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Gambling in Kosovo: Laws and Online Gambling

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Online gambling in Kosovo: laws and player risks

Elodie explains online casino rules in Kosovo, player enforcement evidence, offshore risks and available options. Checked 9 November 2026.

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Published by Casino News Daily editorial teamReviewed byFilip RadulovicOur editorial approach

Kosovo is one of the few European jurisdictions to have moved from a licensing system to a near-total ban on gambling. Until May 2019, casinos, betting shops, gaming-machine venues and bingo halls could operate under licences issued by the Tax Administration of Kosovo (ATK) under Law No. 04/L-080 on Games of Chance. After two killings at gambling venues in March 2019, the Assembly adopted Law No. 06/L-155 on the Prohibition of Games of Chance under an accelerated procedure. The law, which has only three articles, prohibits and closes all games of chance throughout Kosovo, with a single exception for the Lottery of Kosovo. It contains no time limit and no licensing route, so there is no lawful way for a private operator to offer online casino games or betting to people in Kosovo. This guide explains how the ban came about, what it says, how it is enforced, the position of players, taxation and the gaps in consumer protection that remain.

Key points

Regional overview: Gambling laws in the EU and the rest of Europe puts all 55 countries and territories on one map, grouped by how they regulate gambling.

Last reviewed: 8 October 2026.

Historical development

Gambling in Kosovo was regulated for most of the period after 2012 by Law No. 04/L-080 on Games of Chance, which the Assembly adopted on 6 April 2012, according to the Constitutional Court’s judgment in case KI185/21. The law created a licensing system administered by the Tax Administration of Kosovo. A 2020 judgment of the Basic Court in Prishtina quotes its provisions: anyone who operated, managed or exposed a casino game, or took a share of the stakes, needed a casino licence; casino games and equipment could be supplied only by persons approved and licensed by the ATK; and a casino licence ran for three years and could be renewed on request. Operating a casino without a licence was an administrative offence. In the case before the Basic Court, the ATK had fined an unlicensed venue €30,000 in February 2019, and the court upheld the fine.

By the late 2010s the sector was large in relation to Kosovo’s economy. Prishtina Insight, reporting on an investigation by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), stated that gambling businesses paid nearly €16 million in taxes in 2018, according to ATK data, and that more than 300 betting shops had already been closed nationwide in 2017. Yogonet gave the same 2018 revenue figure and noted that, after neighbouring Albania closed its casinos and betting shops in 2018, many operators moved to Kosovo. Police operations against unlicensed gambling were frequent even under the licensing regime; in December 2016, for example, the Kosovo Police reported 16 arrests after searches of 77 locations in seven regions.

The decisive change came in March 2019. Two employees of gambling venues were killed within a few days in Lipjan and Suhareka. According to Yogonet, the Assembly then voted 74 to 0 for a resolution suspending the activity of casinos and betting shops until a new law was adopted, and police closed gambling premises across Kosovo. KoSSev reported that, on the same day as the extraordinary session, police, the tax administration and customs searched 235 casinos and betting shops in 33 towns, closed 35 that lacked licences and seized 118 gaming machines.

The Government approved a draft Law on the Prohibition of Games of Chance on 26 March 2019 (decision No. 02/95), as recorded in the text of the draft law published by the Office of the Prime Minister. The Assembly adopted it on 28 March 2019 using an accelerated procedure; KoSSev reported 69 votes in favour at second reading. The debate was not one-sided. Some members of the Assembly argued that a ban would cost the budget revenue and jobs and push gambling underground, while supporters said it would protect families and young people. The President did not return the law to the Assembly within the deadline, so it was promulgated. Before entry into force, KoSSev, citing the newspaper Gazeta Express, estimated that more than 400 businesses would close: 306 betting shops, 133 venues with gaming machines and six bingo halls.

Legal framework

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The central statute is Law No. 06/L-155 on the Prohibition of Games of Chance. The Constitutional Court records that it was published in the Official Gazette No. 11 on 24 April 2019 and entered into force on 10 May 2019. It is unusually short:

Several points follow from this structure. First, the ban is general. The law does not distinguish between casinos, betting, gaming machines, bingo, poker or online games, and does not create any category of permitted private gambling. Second, it is not time-limited. Press reports at the time described a ten-year ban, but, as Kosovo Online noted in June 2026, the final text sets no period; the prohibition therefore remains in force until the Assembly adopts a different law. Third, the law contains no sanctions, no definitions and no enforcement procedure of its own. Enforcement therefore relies on general legislation, in particular the Criminal Code.

Police and prosecutors charge organisers with the offence of “organising pyramid schemes and illegal gambling” under the Criminal Code of the Republic of Kosovo (Code No. 06/L-074), dated January 2019. According to a KoSSev report on indictments in a major illegal casino case, prosecutors cited it as Article 294, paragraph 2; we could not check this article number against the text of the Code. A 2016 police release refers to the equivalent offence under the previous Code as Article 300. These offences target the organisation of gambling, not participation in it.

