Gambling in Tajikistan: Laws, Casino Ban and Betting Rules

Published by Casino News Daily editorial teamReviewed byFilip RadulovicOur editorial approach

Tajikistan prohibits casinos and gaming-machine halls, but it does not prohibit all gambling. Casino operations have been unlawful since a presidential decree of 20 July 2000, and Article 240 of the Criminal Code makes it a crime to organise or maintain a casino, gaming tables or machines paying cash winnings. At the same time, the Law on Licensing Certain Types of Activity treats totalisators (pool betting), bookmakers’ offices and lotto as licensable activities, and the Ministry of Finance has stated that lottery organisers need its licence. The result is a mixed model: a criminal ban on casino-style gaming alongside a small licensed sector for betting and lotteries. This guide sets out how the system developed, the statutes that govern it, how it is enforced and what it means for players.

Key points

Casino operations have been illegal since Presidential Decree No. 328 “On Casino Operations” of 20 July 2000, according to the 2018 mutual evaluation by the Eurasian Group on Combating Money Laundering (EAG).
Article 240 of the Criminal Code covers organising or maintaining a casino, gaming tables or machines with cash winnings; press reports of police cases cite a penalty of six to eight years’ imprisonment with confiscation of property.
Totalisators, bookmakers’ offices and lotto games are lawful only under a licence issued under the special procedure of the Law on Licensing Certain Types of Activity (2004, as amended).
The Ministry of Finance says lottery organisers need its licence, and the EAG lists it as the anti-money-laundering supervisor for betting offices and lottery organisers; the EAG counted 163 such entities in 2018.
No online casino can be licensed. No published national self-exclusion register or dedicated gambling helpline could be identified.

Last reviewed: 13 October 2026.

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Historical development

The most detailed academic account of Tajik gambling law is an article by T.I. Sultonova, published in 2013 in the Journal of Foreign Legislation and Comparative Law (Sultonova, “Legal regulation of gambling in the Republic of Tajikistan”). It traces a long tradition of restriction. On 15 September 1928 the Central Executive Committee of the Tajik Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic adopted a resolution “On the closure of casinos and other establishments for gambling”, following a Union-wide resolution of 8 May 1928. During the Soviet period lotteries were run by the state and justified by social purposes. Organising gambling and keeping gambling dens became a specific crime in Soviet Tajikistan only in 1989, when Article 221.1 was added to the Criminal Code of the Tajik SSR; administrative liability for taking part in gambling followed in 1993.

After independence in 1991 the state moved against casinos within the first decade. According to the EAG’s 2018 Mutual Evaluation Report on Tajikistan, “According to President Decree ‘On Casino Operations’ (No. 328 of July 20, 2000), casino operations are illegal in Tajikistan.” The present Criminal Code, adopted by Law No. 574 of 21 May 1998, contains the corresponding criminal offence in Article 240.

Gaming machines did not vanish immediately. In February 2008 Asia-Plus reported on an amusement arcade with gambling machines in Sughd province, while noting that “gambling establishments are prohibited from functioning in Tajikistan”. By 2011 the police were treating machine halls as criminal enterprises: in March of that year the Ministry of Internal Affairs reported closing an illegal hall with eleven gambling machines in a Dushanbe restaurant (Asia-Plus, 30 March 2011).

Betting and lotteries took a different path. A Ministry of Culture regulation of 14 June 2002 dealt with licensing gaming and entertainment activities but excluded casinos and money lotteries. Lotteries were placed under a Procedure for Holding Lotteries approved by Government Resolution No. 274 of 3 July 2002, and Ministry of Finance Order No. 36 of 16 May 2003 set out how lottery operators receive certificates. In 2009 the licensing law was amended to list the operation of totalisator ticket offices, bookmakers’ offices and lotto games as licensable activities (Sultonova, 2013).

