number that does not appear there, or appears under a different company, is a reason to stop before depositing.

The licence also shapes what happens after sign-up. Section 169 of the Act allows only a person aged 18 or over to open a gambling account with a remote licensee, and the KYC and anti-money-laundering checks you meet on a first withdrawal are licence conditions, not favours an operator chooses to grant.

A betting licence is often confused with a casino licence or with a licence from Malta or Curaçao. The table sets out the licence types a reader in Ireland is likely to see named, based on what Revenue and the GRAI publish.

The most common mistake is reading a Malta Gaming Authority or Curaçao licence as if it were an Irish one. A foreign licence binds the operator to its own regulator’s rules, so it does not bring the GRAI’s complaints route or the Irish advertising and inducement rules into play, and a betting operator that holds only a foreign licence is not permitted to take bets from people in Ireland.

The word betting matters here too. The GRAI is rolling licences out in phases, and its own statement says applications for gaming, lotteries, B2B and charitable licences will open through 2027 and 2028, so a GRAI betting licence tells you nothing about an operator’s online casino. Until remote gaming licences are actually issued, a casino section sitting beside a sportsbook is not covered by the betting licence on the same page.

A licence is the starting point for trust, not the end of it.