Gambling in Sierra Leone: Laws, Tax and Online Casinos

Published by Casino News Daily editorial teamReviewed byFilip RadulovicOur editorial approach

Sierra Leone has no single, modern gambling statute and no dedicated gambling regulator. Lotteries have a statutory basis dating from the early 1960s and are associated with the state-owned Sierra Leone State Lottery Company. Sports betting, which has grown quickly since the 2010s through retail kiosks, mobile phones and the internet, has developed mainly through licences issued by several government departments and through the tax system. The National Revenue Authority (NRA) taxes betting companies under the annual Finance Acts. It has required them to connect their systems to the authority and has warned that non-compliant firms face penalties. Sector participants, the State Lottery and members of Parliament have repeatedly called for a dedicated regulatory policy. This guide explains what the available sources show about the legal framework, licensing, online gambling, the position of players, taxation, consumer protection and developments in 2024–2026. It also identifies points that could not be verified.

Key points

We found no evidence that Sierra Leone has a consolidated Gaming Act or a statutory gaming board. Licensing is reported to be split between the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Trade and the Ministry of Tourism through the National Tourist Board.
Lotteries rest on legislation from the 1960s, which allows the Minister of Finance to license lotteries. The Sierra Leone State Lottery Company has been run since 2022 under a joint venture with a private partner. In August 2026 Parliament froze the joint-venture accounts and ordered an audit.
Betting companies are taxed under the Finance Acts through excise tax on gaming and betting, goods and services tax (GST), withholding taxes and PAYE. The NRA requires them to link their systems to the authority.
Since the Finance Act 2023, online and digital gambling and betting have been treated as digital supplies within the scope of GST. The Finance Act 2024 brought digital gambling and betting income within the scope of income tax.
We found no law that makes it an offence for an adult to gamble online, and no national self-exclusion scheme or government gambling helpline.

Last reviewed: 13 October 2026.

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Historical development

Sierra Leone’s lottery has a long history. A Law Library of Congress survey of national lotteries in Africa and the Near East, dated April 1974, lists Sierra Leone as one of three English-speaking African states with a national lottery (the others were Ethiopia and Ghana). The survey states that “the Sierra Leone statute allows the Minister of Finance to issue a license authorizing a lottery”. It notes that the lottery was run by the Sierra Leone State Lottery Company rather than by a government department, and that certain British lotteries were licensed to sell tickets in the country. It cites Act No. 51 of 1962 and N.R.C. Decree No. 64 of 1967 as the relevant instruments (Law Library of Congress, 1974).

Sports betting expanded much later. In 2014 SBC News summarised a BBC Africa Business Report segment by the BBC’s Sierra Leone correspondent, Umaru Fofana. It described a rise in telecom- and text-based betting devices in Freetown, used to bet on football matches around the world. A privately owned operator had been licensed by the government to offer betting through shops, internet cafés and kiosks, and said it had more than 1,000 retailers. Critics argued that the industry targeted unemployed people, and anti-betting campaigners alleged that age limits were not enforced (SBC News, 2014).

Calls for formal regulation followed. In September 2017 Awoko reported a meeting in Freetown at which the State Lottery Company and the National Commission for Privatisation (NCP) heard a presentation from La Française des Jeux on match-fixing and money laundering in sports betting. The NCP chairman said the Commission would ensure that a betting regulation policy was put in place as soon as possible. The director of the Financial Intelligence Unit said betting was not yet covered by the anti-money-laundering legislation and would be included when the Act was amended (Awoko, 2017). A later Awoko report on the State Lottery’s finances, which refers to the 2018 and 2020 budgets, stated that gambling in Sierra Leone “has never been regulated”. It said that three ministries (Trade, Tourism through the Tourist Board, and Finance) issue licences to gambling companies and that the government was considering a commission to monitor the sector (Awoko, undated).

Legal framework

Checking gambling legislation and licensing The legal framework is fragmented. No single statute covers all forms of gambling, and the key provisions are spread across older lottery legislation, tourism legislation and the annual Finance Acts. This section sets out what we were able to verify.

