Dominican Republic’s new gambling law brings online betting under one regulator

President Luis Abinader signed Law 86-26 on October 2, publishing it in Official Gazette No. 11263 and creating the Dirección General de Juegos de Azar, or DGJA, as the country’s new gambling regulator. The DGJA replaces the old Dirección de Casinos y Juegos de Azar, the DCJA, as an autonomous, decentralized body attached to the Ministry of Finance and Economy, and its staff will handle the transition with technical support from the outgoing agency’s personnel while the new structure gets fully set up. Abinader named Teófilo “Quico” Tabar Manzur as interim director general, a role he steps into straight from coordinating the country’s Gambling Regularization Process, the same effort that spent recent years working to legalize betting shops that had been operating outside the system.

The law’s reach extends explicitly to online and mobile betting, according to FC Abogados, with dedicated articles requiring licensed operators to verify a user’s identity and age against electoral records before accepting any deposit or bet. No operator can run legally without DGJA authorization, and license terms vary by category: ten years for internet gaming and sports betting banks, five for lottery banks. Advertising aimed at or appealing to anyone under 18 is barred outright, operators have to disclose the risks of compulsive gambling, and the law sets up a national self-exclusion registry with a minimum six-month commitment once someone opts in. Existing operators get twelve months to register in the new unified system, with a three-month window specifically for bringing operations into compliance.

Not everyone in the industry is treating the rollout as settled. Fenabanca, the federation representing traditional lottery banks, has flagged what it calls serious tax and operational contradictions in how the law treats different business types: a traditional banca’s annual tax bill jumped from roughly $575 to $1,400, while electronic lottery platform concessionaires pay closer to $640 under the same framework. The federation is also warning that DGJA’s provisional regime could end up mass-regularizing unlicensed lottery agencies during the transition period, including some operating in violation of the mandatory 200-meter spacing rule between locations, which would undercut the licensed operators the law is supposed to be protecting in the first place.