Legal framework

Checking gambling legislation and licensing

Tajikistan has no single gambling act. The rules are spread across criminal, administrative, civil and licensing legislation, together with subordinate acts of the government and the Ministry of Finance. Sultonova (2013) described the dedicated gambling legislation as underdeveloped, and no comprehensive gambling statute adopted since then could be found.

Presidential Decree No. 328 (2000)

The decree “On Casino Operations” of 20 July 2000 is the instrument that the EAG identifies as making casino operations illegal. The EAG report also states, in its discussion of the country’s risk profile, that “casinos, including online casinos, are banned in Tajikistan” (paragraph 79). The full text of the decree could not be located on a public legal portal for this review.

Criminal Code, Article 240

The Criminal Code of the Republic of Tajikistan was adopted on 21 May 1998 and has been amended many times. Its Article 240 covers the organisation or maintenance of a casino, gaming tables and machines with cash winnings. The official text of the article could not be consulted for this review, as the consolidated versions available online are partial or behind paywalls. Its scope and penalty are therefore taken from consistent secondary reporting:

Sultonova (2013) describes Article 240 as setting criminal liability for “organising or maintaining casinos, gaming tables and machines with cash winnings”.
Reports of police cases describe the penalty as imprisonment for six to eight years with confiscation of property (Asia-Plus, 17 December 2020; Asia-Plus, 12 March 2014). An earlier report gave the maximum as eight years (Asia-Plus, 30 March 2011).

The provision is applied in practice to very small operations as well as large ones. Cases reported by the Ministry of Internal Affairs include a 68-year-old man in Vose district in whose home police found an illegal gambling room, with dice and cash, in 2019 (Asia-Plus, 20 November 2019) and two men in Muminabad district who, in February 2026, were suspected of running a game with winnings, taking a ten-somoni stake from each participant, in a village shopping centre (Ministry of Internal Affairs, 6 February 2026).

Code of Administrative Offences

Below the criminal threshold, Sultonova (2013) cites Article 465 of the Code of Administrative Offences, which imposes fines for organising gambling for money, goods or other valuables in places not authorised for it, for taking part in such gambling, and for private individuals accepting bets on sporting and other contests. The current text and fine levels of that article could not be verified. Administrative sanctions can include short custodial arrest: in May 2022 a court ordered 15 days’ arrest for a 22-year-old man who organised gambling on a street near a Dushanbe market, after police drew up an administrative protocol (Asia-Plus, 12 May 2022).

Civil Code

Part Two of the Civil Code contains two articles on games and wagers. According to Sultonova (2013), Article 1077 sets the general rule that claims connected with organising or taking part in games and bets are not protected by the courts, except where a participant was misled, coerced or threatened, or where there was a malicious agreement between the participant’s representative and the organiser. Article 1078 deals with games organised under a licence: the relationship between organiser and participant rests on a contract, and a winning participant who is not paid has a claim against the organiser. In practice, this means that a gambling debt or unpaid winnings can be pursued in court only where the game was lawfully licensed.

Law on Licensing Certain Types of Activity

The Law on Licensing Certain Types of Activity, signed on 17 May 2004, is the basis for lawful betting. Article 18(1) places on the special list of licensed activities “activity in organising and maintaining totalisator cash desks, bookmakers’ offices and lotto games”. Activities on the special list follow a special licensing procedure set by the government; the law itself leaves the choice of licensing body to the government (Article 5). The version published on FAOLEX lists amendments up to Law No. 1712 of 4 July 2020. In April 2020 the lower house of Parliament adopted amendments moving totalisators, bookmakers, lotto and pawnshops onto the special list, raising the application fee to ten calculation indicators and providing for licences of at least three years, with the issuance fee to be set by the government for each activity (Asia-Plus, 22 April 2020). A calculation indicator is a fixed monetary unit used in Tajik law for fees and fines.

