How to get a gambling licence in France: fees and steps

One national authority, the ANJ, regulates the whole gambling sector; it replaced ARJEL and absorbed the state monopoly oversight when it was created with effect from 1 January 2020 (its college first met on 23 June 2020).

• The Autorite Nationale des Jeux (ANJ) is the independent authority that grants, renews and withdraws online licences (agrements), approves operator technical setups, runs the self-exclusion register, approves promotional strategies and blocks illegal sites.
• The ANJ was created by ordonnance n. 2019-1015 of 2 October 2019 and has existed since 1 January 2020 (college first met 23 June 2020), replacing the Autorite de Regulation des Jeux En Ligne (ARJEL, 2010 to 2019) and taking over the supervision of the FDJ and PMU monopolies.
• The founding statute is loi 2010-476 of 12 May 2010, which opened online sports betting, horse-race betting and poker to competition; implementing detail sits in decrets 2010-482 of 12 May 2010 and 2010-518 of 19 May 2010 (as amended by decret 2020-494), decret 2020-1349 of 4 November 2020, the cahier des charges (arrete of 27 March 2015) and the ANJ's technical requirements ET1 to ET5.
• FDJ (Francaise des Jeux, lottery and retail sports betting) and PMU (retail horse-race betting) hold exclusive-rights monopolies outside the competitive online licences; the PMU also competes for online horse-race betting alongside licensed operators.
• The ANJ address for filings is 99-101 rue Leblanc, 75015 Paris.

Laws that apply

• Loi n. 2010-476 of 12 May 2010 on the opening to competition and regulation of the online gambling and betting sector (as amended)
• Ordonnance n. 2019-1015 of 2 October 2019 reforming the regulation of gambling and creating the ANJ (operational 1 January 2020)
• Decret n. 2010-482 of 12 May 2010 (conditions for issuing agrements) and decret n. 2010-518 of 19 May 2010, as amended by decret n. 2020-494 of 28 April 2020 (the offer, player accounts, deposit and stake limits, self-exclusion, data archiving)
• Code de la securite sociale, articles L137-20 to L137-27 (social-security levies on games and betting, and the 15% contribution on advertising and promotion costs in L137-27)
• Code general des impots, articles 302 bis ZG to 302 bis ZO (state levies) and article 1609 tertricies (racecourse redevance, rate fixed by decree between 22% and 31%)
• Code de la securite interieure (general prohibition L320-1 and derogations L320-6, self-exclusion L320-9-1, player limits and warning messages L320-11, advertising L320-12 and following)
• Loi n. 2025-199 of 28 February 2025 (social-security financing; levy increases in force 1 July 2025)
• Decret n. 2020-1349 of 4 November 2020 (promotional strategies, certification, 85% maximum payout proportion)
• Loi n. 2026-725 of 3 August 2026 on professional sport, in force 5 August 2026 (blocking of circumvention services, payment blocking by the ANJ president, loss limits from 1 January 2027)

This is the central fact of the French market. Only sports betting, horse-race betting and poker can be licensed online. All online casino / house-banked games remain illegal.

• Licensable online: paris sportifs (sports betting), paris hippiques (horse-race betting) and poker / jeux de cercle. Each is a separate agrement with its own cahier des charges; an operator wanting two verticals files two applications.
• Not licensable online: casino games, slots, roulette, blackjack, baccarat and any house-banked game. Offering them to French players is a criminal offence, whatever the operator holds abroad. Casino games are legal only in physical, licensed casinos.
• No bill to legalise online casino games was before Parliament as at 8 October 2026: the ANJ's pages state that online casino games remain prohibited, and neither the 2027 finance bills as tabled on 1 October 2026 nor the Senat's list of recent texts carries a legalising article.
• Online casino games fall under the general prohibition of CSI L320-1, and none of the three agrement categories of Law 2010-476 art. 21 I covers them; offering them carries up to three years' imprisonment and a EUR 90,000 fine (Law 2010-476 art. 56 I). Confirm the statute before assuming any change.
• The ANJ's operators page listed 16 licensed online operators and 22 sites on 8 October 2026 (16 sports-betting, 5 horse-race betting and 7 poker agrements); its January 2026 review of promotional strategies counted 17. The market is open and uncapped, so new entrants compete rather than buy a scarce licence.

There is no cap and no scarcity premium, but the applicant must have its registered office in an EU Member State or in an EEA state that has a tax-fraud administrative-assistance convention with France, appoint a fiscal representative in France if it is not established there, and pass integrity and financial tests.

