Tax results of the gambling industry — record figures despite the war

Traditionally, at the end of the year we sum up the performance of Ukraine’s legal gambling market. Despite the fact that the market continues to operate amid tax and regulatory uncertainty, it still generates significant revenues for the state budget. Over the first ten months of 2025 alone, gambling has already contributed more than UAH 14.5 billion to the budget in taxes. Given current trends, this figure may reach UAH 16–17 billion by the end of the year.

According to the Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine, budget revenues from taxes paid by the legal gambling business from January to October 2025 exceeded UAH 14.5 billion. Taking into account current tax revenue trends, it can be expected that this figure will be at least no lower than last year’s and will amount to around UAH 17 billion.

At the same time, it is important to recognize that the growth in tax revenues is taking place under conditions of a de facto unregulated market. The regulatory steps taken by the state in recent years, at best, offer cautious hope for improvement in the future, but systematically the key issues remain unresolved.

Take, for example, the most recent legislative changes that were positioned as a tool to regulate gambling advertising. In practice, however, they primarily imposed restrictions on legal gambling, while completely ignoring lottery advertising that illegally disguises itself as gambling. As a result, we are faced with an absurd situation: licensed gambling operators that work transparently and pay taxes have limited opportunities to advertise their services, whereas illegal lottery operators, which essentially imitate the same types of gambling without any licenses, can freely promote themselves in the market.

The problems with illegal lottery activities do not end there. The lottery business still remains outside effective state control, as the issue of licensing was only recently revisited, when the idea of an open competition for lottery licenses was announced. However, the competition itself is also unable to fully resolve the problem of illegal lottery operators, which have effectively been operating in a grey zone since 2014 and have paid neither license fees nor taxes. If they did, even the current impressive figure of UAH 14.5 billion would be significantly higher.

The issue of tax legislation also remains extremely pressing, as it still fails to define even basic terminology—particularly with regard to GGR, gambling tax rates, and related matters. Despite some progress in its development, the state online monitoring system (SOMS) has still not been implemented, even though it is closely linked to the introduction of transparent mechanisms for taxing gambling activities.

Thus, despite the impressive volume of tax revenues, 2025 has clearly not become an easier year for legal gambling compared to the previous wartime years. On the one hand, the industry has demonstrated strong resilience and clear growth potential; on the other hand, it has become even more evident that the lack of a structured legal framework significantly hampers its development and fails to make operating legally more attractive than operating illegally.

Therefore, the goal for 2026 is more than obvious—to build clear, fair, and favorable regulatory conditions that will allow the sector to provide the state with higher budget revenues, players with a high-quality and safe gaming experience, and businesses with better opportunities for growth. One would like to believe that as early as next year such conditions will exist at least partially in practice, and not only at the level of loud declarations.