France Gaming License

What is a France gaming licence (ANJ agrément)?

Agrément is what French law calls the licence the Autorité nationale des jeux issues. An agrément covers online sports betting, horse-race betting or poker offered to French players, runs five years and renews. Loi n° 2010-476 du 12 mai 2010 opened the market, and ordonnance n° 2019-1015 du 2 octobre 2019 created the ANJ.

The agrément covers one vertical per dossier and one named domain. Bet365 filed three dossiers and holds all three agréments on bet365.fr.

Article 21 of loi n° 2010-476 sets the five-year term. Online casino sits outside every category the law allows, so no amount of budget or compliance work buys a casino agrément.

Who is the ANJ and what does it regulate?

The Autorité nationale des jeux (ANJ) is the independent French gambling regulator. Ordonnance n° 2019-1015 du 2 octobre 2019 created the ANJ, which started work in 2020 and replaced ARJEL. ANJ oversight now reaches land-based casinos, La Française des Jeux, part of the FDJ United group, and the Pari Mutuel Urbain as well as online operators.

ANJ powers you will deal with directly:

• The ANJ grants, renews and withdraws agréments.

• The ANJ approves your gaming software before any game runs, a step French law calls homologation.

• The ANJ approves three operator plans every year.

• The ANJ fines up to 5% of turnover, and 10% for a repeat breach.

• Since the loi du 2 mars 2022 the ANJ orders blocking and de-listing of illegal sites without a judge.

• The ANJ can order payment providers to cut off financial flows to illegal sites.

ARJEL no longer exists. Guides that tell you to file with ARJEL, or to meet ARJEL technical requirements, describe a regulator that closed in 2020.

What can you license online in France?

The ANJ grants agréments for three online verticals: paris sportifs en ligne (sports betting), paris hippiques en ligne (horse-race betting) and jeux de cercle en ligne (poker). One dossier covers one vertical, and one operator may hold one, two or all three. The ANJ list shows sixteen holders for sports betting, five for horse-race betting and eight for poker.

What you cannot license. Article L320-1 of the Code de la sécurité intérieure prohibits games of money and chance except as permitted by article L320-6. That list stops at the three online verticals above. House-banked games such as slots, roulette, blackjack and baccarat have no online category in France.

Lottery and retail sports betting belong to La Française des Jeux under exclusive rights. Retail horse betting belongs to the Pari Mutuel Urbain.

The ANJ publishes the current list of licensed operators, so any claim about who holds what is checkable in a minute.

Can you get an online casino licence in France?

No online casino licence exists in France, and none is scheduled. A 2024 amendment to the finance bill would have opened the market at 55.6% of gross gaming revenue, matching the online lottery rate. Its authors withdrew it on 28 October 2024 and called a national consultation instead. That consultation never restarted.

The ANJ confirmed in April 2026 that the consultation remains suspended with no timetable. The 2026 finance law left the prohibition untouched. Land-based casinos, local deputies and public-health arguments carried the political weight against reform.

France is the only large European market that still bans online casino games. MGL estimates a realistic opening no earlier than 2027 to 2029, and that estimate is ours, not a regulator's position.

License online casino where the category exists. Malta, the Isle of Man and Gibraltar give you regulated credibility, while Curaçao and Anjouan give you faster and cheaper entry.

Who can hold a French gaming licence?

Only a company registered in an EU member state, or in a qualifying EEA state, can hold a French agrément. An offshore holding company can sit above that operating company, but it cannot hold the licence itself. Bet365 filed through Hillside (New Media Malta) PLC, a Maltese company, which is the standard route.

The agrément attaches to a domain as well as a company. The ANJ names the domain in the decision, and traffic from France must land on a site reachable only through a .fr top-level domain.

One dossier covers one vertical. A single holder may run one, two or all three agréments, and each one names its own domain.

A French company is not required. A permanent correspondent in France is, and so is the archiving device on French soil.

What documents does an ANJ application require?

An ANJ dossier documents who owns the operator, how the games will run, and how player money is protected. Ownership and beneficial-owner evidence goes in with the AML programme, the player-fund guarantee, proof of the .fr domain, the archiving device plan and the full software homologation package. Expect these items:

• Ownership and management structure of the EU or EEA operating company.

• Beneficial-owner documentation for every controller, with financial history and background.

• AML and counter-terrorist-financing programme, responsible-gaming programme, and conflict-of-interest policy.

• Player-fund guarantee documentation.

• Proof of .fr domain registration.

• SMA archiving device specification and hosting plan.

• Software homologation submission: source code, dedicated random number generator audit, security audit and an implementation-compliance report.

What does a France gaming licence cost?

