Gambling tax in the Netherlands

The licence decides who files

Gambling tax is a separate tax with its own law. It is levied on prizes from games of chance, and the law fixes who pays it over: within the licensed Dutch offer that is the operator, outside it that is the winner.

That split follows the licence, not how trustworthy an operator looks. A site can appear polished and pay out quickly and still sit outside the Dutch system. How you check which category an operator falls into is covered in what a Ksa licence means.

The rate is 37.80% as of 1 January 2026

Dutch gambling tax rose in two steps: from 30.5% to 34.2% on 1 January 2025 and to 37.80% on 1 January 2026. The rate applies to the prize, not to your net result — your stake is not deducted.

Prizes of € 449 or less are exempt. That exemption is not a threshold subtracted from a larger prize: win € 500 and the whole € 500 is taxed. And the exemption does not apply at all to online gambling without a Dutch licence, where the tax office looks at each calendar month and asks whether your winnings exceeded your stakes.

One case catches people out in both directions. For casino games and horse-race betting with an operator established inside the EU or EEA, you do not have to file at all. For foreign lotteries you do — even inside the EU.

At a licensed operator, you notice little

The withholding is a duty of the licence holder. You receive your payout and carry no tax task away from it: no form, no deadline, no letter from the Belastingdienst. For most players the subject ends here.

If you are unsure whether your operator handles it this way, that is a question you can put to the operator directly — it should be able to explain how the withholding is arranged. A vague answer, or none, is itself information about the operator you are dealing with.

Without a Dutch licence, the return becomes yours

If the withholding falls away, the obligation does not — it moves. You become the one who must declare the prize, and that duty carries your name. It survives even if the operator later turns out to be unreachable, changes its name, or closes your account.

In practice this means you cannot leave the filing to a party that has no stake in it. You do it yourself, with the Belastingdienst, based on your own records. We spell this step out deliberately, because it is the cost that stays invisible for longest when you play outside the Dutch licensed offer.

What this means without a BSN or DigiD

Filing anything with the Belastingdienst is normally done through DigiD, and DigiD is tied to a BSN. An expat who has only just arrived may have neither yet. That is a real gap, and it lands squarely on the situation this page is about: a prize from an operator outside the Dutch licensed offer, with no withholding done for you.

How the Belastingdienst expects someone without a BSN to file a gambling tax return is not something we can verify from what we hold, so we are not going to guess at a procedure. The Belastingdienst is the party that can answer for your specific case, and the sooner you ask, the less that gap costs you.

The rate exists, and here is why it is not printed here

The rate is a percentage fixed in the law and adjusted by the legislator from time to time. We do not reproduce that percentage on this page. A figure in an article is a snapshot that does not update itself when the law does, and with a tax rate a stale figure is worse than no figure — you would plan around it.

The current rate is published by the Belastingdienst, and the underlying legal text sits on wetten.overheid.nl. Both are listed under sources below. The same applies to the exemption threshold for small prizes: it exists, and its amount is exactly the kind of figure you should take from the source, not from us.

The deadline is tied to the prize, not the tax year

This is the mistake that costs the most. Gambling tax does not travel with your annual income tax return; the filing clock starts running from the moment the prize becomes available to you. Waiting for spring to fold it into the rest of your paperwork is not early, it is late.

How much time you actually have sits with the Belastingdienst. What matters here is the shape of it: short, and tied to an event. Put the date of the payout in your diary, not the date of your yearly return.

A loss is not an offset

Gambling tax looks at prizes, not at your result over a period. A losing month is not netted against a winning one, and your stake is not a cost you can deduct. Someone who lost money overall across a year but won one single prize can still owe tax on that prize.

That feels unfair, and it is consistent: casino games are built so that the operator wins over the long run, and the tax is not an instrument that corrects for that. Do not work out your tax position as if you were running a business with an annual profit and loss account.

What to keep on record

Anyone playing outside the licensed Dutch offer needs their own paper trail. For every prize, note the date it became available, the amount, the operator's name and proof of the payout — a bank statement or a transaction record you keep yourself.

Keep that outside the account with the operator. Accounts get closed and statements disappear; your filing duty does not disappear with them. And read how often you find yourself keeping this kind of record as information about your own play, too — that is the subject of responsible gambling.