Lottery legislation

The lottery legislation cited in the 1974 Library of Congress survey (Act No. 51 of 1962, together with the 1967 decree) gives the Minister of Finance power to license lotteries. Other statute titles that circulate online could not be traced to an official source. We could not obtain the current text of any lottery or gaming statute from SierraLII, the official legal information portal, or from Parliament’s website. Readers should therefore treat the precise title, number and current wording of the lottery legislation as unverified.

Tourism legislation and casinos

Land-based casinos are linked to the tourism sector. The National Tourist Board describes itself as a semi-autonomous body established under the Tourism Development Act 1990. Its functions include the “registration, licensing and classification of all tourist establishments” (National Tourist Board). The published Finance Bill for 2024 contained a schedule of fees for the ministry responsible for tourism, with a section headed “Casinos” that set licence fees by class (Class 1 to Class 5) (Finance Bill 2024). The scanned text was not clear enough for us to report the amounts.

Finance Acts

In practice, the most detailed statutory rules affecting gambling businesses are tax provisions in the annual Finance Acts, described under Taxation below. The Finance Act 2024 is Act No. 1 of 2024. It was assented to on 10 January 2024 and took effect on 1 January 2024 (SierraLII). The NRA has said that the Finance Acts 2024 and 2025 “make provision for taxation and the regulation of betting activities in the country” (NRA, 2025).

Anti-money laundering

In 2024 Sierra Leone enacted a new Anti-Money Laundering and Combating of Financing of Terrorism and Financing of Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction Act (Sierra Leone Law Reports). We could not confirm whether, or how, betting operators and casinos are listed as reporting entities under that Act. Operators should check this directly with the Financial Intelligence Unit.

Regulator and licensing model

Countries generally follow one of three models for gambling. Under a monopoly, the state reserves gambling for one operator. Under a licensing model, any operator that meets the conditions can obtain permission. Under prohibition, gambling is banned. Sierra Leone fits none of these neatly. A state-owned lottery company exists alongside private betting operators, but the private sector is not governed by a dedicated licensing statute or a single regulator.

Some online sources refer to a “National Gaming Board” established by a Gaming Act. We found no official or press source confirming that such a body or statute exists in Sierra Leone. No gaming board website, Act of Parliament, Hansard record or news report referred to one. The bodies that do appear in the sources are:

the Ministry of Finance, which has statutory power to license lotteries and whose fiscal-risk assessment has flagged the State Lottery’s financial problems (Law Library of Congress, 1974; Focus Gaming News, 2026);
the Ministry of Trade and the Ministry of Tourism, through the National Tourist Board, which Awoko reported as also issuing licences to gambling companies (Awoko, undated);
the National Revenue Authority, which administers the taxes on betting and gaming and has imposed system-integration and data-sharing requirements on operators (NRA, 2025);
the National Commission for Privatisation, which represents the government in the State Lottery joint venture (Focus Gaming News, 2026); and
Parliament, whose Committee on Trade and Industry has oversight of the State Lottery joint venture.

The State Lottery

The Sierra Leone State Lottery Company is the state’s own gaming operator. According to Focus Gaming News, Parliament ratified a joint venture agreement between the State Lottery, Accord Logistics and the government (represented by the NCP) on 8 February 2022. Its aims were to develop the gaming and betting industry and revive the lottery. The Ministry of Finance has linked the lottery’s difficulties to mismanagement and administrative problems, and has stated that Accord holds full control of the lottery’s operations and finances (Focus Gaming News, 2026). The parliamentary action taken against the joint venture in 2026 is described under Recent and upcoming developments.

Number of licensees

No official register of betting or casino licensees is published, so we cannot give a verified count. The NRA’s January 2025 compliance meeting was attended by five betting and casino companies (NRA, 2025). Attendance shows that these firms are known to the tax authority. It does not show which licences they hold or that the list is complete.