• The applicant's registered office must be in an EU Member State or in another EEA state that has concluded with France a convention containing an administrative-assistance clause against tax fraud and evasion (Law 2010-476 art. 21 II); a company established in, or controlled from, a non-cooperative state or territory cannot apply.
• An operator not established in France must appoint a fiscal representative established in France, who files and pays the gambling levies in its place (article 302 bis ZN of the Code general des impots); every operator must also designate the person or persons domiciled in France responsible for keeping its games compliant (Law 2010-476 art. 16).
• The applicant must report final convictions of the last ten years of itself, its owner, its executives and corporate officers for the listed offences (fraud, money laundering, tax fraud and breaches of the gambling prohibition among them), declare every holder of more than 5% of its capital or votes, and show its financial solidity, the financing of its commitments and a guarantee of players' funds; no instrument read asks for beneficial owners or source of funds as such.
• The application dossier includes company statutes, capitalisation and financing evidence, a description of the technical platform and its security, KYC / identity-verification procedures, an AML programme, and a responsible-gaming and player-protection plan.
• There is no scarcity: the number of agrements per vertical is not capped, so the route to market is a fresh application, not the acquisition of an existing licence.

Apply per vertical to the ANJ. The instruction period is capped at four months, there is no application fee, and the agrement runs for five years and is renewable.

• File a separate agrement application for each vertical (sports betting, horse-race betting, poker) with the ANJ; each is assessed against its own cahier des charges.
• The ANJ must give its decision within four months of filing (decret 2010-482 of 12 May 2010); if the file is incomplete the ANJ asks for the missing items and the examination is suspended, a change to the file during examination restarts the four months, and silence at the end of the period is an implicit refusal.
• There is no application fee: the former droit fixe was abolished by loi 2018-1317 of 28 December 2018. Cost is driven by legal, technical and certification work, not a filing charge.
• The agrement is granted for five years and is renewable; the ANJ periodically renews cohorts of operators (between 23 June and 16 September 2020 it renewed 19 agrements held by 10 operators and approved one new operator).
• Before commercial launch the operator must have its technical setup in place and declared to the ANJ, and its gaming software homologated (see section 5).

France requires every licensed operator to capture and archive all gaming data in real time, on a secured device located on French territory, and to have that device and its software certified.

• The operator must run a frontal, a data-capture device made of a capteur (sensor that collects and formats every gaming and account event) and a coffre-fort (safe that secures and preserves the data). Records are timestamped, chained and sealed and must be made available to the ANJ for control.
• The archiving hardware support must be physically located on French (metropolitan) territory; the operator declares its commissioning to the ANJ before any gaming or betting begins (Law 2010-476 art. 31; ANJ technical requirement ET1, decision 2023-214).
• Certification: the archive medium (frontal) must undergo a one-time certification within six months of going live, and a certification of compliance with all ANJ technical requirements on game-operation integrity and information-system security is due within one year of the agrement and updated every year.
• Certification must be performed by a body chosen from the list established by the ANJ (open to EU-established firms registered on that list), not by a body the operator picks freely.
• The operator must list every version of its client-side and server-side gaming software with the corresponding homologation reports and ANJ decisions; software must be homologated before deployment.

French rules require a single verified account per player, self-set limits with a delay on increases, and active moderation of at-risk play.

• The operator must verify identity, address and age (minors are refused) within 30 days of the account request; a provisional account not yet verified is deactivated at 30 days and closed at 60, cannot withdraw, and withdrawals from a validated account go only to one payment account in the player's name.
• Players set deposit and stake limits (moderateurs); the limits are set per seven days before the first deposit and first stake; a lowered limit takes effect at once and a raised limit no earlier than 48 hours after entry (decret 2010-518 art. 16), and from 1 January 2027 the devices must also cover losses, with a wait of at least two weeks for players aged 18 to 25 (Law 2026-725 art. 39).
• Operators must offer self-limitation and temporary self-exclusion tools, monitor for excessive play, and act on at-risk indicators as part of the responsible-gaming plan approved by the ANJ.
• Player funds must be protected and the operator must be able to honour balances; segregation and financial-soundness expectations flow from the agrement conditions.
• Sending commercial communications to a self-excluded or banned player is prohibited (Code de la securite interieure).

France operates a single national gambling-ban register. Consulting it before allowing play is mandatory for every licensed operator.

• The fichier des interdits de jeu lists people banned from gambling, either voluntarily (self-exclusion) or by an administrative prohibition of up to five years for disorderly behaviour (CSI L320-9-1 I). It covers casinos, gaming clubs and the sites of ANJ-licensed online operators, plus FDJ and PMU player accounts.
• Management of the register was transferred from the Ministry of the Interior (bureau des courses et jeux, DLPAJ) to the ANJ with effect from 31 December 2020; the ANJ now runs an online enrolment service to shorten the process.
• A voluntary ban lasts three years, tacitly renewable (CSI L320-9-1 II); the ANJ says it is valid for at least three years, after which the person may ask for it to be lifted.
• Every operator must query the register through the ANJ's information system when an account is opened and again at every connection, refuse anyone listed and close the account of anyone who becomes listed (ET4, API service). 73,439 people were under an exclusion at the end of 2024, and the ANJ said in November 2025 that more than 85,000 were registered.