A France gaming licence carries no government fee at all. Real spending goes on the EU or EEA operating company, the archiving device in France, software homologation and certification. Add French compliance staffing, the player-fund guarantee, and the droit au pari paid to each sports organiser.

France charges no application fee and no licence fee.

Article 26 of loi n° 2018-1317 du 28 décembre 2018 abolished the droit fixe on online gaming operators from 1 January 2019. The scrapped charge ran €5,000 to €10,000 on application and €20,000 to €40,000 a year, depending on how many licences an operator held.

So every euro you spend on a French licence is structural or operational. Only the two €0 lines come from law. Everything else in the table below is a market estimate. No French rule publishes a price for the archiving device, homologation, certification, compliance staffing or the guarantee instrument.

What tax do ANJ-licensed operators pay in France?

Online sports betting in France carries total public levies of 59.3% of gross gaming revenue since 1 July 2025. Three levies stack: 33.7% to the State, 15% social contribution, and 10.6% to the Agence nationale du sport. Loi n° 2025-199 du 28 février 2025 (LFSS 2025) raised the social share from 10.6% to 15%.

That single change took the sports-betting burden from 54.9% to 59.3% of gross gaming revenue.

Read the horse-betting row carefully. Taxes proper come to 27.1% of GGR. The redevance aux sociétés de courses lifts total public levies to about 52.9%, a figure FDJ United reported for 2026 after 52.3% the year before. A comparison that stops at 27.1% makes horse betting look twice as cheap as it is.

Another three charges apply on top.

• A 15% contribution on advertising and promotional spend, created by article 32 of loi n° 2025-199. Article L137-27 of the Code de la sécurité sociale sets it out. It is annual: it falls due on fiscal years closed from 1 July 2025, unlike the 15% social levy on sports betting, which applies to levies due from that date. Online horse-race betting is excluded, because L137-27 leaves out 6° of article L320-6 of the Code de la sécurité intérieure.

• Corporate income tax at 25% on taxable profit.

• VAT exemption, which also means you recover no input VAT on servers, marketing or professional fees.

Droit au pari. For each competition you take bets on, you contract with and pay the organiser, whether a federation or a league. The amount is negotiated, not tariffed, so it resists budgeting.

Loi n° 2026-103 du 19 février 2026, the 2026 finance law, amended the chapter on gaming levies. The rates above stood unchanged in March 2026.

What are the France-specific technical requirements?

Three French requirements have no equivalent in most licensing regimes: the support matériel d'archivage, the compulsory .fr domain, and the fully verified player account. Each one costs money before you take a single bet, each one is audited, and the archiving device also carries an initial certification and then an annual one.

The support matériel d'archivage (SMA), known as the frontal. The device archives player and transaction data in real time on physical media in metropolitan France.

Only the ANJ can decrypt the archive.

The compulsory .fr domain. Your French-facing site must be reachable only through a top-level domain ending in .fr, and the agrément names that domain.

Verified player accounts. You verify identity, age and address before you validate an account. French law prohibits anonymous play.

Certification runs on two tracks under article 23 of loi n° 2010-476. You certify the archiving device once, within six months of going live. A recurring annual certification then covers game integrity and information-system security.

How are payments and player funds handled?

Player accounts in France accept bank cards, mobile payments, bank transfers, e-wallets and prepaid cards. The funding rule is narrow. Only the account holder may fund the account, only with an instrument in their own name, and only from a payment account held in the EU or EEA.

Article 17 of loi n° 2010-476 sets the withdrawal side. Player money leaves the gaming account by bank transfer only, into a single payment account the player holds. That account sits with a provider established in the EU or the EEA under an administrative-assistance agreement with France.

Crypto fails that construction rather than a crypto-specific ban. A wallet is not a payment account in an EU or EEA state, and a crypto withdrawal is not a bank transfer to a named account. The rule closes the door without ever mentioning tokens. The ANJ's own list of ways to fund a player account stops at bank cards, mobile payment, bank transfers, e-wallets and prepaid cards.

What are the ongoing compliance obligations?

Every ANJ licensee files three plans a year, holds payouts under the 85% cap and screens players against the national exclusion register. Suspicious transactions go to Tracfin. The ANJ approves or amends the plans, and audits the payout cap over the full year rather than by month.

Three annual plans. You file the promotional strategy, the responsible-gaming action plan, and the anti-fraud and AML plan before 31 January. The ANJ can order changes, and for 2026 it told every operator to stay inside the promotional budget it declared.

The 85% payout cap (taux de retour au joueur, TRJ). Sports and horse betting may return no more than 85% of stakes to players across the year. On 1 October 2024 the ANJ sanctions commission ruled on nine operators for breaching the 2022 cap and issued one warning and eight fines of €5,000 to €150,000.