The legal position of the Lottery of Kosovo rests on its own constitutional documents. The Statute of the Lottery of Kosovo, approved by the Government on 2 August 2017, describes it as a public legal entity with the status of a joint stock company, owned by the Government and based in Prishtina. It is the legal successor of the lottery founded in 1974. The Statute was adopted under Law No. 04/L-080, the very law that Law No. 06/L-155 repealed. Its permitted activities included traditional and instant lotteries, numerical games such as lotto and keno, television bingo and sports pools.

Kosovo is not a member of the European Union, so EU free-movement rules on gambling services do not apply directly. A licence issued in an EU member state or elsewhere gives an operator no right to serve customers in Kosovo.

Regulator and licensing model

Kosovo now follows a prohibition model: rather than licensing private operators, the law forbids gambling altogether, subject to one state-owned exception. Under the 2012 law, the Tax Administration of Kosovo acted as the licensing authority and inspected operators. The Constitutional Court judgment describes how, on 3 May 2019, the ATK notified a sports-betting company that its licence, valid until August 2019, would be revoked with effect from 10 May 2019, the day the ban took effect. The Lottery Statute separately states that supervision of the Lottery had been delegated to the Ministry of Finance, which had a dedicated games of chance department.

Since no licences can be issued, there is no public register of licensed operators, no licence fee schedule and no licence application process. We found no official publication from the ATK or the Ministry of Finance describing a current regulatory function for private gambling. Readers should treat any claim that an operator is “licensed in Kosovo” with caution.

The abrupt revocation of licences raised constitutional questions. In case KI185/21, decided on 9 February 2023, a sports-betting company challenged the revocation of its licence. The Basic Court, the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court had all rejected its claims, the lower courts stating that they could not review the constitutionality of a law. The Constitutional Court found violations of the right to property (Article 46 of the Constitution, with Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 to the European Convention on Human Rights) and of the right to a fair trial (Article 31, with Article 6 of the Convention), and annulled the three judgments. Importantly, it did not rule on whether the ban itself is constitutional. It held that the company was affected by the ATK’s implementing decision rather than directly by the law, and limited its review to the court decisions. We could not verify what happened in the regular courts after the annulment.

Online gambling: what is permitted and how it is enforced

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No form of online gambling is authorised in Kosovo. Law No. 06/L-155 bans all games of chance without distinguishing between land-based and remote play, and it provides no licence that a domestic or foreign online operator could obtain. Offering online casino games, betting or poker to people in Kosovo is therefore unlawful under Kosovo law, wherever the operator is based or licensed.

Enforcement has concentrated on physical points where online gambling is organised, rather than on foreign websites. Soon after the ban, KoSSev (republishing a Gazeta Express report) described a café a short distance from the Government building in Prishtina where bets were taken on a laptop through an online platform, with no paper slip; regular customers could bet remotely without visiting. In the same period police arrested about a dozen people in several municipalities and seized dozens of computers. In another operation, KoSSev reported that police arrested ten people in Prishtina and Peja on charges of organised crime and organising illegal gambling, and found 15 further people at locations running online gambling games; those 15 were released after questioning.

The largest case to date concerns illegal casinos in the village of Karačevo/Karaçevë near the boundary with central Serbia. According to KoSSev, the Basic Prosecutor’s Office in Gjilan indicted 73 people. In the raid that started the case 33 people were arrested, and the court ordered detention for 30 suspects, 12 of them members of the Kosovo Police. Kosovo Online reported more than 65 arrests in operations there in 2021 and 2022, the demolition of 12 structures and the seizure of hundreds of gaming machines. A separate corruption case, documented by Transparency International, concerns two former police investigators accused of taking bribes between November 2019 and February 2020 to avoid investigating illegal gambling (a cooperating witness described one operation as a fictitious online gambling business); their first conviction was annulled on appeal in May 2023 and a retrial was still under way in January 2025.

We found no official list of blocked gambling websites, no published order requiring internet service providers to block gambling domains, and no rule requiring banks or payment providers to stop gambling transactions. In other words, Kosovo does not appear to operate the website-blocking or payment-blocking systems (technical measures that prevent access to, or payments to, unlicensed sites) used in many European countries. Because all gambling is banned, there is also no regime for lawful gambling advertising.

Position of players

Law No. 06/L-155 prohibits games of chance but does not itself state any penalty, either for organisers or for participants. The Criminal Code offence relied on by prosecutors is directed at those who organise illegal gambling. In the sources we reviewed, police and prosecutors charged organisers, venue owners, staff and, in some cases, police officers who protected them. Where players were found on premises, as in the Prishtina and Peja operation, reports describe them being questioned and released rather than charged. We found no recorded prosecution or fine of an individual for placing bets or playing casino games, online or offline.