Licensed operators are obliged entities under French anti-money-laundering law and report to TRACFIN, under ANJ supervision.

• Operators must run customer due diligence and identity verification, monitor transactions for suspicious activity, and keep records, under the AML/CFT provisions of the Code monetaire et financier (licensed online operators are obliged entities under CMF L561-2 9 bis; due-diligence and transaction records are kept five years, CMF L561-12).
• Suspicious transactions must be reported to TRACFIN, the French financial-intelligence unit, before the operation is carried out (CMF L561-16); the ANJ supervises online operators' AML compliance but refers breaches to the Commission nationale des sanctions (CMF L561-38), which heard its first ANJ referral on 8 July 2026 and sanctioned the operator, one of its directors and its compliance officer.
• AML controls overlap with the KYC and single-account rules, so identity verification serves both player-protection and AML purposes.
• Payment and account rules restrict funding methods and anonymity, and so strengthen the traceability of player funds.

The betting levies are charged on gross gaming revenue (produit brut des jeux, PBJ = stakes minus winnings paid), with stakes counted from 1 January 2020 by the date of the event; for online poker the social-security levy is on gross gaming revenue and the CGI levy on stakes. The state levies rose on 1 March 2025 and the social-security levies on 1 July 2025.

• Online sports betting carries total public levies of 59.3% of GGR since 1 July 2025: a state levy of 33.7% (Code general des impots, art. 302 bis ZK, since 1 March 2025), a social-security levy of 15% (Code de la securite sociale, art. L137-21, since 1 July 2025) and a levy of 10.6% funding the Agence nationale du sport (CGI art. 1609 tricies, since 1 January 2024); the three share one base.
• Online horse-race betting carries a state levy of 20.2% of GGR (art. 302 bis ZK, since 1 March 2025) plus a social-security levy of 6.9% of GGR (art. L137-20), 27.1% in total, on top of a redevance for the racecourse companies (sociétés de courses) on the same GGR for bets on French races, at a rate fixed by decree between 22% and 31% (CGI art. 1609 tertricies; 25.8% in the ANJ's table of 11 December 2025), which funds the racing industry.
• Online poker carries a state levy of 1.8% of amounts wagered (CGI art. 302 bis ZK, since 1 March 2025; outside tournaments capped at EUR 0.90 a hand) plus a social-security levy of 10% of GGR since 1 July 2025 (art. L137-22); the two bases differ, so the rates are not added.
• A 15% contribution applies to advertising and promotion costs (CSS art. L137-27; the date it first applied was not established in the sources read), payable to the Caisse nationale de l'assurance maladie; online horse-race betting is outside it.
• Levies are declared on the annex to the VAT return and paid by the operator, or by its French fiscal representative if it is not established in France (art. 302 bis ZN). Player winnings on skill games can be personally taxable, but the operator levies above are the market-entry numbers.

Advertising is permitted for licensed operators but tightly framed. Each operator must submit its annual promotional strategy to the ANJ for approval, and every ad must carry a prevention message.

• Every licensed operator must submit its annual promotional strategy to the ANJ before 30 October (Law 2010-476 art. 34 IV; the ANJ decides within two months), which assesses it against public-policy objectives (preventing excessive and pathological play, protecting minors) and can impose binding prescriptions.
• Advertising must not target minors (CSI L320-12 and D320-10), must not suggest that gambling is a solution to personal, professional, social or psychological difficulties or present it as a living (CSI D320-9), and must carry the warning message with the helpline number 09-74-75-13-13, whose wording is fixed by the arrete of 4 March 2026 (in force for online games from 6 September 2026, replacing the 2010 order).
• Bonuses and financial incentives to recruit or retain players are scrutinised; in its January 2026 review the ANJ flagged as vigilance points promotional budgets up 25% to EUR 785 million, the World Cup months of June and July taking 21% of marketing spend, digital media at 44% of spend and financial gratifications up 23%, and for the first time ordered every operator not to exceed its announced global budget.
• A 15% levy applies to advertising and promotional expenditure (see section 9), on top of the content rules.
• The statutory rules sit in CSI L320-12 to L320-14 and D320-2 to D320-10 (articles 7 to 9 of Law 2010-476 were repealed on 1 January 2020 by Ordonnance 2019-1015), and the ANJ publishes lignes directrices (guidelines, 2022) on them. Advertising an unlicensed site is an offence (Law 2010-476 art. 57: EUR 100,000, up to four times the advertising spend), and influencers' gambling content is governed by Law 2023-451.