Regulator and licensing model

Tajikistan has no independent gambling regulator. Responsibility is divided as follows:

Ministry of Finance. It has long had a role in lotteries: a Ministry of Finance order of 2003 set the procedure for issuing certificates to lottery operators (Sultonova, 2013). In 2021 a ministry lawyer told Radio Ozodi that organisers of online lotteries “are obliged to obtain the appropriate licence from the Ministry of Finance”, that unlicensed organisers would be liable for illegal business activity, and that the ministry had prepared amendments to make this explicit for online draws (Asia-Plus, 19 April 2021). The EAG report lists the ministry as the anti-money-laundering supervisor for “organizations owning sweepstakes and betting offices and holding lotteries and other games”. Under Article 5 of the licensing law, the government designates the body that licenses totalisators and bookmakers’ offices; no official published source naming that body could be found for this review.
Ministry of Internal Affairs and prosecutors. The police detect and investigate unlicensed gambling under the Criminal Code and the Code of Administrative Offences.
Courts. Criminal cases under Article 240 are tried by the ordinary courts.

The EAG recorded 163 entities in the sector at the time of its 2018 assessment: 112 organisations operating sweepstakes and betting offices and 51 lottery and other game organisers. No public online register of licensed betting or lottery operators could be found for this review.

This produces a prohibition-plus-licensing model. Casino games, table games and gaming machines with cash prizes are prohibited outright. Fixed-odds and pool betting and lotto are allowed through domestically licensed businesses. Lotteries require a licence, which the Ministry of Finance says it issues. No state-owned national lottery operator could be identified.

Online gambling and enforcement

Online casino games on mobile devices

No law creates a separate licence for online gambling. The legal position therefore follows from the rules above:

Online casino games are not licensable. The EAG states that online casinos are banned, and the prohibition on casinos and machines with cash winnings applies regardless of the channel.
Online betting and lotteries appear to be possible only through operators licensed in Tajikistan, as the Ministry of Finance’s 2021 statements on online lotteries indicate.
Offshore operators hold no Tajik licence. Accepting bets or running lotteries without a licence exposes an organiser to liability for unlicensed business activity and, for casino-type games, to prosecution under Article 240.

Enforcement against offshore websites is less documented. Internet access in Tajikistan is heavily controlled by the state: in 2019 Reporters Without Borders described how the government’s Communications Service blocks news websites, noting that the authorities control access to the internet and can block resources without involving providers (RSF, 29 April 2019). However, no official list of blocked gambling websites, and no published order on blocking payments to foreign gambling operators, could be found. Claims that betting or casino websites are systematically blocked could not be verified for this review.

Enforcement on the ground is mainly directed at physical premises. The largest reported case concerned a network of gaming-machine branches in Dushanbe, Yavan district and Vahdat, registered in 2019 as a limited company with “loto” in its name. Prosecutors and police detained nine people, including two foreign nationals, and seized 1.3 million somoni, US$200,000 and 18 vehicles (Asia-Plus, 14 October 2019). On 27 February 2020 the Dushanbe City Court convicted the organisers under Article 240 together with the articles on fraud (Article 247) and illegal foreign-currency dealing (Article 286), imposing sentences of between six and 22 years; the verdict was subject to appeal (Asia-Plus, 27 February 2020). The case shows that labelling a gaming operation as a “lottery” does not take it outside the casino ban.

Advertising of gambling is not governed by a dedicated set of rules that could be identified. No published restrictions specific to gambling advertising could be found for this review.

Position of players

The criminal ban in Article 240 is aimed at those who organise or maintain gambling, not at those who play. No provision making it a crime simply to gamble online with a foreign operator could be found, and no prosecution of an individual player for doing so was found.

Players are not entirely free of liability, however. According to Sultonova (2013), Article 465 of the Code of Administrative Offences provides for fines for taking part in gambling for money in unauthorised places, as well as for organising it. Participants found at illegal gambling venues are therefore at risk of administrative penalties, although the reported cases name only organisers as defendants.

The civil-law position is also relevant. Under Article 1077 of the Civil Code, claims arising from unlicensed gambling are not protected by the courts. A player who is not paid by an unlicensed or foreign operator has no practical legal remedy in Tajikistan. Under Article 1078, a player with a licensed domestic operator can sue for unpaid winnings.