That does not make playing lawful or safe. Every private gambling service available to people in Kosovo operates outside the law. Players have no domestic regulator to complain to, no guarantee that winnings will be paid, no verified protection of deposits or personal data, and no access to the safeguards (identity checks, limits, self-exclusion) that a licensing system would require. Money staked with illegal domestic venues may also fund organised crime, which was one of the reasons given for the ban.

Taxation

Operators

Under the 2012 law, gambling was a significant source of public revenue: nearly €16 million in 2018, according to ATK data cited by Prishtina Insight and Yogonet. Since the ban, there is no lawful private gambling sector to tax, and no gambling-specific tax applies. Illegal operators may face criminal confiscation of proceeds, as the seizures of cash and equipment in police operations show, but this is not taxation.

Players

Kosovo’s personal income tax law (Law No. 05/L-028) lists lottery winnings among the categories of taxable income, according to the Eurofast Kosovo Individual Taxation Guide 2024. The guide does not set out a separate rate or withholding rule for winnings, which suggests the general progressive rates of 0% to 10% apply. With private gambling banned and the Lottery reportedly inactive, the practical relevance of this rule is limited. We could not verify any official ATK guidance on the treatment of winnings from foreign or unlicensed gambling, and players with specific questions should consult the ATK or a tax adviser.

Consumer protection and responsible gambling

Secure account login with a padlock and shieldBecause Kosovo prohibits gambling instead of regulating it, it has none of the statutory protection tools found in licensing systems. We found no national self-exclusion register, no mandatory deposit or loss limits, no regulator-run complaints procedure and no official responsible-gambling standards for operators. We also could not identify a dedicated national gambling helpline. The policy rationale for the ban, as described by Kosovo Online, included concern about betting shops located near schools and rising gambling addiction among young people; the response chosen was closure rather than harm-reduction regulation.

Critics have argued that this leaves people who continue to gamble without protection. In August 2019, a lawyer for the gaming association and an analyst at the GAP Institute, quoted in a Gazeta Express report republished by KoSSev, warned that a total ban would push the activity underground and that stricter regulation would be more effective. People affected by gambling problems can seek help through general health services and family doctors. General guidance on recognising and managing gambling harm is available in our responsible gambling guide.

Recent and upcoming developments

Casino listings and Kosovo

We do not publish casino listings for Kosovo. Law No. 06/L-155 prohibits all games of chance other than the Lottery of Kosovo, no online gambling licence exists, and offering online casino games to people in Kosovo is unlawful. No operator listed elsewhere on this site should be taken to be permitted to serve players in Kosovo.

Related country guides

Sources and further reading

  1. Constitutional Court of the Republic of Kosovo, Judgment in Case No. KI185/21, Applicant SH.P.K. CO COLINA (2023).
  2. Government of the Republic of Kosovo, Office of the Prime Minister, Draft Law on the Prohibition of Games of Chance (text as adopted as Law No. 06/L-155) (2019).
  3. Government of the Republic of Kosovo, Statute of the Lottery of Kosovo (2017).
  4. Basic Court in Prishtina, Department for Administrative Matters, Judgment A.nr.1009/19, S.R. v. Tax Administration of Kosovo (2020).
  5. Assembly of the Republic of Kosovo, via Refworld, Criminal Code of the Republic of Kosovo, Code No. 06/L-074 (2019).
  6. Government of the Republic of Kosovo, Office of the Prime Minister, Legislative Programme 2020 (2020).
  7. Government of the Republic of Kosovo, Office of the Prime Minister, Legislative Programme for 2021 (2021).
  8. Government of the Republic of Kosovo, Office of the Prime Minister, Programme of Draft Laws of the Government for 2025–2027 (2025).
  9. Kosovo Police, Kosovo Police arrests 16 suspects for organisation of pyramid schemes and illegal gambling (2016).
  10. Yogonet, Kosovo suspends casinos, betting shops to increase control (2019).
  11. KoSSev, News report: Assembly adopts the Law on the Prohibition of Games of Chance (accessed 8 October 2026).
  12. KoSSev, The Law on the Prohibition of Games of Chance enters into force (2019).
  13. KoSSev (from Gazeta Express), The law that did not stop gambling (2019).
  14. Prishtina Insight, Kosovo police raid betting stores in Gjakova (2019).
  15. KoSSev, Uhapšeno 10 osoba zbog ilegalnog kockanja u Prištini i Peći (accessed 8 October 2026).
  16. KoSSev, News report: indictments against 73 people in the Karačevo case (accessed 8 October 2026).
  17. Transparency International, Kosovo police investigators alleged bribes to protect illegal gambling (2025).
  18. Kosovo Online, Lojërat e fatit në Kosovë u ndaluan me ligj në vitin 2019 (2026).
  19. Eurofast, Kosovo Individual Taxation Guide 2024 (2024).

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