The ANJ polices the illegal market with administrative blocking powers it can exercise without a prior court order, and publishes the list of blocked sites.

• The ANJ president can, after a notice to the site editor and host that goes unheeded for five days, order internet service providers to block access to an illegal gambling site, order search engines and directories to delist it and, since 5 August 2026 (Law 2026-725), order providers of circumvention services (mere-conduit services that let users bypass access restrictions) to block it (Law 2010-476 art. 61); the ANJ president can also ban payment flows to and from the operator's accounts for six renewable months (CMF L563-2).
• Enforcement is heavy: in 2024 the ANJ issued 232 blocking / delisting orders covering 1,337 URLs, and blocked around 1,290 URLs in 2025; it also blocked prediction-market site Polymarket and targets influencers promoting illegal offers.
• The ANJ publishes the list of sites subject to a blocking / delisting decision so players can identify illegal sites.
• Scale of the illegal offer: an ANJ-commissioned study (2023) found 510 unauthorised sites drawing traffic from France and about 3 million people using unlicensed offers at least monthly, 35% of them through a VPN; 910 of the 1,337 URLs blocked in 2024 were mirror sites.

Because the market is open and uncapped, the work is not chasing a scarce licence but building a compliant French operation: correct vertical, EEA/fiscal footing, certified French-territory archiving, register and AML integration, then filing per vertical with the ANJ. Sequence:

1. 01

   Confirm your vertical is licensable

   casino excluded

   Pick sports betting, horse-race betting or poker. If your product is online casino / house-banked games, France has no licence for it, it is illegal, so do not proceed on that basis.

2. 02

   Stand up an eligible entity and fiscal representative

   EEA + art. 302 bis ZN

   Use a company whose registered office is in an EU Member State or in an EEA state with a tax-fraud administrative-assistance convention with France; appoint a fiscal representative established in France for the levies if the company is not established there, and name the person domiciled in France responsible for the compliance of the games. Prepare financing evidence and the guarantee of players' funds.

3. 03

   Assemble the agrement dossier per vertical

   one file each

   Compile statutes, financing evidence, platform and IT-security description, KYC procedures, AML programme and the responsible-gaming plan. File a separate application for each vertical you want.

4. 04

   Build the frontal and locate archiving in France

   capteur + coffre-fort

   Deploy the data-capture device (sensor plus secure safe) that timestamps, chains and seals every gaming and account event, hosted on French metropolitan territory, and prepare to declare its commissioning to the ANJ before launch.

5. 05

   Homologate your gaming software

   pre-deployment

   Obtain homologation for each client-side and server-side software version, and keep the reports and ANJ decisions ready to list in your dossier.

6. 06

   Engage an ANJ-listed certification body

   6-month + annual

   Choose a certifier from the ANJ list. Plan the one-time frontal certification within six months of go-live and the recurring annual certification of game integrity and IS security.

7. 07

   Integrate the self-exclusion register

   mandatory check

   Wire ANJ interrogation of the fichier des interdits de jeu into onboarding and pre-play, refuse listed players, and block commercial messaging to self-excluded / banned players.

8. 08

   Implement player-protection controls

   single account + limits

   Enforce one verified 18+ account per player, self-set seven-day deposit and stake limits (an increase takes effect no earlier than 48 hours after entry; loss limits join them on 1 January 2027), self-exclusion tools and at-risk monitoring.

9. 09

   Stand up AML/CFT compliance

   TRACFIN

   Implement customer due diligence, transaction monitoring and suspicious-transaction reporting to TRACFIN under the Code monetaire et financier, supervised by the ANJ.

10. 10

    File with the ANJ and clear the four-month review

    <= 4 months, no fee

    Submit each dossier to the ANJ (99-101 rue Leblanc, 75015 Paris). There is no application fee; the ANJ decides within four months of filing (a request for missing items suspends the period, a change to the file restarts it, and silence is an implicit refusal). The agrement runs five years, renewable.

11. 11

    Submit your annual promotional strategy

    ANJ approval

    Before advertising, file your annual promotional strategy before 30 October for ANJ approval, include the mandatory prevention message, avoid targeting minors, and budget the 15% advertising levy.

12. 12

    Launch and pay the GGR levies

    ongoing

    Go live once declared, certified and homologated. Then declare and pay the levies via the fiscal representative (59.3% of GGR for sports betting, plus the horse-race and poker rates in section 9) and maintain certification and register checks.

Tier-ordered: official government first, then practitioner, then trade media. Every primary figure was read from the in-force text on 8 Oct 2026.