Netherlands renews licenses for eight iGaming operators through 2031, now with a five-year violations check

The brands covered are Holland Casino Online, bet365, GGPoker, Betcity, TOTO and Winnitt, Kansino, FairPlay Casino, and Bingoal, operating under license holders TOTO Online, Holland Casino, Hillside, Betent, NSUS Malta, Play North, FPO Nederland, and Bingoal Nederland. These are the first-wave operators that received licenses back in 2021, when the Netherlands legalized online gambling, and their original terms were set to expire at the end of September 2026. Two other first-wave names, LiveScore Bet and Tombola, aren’t part of this renewal because they already exited the Dutch market in 2024, both citing the country’s rising gambling tax rate, which is set to climb to 37.8% by 2026, as the reason the market stopped making commercial sense for them.

What’s new in this renewal round is how the KSA evaluated the eight remaining operators. For the first time, the regulator factored in violations that had been definitively established against each licensee over the preceding five years, and it required operators to show what corrective steps they had taken in response and what they were doing to prevent the same issues from recurring. The KSA said all eight met the bar for renewal, though it flagged some operators with additional points of attention based on its review, without specifying publicly which operators those were or what the concerns involved. It’s a tighter standard than the one the regulator applied when it built out its approved-operator list for advertising partners, and it suggests the KSA plans to keep raising the bar each time a license comes up for renewal.

The five-year license term now running from October 2026 through September 2031 effectively sets the clock for the next renewal cycle, and the violations-review approach introduced this time is likely to carry over as a standard part of how the KSA evaluates every future license renewal in the Dutch market, not just this first batch.