Online gambling and enforcement

Online casino games on mobile devices Online betting is offered openly in Sierra Leone. Tax legislation now refers expressly to online gambling. The Finance Act 2023 (Act No. 14 of 2023) amended the Goods and Services Tax Act 2009 so that “digital market supply” includes “any online or digital gambling and betting activities” (Finance Act 2023). The Finance Bill for 2024 proposed extending income tax to “digital gambling and betting activities” supplied to consumers in Sierra Leone, including by non-residents with income sourced in the country (Finance Bill 2024).

These provisions bring online gambling into the tax net. They do not create a licensing regime for online casinos, and we found no statute or official guidance that sets out how an operator may obtain permission to offer online casino games to residents. Online casino gaming is therefore best described as unregulated rather than expressly authorised or expressly prohibited. Statements on third-party websites that foreign licences are “tolerated” could not be traced to any official source.

We found no evidence of the enforcement tools used in more developed regimes. These include blocking, meaning orders requiring internet service providers to prevent access to unlicensed sites; payment blocking, meaning instructions to banks or mobile-money providers to refuse gambling transactions; and a published blacklist. Enforcement so far has been fiscal. The NRA has required betting companies to integrate their systems with the authority “to enhance transparency and enable thorough audits of their operations” (Sierraloaded, 2025). Its Deputy Commissioner of Domestic Tax, Edwin Conteh, warned that the sector was under “stringent scrutiny” and that non-compliant companies would face penalties under the Finance Act 2025 (NRA, 2025).

We found no specific rules on gambling advertising, such as watershed restrictions or mandatory warnings, in the sources reviewed.

Position of players

We found no provision in the sources reviewed that makes it an offence for an adult to place a bet or play casino games, whether with a locally established operator or with a foreign website. We also found no reported prosecution or fine of a player for gambling online. This should not be overstated. The underlying lottery and gaming legislation could not be inspected in full, and older statutes inherited from the colonial period may contain gaming offences that are not enforced in practice.

The main legal effect of gambling for players is tax on winnings, which is collected by the paying operator (see Taxation). In practice, players who use foreign websites are outside both Sierra Leone’s tax collection mechanism and any local supervision. Because no regulator handles player complaints, a dispute with an operator, local or foreign, would have to be pursued with the operator directly or through the courts. At a 2026 betting-brand launch, John Buckle, representing the Ministry of Social Welfare, said that “people below 18 years should not be involved in betting or gaming activities” (Awoko, 2026). However, we could not locate the statutory source of a minimum age.

Taxation

Operators

According to the NRA, betting companies are subject to Pay As You Earn (PAYE) on employees’ pay, withholding taxes, goods and services tax and an “Excise Tax on Gaming and Betting” (NRA, 2025). The Finance Bill for 2024, published in the Gazette on 3 November 2023, proposed a new tariff item, 98.01, for “gambling, betting and lottery services”. The proposed rate was 5% of the “net wagered lottery (gross gambling revenue less winnings)” (Finance Bill 2024). Gross gambling revenue (GGR) normally means stakes received less prizes paid out, so the Bill’s wording of the base is ambiguous. The enacted text on SierraLII, and a law-report overview of the Act, did not allow us to confirm whether the 5% rate was adopted unchanged. A 10% figure seen on third-party websites could not be traced to any official source. Operators should obtain the current rate from the NRA.

Online and digital gambling and betting have been within the scope of GST as digital supplies since the Finance Act 2023 (Finance Act 2023). The Finance Bill for 2024 also proposed bringing income from digital gambling and betting supplied by non-resident providers within the income tax net (Finance Bill 2024). The Finance Act 2026 raised the corporate income tax rate from 25% to 30% and increased several withholding taxes. A BudgIT Sierra Leone analysis of the Act did not identify any gambling-specific changes (BudgIT Sierra Leone, 2026).

Players’ winnings

Winnings are taxed by withholding at source. Withholding means that the operator deducts the tax before paying the winner and passes it to the NRA. The Finance Act 2017 introduced a withholding tax on prize winnings. The Hansard of 26 April 2017 records a rate of 10% on winnings up to Le10 million and 20% above that amount. It also records that the House declined a proposal to cut the upper rate to 15%, and that it removed a requirement for winners to hold a taxpayer identification number (Parliament, Hansard, 2017). The NRA’s 2022 tax guide lists the bands as Le500,000 to Le10 million at 10% and above Le10 million at 20%, citing section 2 of the Finance Act 2017 (NRA Tax Guide 2022).

