The Netherlands' licensed gambling market shrank in 2025, while licensed online operators reported higher gross gaming result in the first half of 2026. The findings appeared together in two reports the Kansspelautoriteit (Ksa) released on 29 October. They compare different periods and cover different parts of the market.
The annual Marktscan for 2025 puts the licensed market at €4.1 billion, against €4.5 billion for 2024, with both expressed at 2025 prices. Its inflation-adjusted comparisons show online casino gross gaming result falling 18.2% and online betting falling 30.2%. The annual scan covers licensed land-based and online gambling, including lotteries; it excludes the illegal market.
Ksa uses brutospelresultaat, or BSR, for stakes minus prizes. That gross measure leaves business costs unresolved. Our GGR and NGR explainer follows the separate deductions that stand between a gaming-revenue label and profit.
The later comparison is online-only
The first-half 2026 monitor reports €670 million of licensed online BSR, up from €602 million in the second half of 2025, about 11%. This is a consecutive-half-year comparison. It cannot replace the annual scan's inflation-adjusted, whole-market result or establish a completed 2026 annual total.
The two findings therefore do not contradict each other. A business using them in a presentation needs to retain the market boundary alongside the date. Dropping either label could turn a later online increase into a claim that the entire Dutch market had recovered its previous annual size.
More accounts does not establish more people
Ksa's announcement highlights rising account activity without a significant increase in the number of people gambling. The monitor specifies an average of 1.48 million active licensed accounts per month in January to June 2026, compared with 1.38 million in the preceding half-year. These are accounts used, not a cumulative registration total.
The monitor separately estimates about 490,000 people using licensed online gambling per month, and about 820,000 over the six months. Those figures describe different windows. One person can use several operators, and someone active during the half-year need not gamble every month.
Licensee account records cannot identify the same person across operators. The people estimates come from a GfK panel of roughly 6,000 people, including about 300 classified as online gambling participants. Ksa warns about extrapolating from that small group.
The licensed share changes with the denominator
Ksa's release gives roughly 94% for people gambling exclusively with licensed providers. Its money-based estimate is 59% of BSR, compared with 54% in the previous half-year. The five-point rise concerns the monetary estimate; 94% is not the share of gambling revenue retained in the licensed market.
The monitor estimates unlicensed BSR using search-volume data. It excludes some operators' search volumes over suspected manipulation and limits that series to summer 2025 onward after developing the method. The resulting comparison carries that boundary.
The release offers possible explanations for changing activity, including the football World Cup and multiple-account use. It does not quantify how much either contributed. These figures cannot establish that a particular rule caused the change, or describe an individual person's losses. Our market-statistics guide keeps the same distinction between a reported aggregate and the question a reader wants it to answer.