Self-exclusion register. The ANJ has run the fichier des interdits de jeux since the end of 2020, and its published series shows 73,439 people registered at the end of 2024 against 40,000 in 2021. You check the register when an account opens and at every login.

AML and counter-terrorist financing. French AML law covers licensed operators directly. You report suspicious transactions to Tracfin through ERMES and keep records for five years.

The ANJ enforces responsible gaming as hard as it enforces tax. The ANJ's largest fine to date, €800,000, went to SPS Betting, the operator of Unibet.fr, by decision n° 2024-033 of 3 March 2025. A self-exclusion bug had let 6,754 players return to betting early.

What happens if you operate in France without an ANJ licence?

Offering online gambling to French players without an ANJ agrément is a criminal offence. Article L324-1 of the Code de la sécurité intérieure carries three years in prison and a €90,000 fine. An organised group faces seven years and €200,000. Administrative measures run alongside: site blocking, de-listing and cut-off of payment flows.

Since the loi du 2 mars 2022 the ANJ president orders blocking and de-listing directly, with no judge. Administrative blocking takes about two months against six to nine months under the old court route.

In 2024 the ANJ issued 232 blocking and de-listing orders covering 1,337 URLs, and 910 of those were mirror sites. Since March 2022 the ANJ has issued 506 administrative blocking acts against 2,365 URLs. By the ANJ's own account, the administrative route blocked almost twice as many URLs in two and a half years as twelve years of court orders achieved.

France's illegal market is large enough to explain that pressure. An ANJ study put illegal online gross gaming revenue at €748 million to €1.5 billion, with 3 to 4 million French players in a year. Half of that illegal traffic goes to casino games and slots. That last number is the product France declines to license.

How does France compare to Malta and the UK?

France licenses no online casino at all. Malta and the United Kingdom license the full product set, and both are raising their rates, so compare the direction of travel as well as today's number. France taxes sports betting far above either of them.

What are the advantages of a France gaming licence?

France pairs a zero government fee with a statutory four-month decision and access to European payment infrastructure. The market grew again in 2025 and has just admitted a major new entrant. For a sports-betting operator that can absorb the tax, the entry mechanics are unusually clean.

No government fee. €0 on application and €0 a year since 1 January 2019.

A statutory clock. Four months for the ANJ decision.

EU and EEA payment infrastructure. An EU or EEA licence-holder banks and processes where offshore-licensed operators cannot.

No tender and no concession. Meet the conditions and file, with no auction and no cap on the number of agréments.

An open market, demonstrated. Bet365 applied in January 2026 and was trading in France by May 2026.

Demand, in numbers. The ANJ market review for 2025, published in April 2026, recorded €11,517 million staked on sports betting, up 12%. Online sports-betting gross gaming revenue reached €1,766 million, up 10.4%, which is two-thirds of the €2,617 million online total. The 2026 World Cup falls inside that trend.

What are the disadvantages and risks?

France has one of the heaviest gambling tax burdens in Europe, caps how well you can price, and refuses the casino product entirely. None of the risks below improve with good execution. They are built into the regime. Read this section before you commit capital to a French build.

Tax at 59.3% of GGR on sports betting, with the social share raised as recently as July 2025 and no sign of a reversal.

The 85% payout cap, which limits how far you can compete on odds against unregulated sites and narrows product differentiation.

France licenses no online casino, and nobody has published a timetable for one.

Sunk cost before revenue. You pay for the archiving device, homologation and certification before the first bet settles.

VAT exemption without input VAT recovery, which quietly raises the real cost of servers, marketing and professional services.

A 15% tax on promotional spend. It lands on a crowded market: licensed operators declared €785 million of promotional budget for 2026, up 25% on 2025. The levy bites on the advertising slice, €319 million of that total, not on player bonuses.

The droit au pari, negotiated with each organiser and so hard to forecast.

Active enforcement, including fines up to 5% of turnover and a €800,000 penalty for a responsible-gaming failure.

Consolidation. Parions Sport closed after merging into Unibet in March 2026, and operators have left the French market before over margins.

Why MGL

MGL runs the France application end to end and tells you before you spend whether the numbers work. We set up the EU or EEA operating company, coordinate the .fr domain and the SMA, and file the software for homologation. We also structure the player-fund guarantee, write the AML programme and handle every exchange with the ANJ.

You supply beneficial-owner documentation, financial history and background for every principal. We build and file the rest.

MGL has obtained 300+ licences for operators across offshore, onshore and EU regulated markets.

If a 59.3% tax kills your model, we will say so and show you the jurisdictions that fit instead. That answer costs you nothing.