The Finance Act 2024 changed the rate for lotteries. The Bill set withholding tax at 15% on “winnings of NLe1000 and above from any lottery” paid to residents (Finance Bill 2024). Orbitax reported that the enacted Act raised the rate for lottery winnings paid to residents from 10% to 15% (Orbitax, 2024). Whether the 15% rate also applies to sports betting winnings, or whether the 2017 bands still govern them, is not clear from the sources we could read.

Consumer protection and responsible gambling

Sierra Leone has no national self-exclusion scheme, meaning a register through which a person can bar themselves from all licensed gambling. We also found no government-funded gambling helpline or dedicated problem-gambling treatment service. No statute or regulation seen during our research imposes deposit limits, reality checks or other harm-minimisation duties on operators.

Concern about the social effects of betting is long-standing. Critics quoted in 2014 said operators targeted unemployed people and did not enforce age limits (SBC News, 2014). In May 2026, at the Freetown launch of a new betting brand, a panel on responsible gaming and youth safety heard calls from Ibrahim Barrie for age restrictions, betting limits and stronger enforcement. The company said it was considering helplines and awareness tools but had not yet introduced them (Awoko, 2026). In August 2026, a policy analysis by the think tank Nextier, reported by Focus Gaming News, named Sierra Leone with Nigeria and Ghana as countries where betting is spreading in low-income communities. It described Sierra Leone’s regulatory framework as “less developed” (Focus Gaming News, 2026).

Anyone in Sierra Leone concerned about their gambling can seek help from general mental-health services or a doctor. Our responsible gambling guide sets out practical steps, including the blocking software and international support services available online.

Recent and upcoming developments

NRA compliance drive (2025). On 24 January 2025 the NRA met betting companies at its Freetown offices to discuss provisions of the Finance Acts 2024 and 2025. It required operators to link their systems to the authority and reminded them of their data-sharing obligations (NRA, 2025; Sierraloaded, 2025).

State Lottery joint venture (2025–2026). Parliament questioned in July 2025 whether the Accord Logistics agreement had expired. In February 2026 its Committee on Trade and Industry directed Accord’s chief executive to pay outstanding staff salaries and disclose details of the joint account (Focus Gaming News, 2026). At its sitting reported on 6 August 2026, Parliament unanimously adopted the committee’s report. The report found breaches of the agreement, unpaid workers and repeated failures to answer parliamentary summons. The Speaker ordered all accounts linked to the joint venture frozen with immediate effect and directed the Audit Service Sierra Leone to audit them and report to Parliament (Awoko, 2026). The committee recommended that the expired contract should not be renewed and that any future arrangement should go through transparent, competitive procurement. As of October 2026, we found no published outcome of the audit.

Regulatory reform. No gaming bill or new gaming regulator had been announced in official sources by the date of review. The proposals for a betting regulation policy (2017) and a monitoring commission (reported by Awoko in an undated later article) do not appear to have resulted in legislation.

Casino listings for players in Sierra Leone

The listings below are generated automatically from our casino database. They do not by themselves show that an operator is licensed or authorised in Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone has no licensing regime for online casinos and no public register of licensed gambling operators against which a listing could be checked. The listings must therefore not be read as an indication that an operator is supervised locally, or that any particular form of play is lawful. Readers should check an operator’s own licensing information and the terms on which it accepts players from Sierra Leone.

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Key points

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Historical development

Legal framework

Lottery legislation

Tourism legislation and casinos

Finance Acts

Anti-money laundering

Regulator and licensing model

The State Lottery

Number of licensees

Online gambling and enforcement

Position of players

Taxation

Operators

Players’ winnings

Consumer protection and responsible gambling

Recent and upcoming developments

Casino listings for players in Sierra Leone

Related country guides

Sources and further reading

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