GGR (gross gaming revenue)
GGR, or gross gaming revenue, is the amount an operator keeps from gambling after paying out winnings: total stakes taken minus total winnings paid, before tax, bonuses or running costs come out of it. It is the operator’s win, not its profit, and it measures what players as a group have lost. Regulators, investors and tax authorities use it because it strips out the money that only passes through a betting account on its way back to the player.
How gross gaming revenue is calculated
The core formula is simple: GGR = total amount wagered – total winnings paid out, measured over a fixed period such as a month, a quarter or a financial year.
Take a casino that accepts €1,000,000 in stakes on its slots in a quarter and pays €960,000 back in wins. Its GGR for that quarter is €40,000, which is the 4% the games kept on average, and that figure sits close to what you would expect from slots with an RTP of around 96%.
The arithmetic gets less tidy once bonuses enter it. Some operators count stakes placed with bonus funds or free spins as wagers and the resulting wins as payouts, while others strip bonus play out of the figure entirely, and practice varies between operators and between the reporting rules of each jurisdiction, so two GGR numbers are only comparable when you know how each one treated promotional money.
For betting exchanges and poker rooms, where players bet against each other, the operator’s gross revenue is the commission or rake it charges rather than the difference between stakes and winnings.
GGR compared with turnover and NGR
The term most often confused with GGR is turnover, which in betting usually means the total amount staked, with nothing taken off for winnings.
Irish betting tax works on that stake figure, not on GGR. Revenue charges licensed bookmakers 2% on the amount of every bet, whether placed over the counter or by remote means, while remote betting intermediaries such as exchanges pay 25% of the commission they charge customers in the State. A bookmaker’s duty bill therefore rises with the volume of betting even in a quarter when its GGR is thin.
The Gambling Regulation Act 2024 uses the word turnover differently, and that is where readers trip up. For most licensees, the Act defines turnover as total income from relevant gambling activities less the winnings paid out, which is in substance a GGR measure; for remote betting intermediaries it means the charges paid to them, and for business-to-business licensees it means gross profit on the products they supply. Section 54 obliges licensees, other than those holding a licence for a charitable or philanthropic purpose, to pay an annual contribution to the Social Impact Fund, and section 54(3) leaves the percentage of turnover payable to regulations made by the Minister, so until those regulations are made and published, the rate itself cannot be quoted.
Net gaming revenue, or NGR, starts from GGR and then deducts bonus costs and, depending on the operator, gaming taxes or payment fees.
Where players meet the GGR figure
Most players never see GGR on a casino screen, but it shapes several things they do see. Affiliate deals are commonly paid as a share of the revenue a referred player generates, and published market reports quote GGR when they describe how large a country’s gambling sector is.
It also explains a point readers often miss. Because GGR is what the player base as a whole has lost, a rise in an operator’s reported GGR is, read plainly, a rise in money that did not come back to customers, and figures from Revenue on Irish betting turnover say nothing about that loss until winnings are deducted.
What I look at first, when a report quotes a headline number, is whether it means stakes, GGR or NGR.
The three can differ by a factor of twenty or more on the same business, and a sentence that calls one of them simply revenue usually leaves the reader to guess which. Where you see a figure attributed to an operator holding a licence from the Malta Gaming Authority or from Curaçao, check also which jurisdiction’s reporting rules produced it, since a foreign regulator’s definition need not match the one the Gambling Regulatory Authority of Ireland will apply to its own licensees.
