Finland is closing the book on one of Europe’s last state gambling monopolies. From July 2027, Veikkaus will no longer be the only legal option for online betting, slots, and casino games in the country. Private operators will need a Finnish gambling licence instead, and a new supervisory authority will be watching how they behave.
For now, though, nothing has changed for players. Finland has never blocked its residents from using internationally licensed operators, and Malta has long been one of the more trusted jurisdictions among them.
What’s actually changing
The legal groundwork is already in place. Parliament passed the new Gambling Act in December 2025, and the President signed it into law the following month. Applications opened on 1 March 2026, but nobody can operate legally under a Finnish licence until 1 July 2027, when supervision shifts from the National Police Board to the Finnish Supervisory Authority.
Veikkaus keeps its grip on lotteries, scratch cards, and physical slot machines. Everything else, like online betting, slots, and casino games, opens to competition. Sites like MaltalaisetKasinot.net exist precisely because so many Finnish players already stick to MGA-licensed online casinos while waiting to see what the domestic market looks like once it opens. For now, Finnish gamblers can legally gamble at these sites, but come 1 July next year, their options will be strictly limited.
Legal analysts tracking the reform have been consistent about where Finland looked for a template. The Finnish model isn’t a direct copy of either the Swedish or Danish regimes; it draws heavily on both. The UK isn’t part of that lineage. But the mechanics Finland ended up with overlap with the UK’s system anyway, because most competitive licensing regimes converge on the same handful of tools.
Where the two systems actually line up
Three things stand out as structurally similar, regardless of who influenced whom.
- Tax follows the player, not the operator. The UK reformed its Remote Gaming Duty in 2014 so that any operator serving UK customers pays UK tax, no matter where the company is based. Finland’s licence requirement works on the same logic: a Finnish licence exists to bring player spending under domestic tax law, wherever the operator happens to be headquartered.
- Tax is charged on what’s actually won, not on turnover. UK duty is calculated on gross gaming yield, meaning stakes minus payouts, and that rate jumped from 21% to 40% in April 2026. Finland’s licensed operators will be taxed the same way, on gross gambling revenue rather than the total amount wagered.
- One authority replaces a patchwork. The UK Gambling Commission has issued licences and enforced identity checks and anti-money-laundering rules under a single roof since the Gambling Act 2005 replaced an older, fragmented system. Finland is making the same move in one step, folding licensing, supervision, and enforcement against unlicensed operators into the incoming Finnish Supervisory Authority rather than leaving it split across ministries.
- One self-exclusion list covers every licensed operator. The UK’s version of this is GAMSTOP, and it wasn’t optional for long: the Gambling Commission made participation a licence condition for every online operator from 31 March 2020, so a single registration blocks a player from every UK-licensed site at once rather than one at a time. Finland is building the same thing from day one instead of bolting it on later. This ensures that players will be able to self-exclude through a centralised system covering every licence holder, closing the same loophole GAMSTOP was built to close: someone shut out of one operator simply signing up with the next.
- Deposit limits and behavioural monitoring sit inside the licence, not beside it. Both systems treat this as a condition of doing business rather than a voluntary extra. UK operators must offer deposit, loss, and session limits and watch for signs of harmful play as part of their Gambling Commission licence. Finland’s Act goes a step further procedurally: players will have to set a personal deposit limit before they can gamble at all, and operators carry an explicit duty to monitor behaviour and intervene when it looks risky.
Where they don’t
The differences matter just as much. Finland is going further than the UK on marketing. Affiliate marketing and influencer promotion are banned outright under the new Act, a restriction the UK has never imposed on its licensed operators.
Finland is also opening into a market where offshore play is already the norm rather than the exception. Around half of all Finnish online gambling spend currently goes to operators outside Veikkaus, a gap the Finnish Competition and Consumer Authority estimated at €520 to 590 million a year in 2021. Bringing that spending back under domestic supervision, not competing with an already-licensed market, is the real point of the reform.
What it means for players right now
Until July 2027, nothing about where Finnish players can legally gamble has changed. Malta-licensed operators remain a normal, legal choice, and that won’t stop being true the day Finland’s own licences go live. What changes is that Finland will finally have its own version of the system the UK has run for two decades: one authority, one tax base tied to the player’s location, and licence conditions that apply regardless of where the operator’s servers sit.
David Prior
David Prior is the editor of Today News, responsible for the overall editorial strategy. He is an NCTJ-qualified journalist with over 20 years’ experience, and is also editor of the award-winning hyperlocal news title Altrincham Today. His LinkedIn profile is here.
