Europe’s offshore iGaming market tripled to €12B in 6 years

Helios and Regulus Partners put a real number on something the industry has mostly discussed in vague terms until now. Commissioned by Euromat, their study puts Europe’s offshore iGaming turnover at €12 billion in net revenue for 2025, roughly a quarter of the entire European iGaming market. That’s not a small leak around the edges of a regulated system. That’s one euro in four moving through operators sitting outside any European licensing framework at all.

The research covered 28 markets: all 27 EU countries except Malta and Luxembourg, plus the UK, Serbia, and Montenegro. Rather than estimate from the top down, the analysts worked through more than a thousand hours of website traffic data and digital promotion activity, then cross-referenced that against regulatory changes and socioeconomic indicators market by market. Since 2019, they found, the unregulated segment has tripled in size. The biggest offshore operators, per the report, have gotten large enough to build actual recognizable brands and hold meaningful market share, not just scrape by on scattered, low-visibility traffic.

Helios pins the growth on a mix of causes rather than one obvious culprit. Tighter regulation itself pushes some of it: stricter rules narrow what licensed operators can offer, which leaves gaps offshore platforms fill. Affordability checks, the spending-verification measures several regulated markets have rolled out, get named specifically as a driver too, alongside the more basic problem of licensed operators simply offering less choice than players want.

One gap stands out. Most regulated European markets still don’t offer any legal way to gamble using cryptocurrency, and offshore operators fill that space without hesitation. Affiliate networks get a specific mention too — the same infrastructure regulated operators use to acquire players is apparently just as effective at funneling traffic to platforms with no license at all, and nobody’s built a way to tell the two apart before the click happens. Europe isn’t alone in this pattern either. US offshore iGaming crossed $97.4 billion the same year, growing roughly twice as fast as the licensed market there, which suggests the forces pushing players toward unregulated platforms aren’t specific to any one continent’s rulebook.