Gambling losses can also lead to other offences. In June 2026 a Dushanbe man who had lost 8,960 somoni gambling falsely reported a robbery to hide the loss from his parents, and was investigated under Article 346 of the Criminal Code on knowingly false reports (Asia-Plus, 16 June 2026).

Taxation

Specific gambling tax rules could not be verified from primary sources for this review. The list of national taxes in Article 6 of the Tax Code, in the undated English version published on FAOLEX (which may not reflect the current code), names no separate gambling tax, which suggests that licensed betting and lottery companies are taxed under the general rules for businesses. They also pay licence fees under the licensing law. The application fee for special-list activities is ten calculation indicators, with the issuance fee set by the government (Asia-Plus, 22 April 2020).

For individuals, whether and at what rate winnings from licensed betting or lotteries are taxed or withheld at source could not be confirmed. Readers with questions about the tax treatment of winnings should consult the Tax Committee under the Government of the Republic of Tajikistan.

Anti-money laundering

Gambling businesses are covered by the anti-money-laundering (AML) regime as designated non-financial businesses and professions (DNFBPs), a term used by the Financial Action Task Force for non-bank sectors exposed to money laundering. The 2018 EAG evaluation rated lotteries and sweepstakes (pool betting) among the DNFBPs with a high vulnerability to money laundering. It found that DNFBPs understood their reporting obligations but had not sent “even a single report” to the Financial Monitoring Department, that the Ministry of Finance was not authorised at the time to inspect betting and lottery businesses for AML compliance, and that no sanctions had been applied to DNFBPs. The Financial Monitoring Department has indirect access, through the Ministry of Finance, to information on bookmakers operating in Tajikistan, updated at least once every two weeks.

Consumer protection and responsible gambling

Consumer protection is limited and rests mainly on the prohibition model itself:

Age limits. A statutory minimum gambling age set by a gambling-specific law could not be identified.
Self-exclusion. No national self-exclusion register could be found. Self-exclusion means a scheme by which a person can bar themselves from gambling with all licensed operators.
Support services. No dedicated national helpline or treatment service for gambling problems could be identified. People affected would have to rely on general health services.
Court enforcement of winnings. Article 1078 of the Civil Code gives players with licensed operators a contractual claim for unpaid winnings.

General guidance on recognising and managing gambling harm is available in our responsible gambling guide.

Recent and upcoming developments

Licensing amendments (2020). Parliament moved totalisators, bookmakers, lotto and pawnshops onto the special licensing list, with higher fees and licences of at least three years (Asia-Plus, 22 April 2020).
Online lotteries (2021). The Ministry of Finance stated that organisers of online lotteries, including bloggers running paid draws on video platforms, need a ministry licence, and prepared draft amendments. Whether those amendments were adopted could not be confirmed.
Continued Article 240 enforcement (2026). In February 2026 the Ministry of Internal Affairs reported that two men in Muminabad district had been detained on suspicion of an offence under Article 240.
No comprehensive reform. No draft law to legalise casinos or to create a single gambling act or regulator could be found as of 13 October 2026.

Casino listings for players in Tajikistan

The listings below are generated automatically from our casino database and do not show that any operator is licensed in Tajikistan. Casino operations, including online casinos, are prohibited, and no online casino licence exists; the listings must not be read as an indication that playing at these sites is lawful or that winnings could be enforced in a Tajik court. Only domestically licensed betting and lottery businesses are authorised, under the licensing system.

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Key points

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Historical development

Legal framework

Presidential Decree No. 328 (2000)

Criminal Code, Article 240

Code of Administrative Offences

Civil Code

Law on Licensing Certain Types of Activity

Regulator and licensing model

Online gambling and enforcement

Position of players

Taxation

Anti-money laundering

Consumer protection and responsible gambling

Recent and upcoming developments

Casino listings for players in Tajikistan

Related country guides

Sources and further reading

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