Tusk pushes EU-wide iGaming tax, Malta already says it’ll block it

Donald Tusk made his case in plain terms: whatever pays for the EU’s next long-term budget shouldn’t come out of ordinary workers’ pockets. Instead, Poland’s prime minister argued the money should come from industries already posting high margins, naming iGaming, crypto, and large digital companies specifically as candidates. It’s a political framing as much as a fiscal one, and it puts Tusk behind a proposal that’s already been sitting inside Brussels’ own planning documents for a while.

The gambling levy isn’t a fresh idea Tusk invented on the spot. It’s part of a package of possible new EU revenue sources the European Commission put forward while building the 2028-2034 multiannual budget, and the European Parliament already backed the broader initiative back in 2026. What Tusk added was political weight from a sitting head of government, pushing a line item that had mostly lived in commission paperwork into an actual public argument.

The numbers involved keep shifting depending on who’s running them. Current preliminary estimates put potential annual revenue at €2-4 billion, though the actual rate, how it would get collected, and how the money would then be split among member states all remain unsettled. That range is already well above an earlier commission figure of €1.9 billion a year, calculated at a 3% levy on net gaming revenue, a spread wide enough that nobody’s treating either number as final.

Malta has already signaled where this fight is headed. Its prime minister said the country would block an EU-wide levy outright, pointing to iGaming’s outsized role in the Maltese economy, where the sector accounts for more than 10% of GDP. That objection matters more than most, because adopting a new EU own resource requires unanimous approval from all 27 member states before it even reaches national constitutional procedures. One government with enough at stake to say no is, on paper, enough to stop the whole thing. The EU already has an offshore iGaming problem draining potential tax revenue regardless of how this vote goes, with unlicensed operators pulling in an estimated €12 billion across the bloc last year alone. Taxing the licensed side harder while that keeps growing untouched would just widen the price gap pushing players toward operators paying nothing at all.