Online gambling operators’ revenue is, quite literally, what their customers lose. Using official data, this is how that business has grown in Spain, how much it spends to recruit players and who it reaches.
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Plain mode explains the ideas without jargon. Technical mode adds formulas, methods and code.
€1.71bn
lost by online players in 2025 (+17% on 2024)
2.2m
active players in 2025
€791
net loss per active player per year
39%
of that revenue goes back into marketing (€664m)
A business that has tripled
What online gambling operators earn is, literally, what their customers lose: everything that is bet minus everything paid back as prizes. In Spain that figure went from €558m in 2017 to €1,706m in 2025.
TechnicalWhat GGR is
GGR (gross gaming revenue, «rendimiento neto» in DGOJ reports) is total stakes minus prizes paid. It is operators’ gross income before tax, marketing and costs, and equals the aggregate net loss of players. Figures cover only nationally licensed online gambling regulated by the DGOJ.
Net revenue of online gambling in Spain
What players lost each year, in millions of euros.
Annual GGR of nationally licensed online gambling, € millions.
One figure connects this dashboard with the Ruin Lab. Divide what operators earn by everything that is wagered and the result barely moves: between 3.0% and 4.2% every year. That is the house edge seen at the scale of a country. Players wagered €40,795m in 2025, and the house kept about 4 cents of every euro.
The house keeps about 4 cents of every euro wagered
Of every euro bet, the share that ends up with the house.
Sports betting is the most visible part, but it is no longer the biggest earner. In 2025 online casino (roulette, slots, blackjack) generated 53% of revenue, growing 22% in a single year. These are precisely the games with the fastest, most continuous play.
Revenue by type of game, 2024 and 2025
What players lost on each type of game, in millions of euros.
In 2025 operators spent €664m on marketing, 26% more than the year before. The largest item is not advertising but promotions, above all welcome bonuses: “free” money that can only be withdrawn after it has been wagered several times over.
In November 2020, Royal Decree 958/2020 restricted advertising and sign-up bonuses. In April 2024 the Supreme Court struck down several of its articles, including those limiting welcome bonuses. Bonuses released, which had plateaued at around €200m, shot up afterwards.
Gambling for money is illegal for minors. Even so, according to the Ministry of Health’s ESTUDES survey, 13.0% of students aged 14 to 18 gambled online in the past year in 2025, and 20.9% did so in person. Among boys online gambling reaches 20.7%, four times the rate among girls. Their most common games are roulette and sports betting.
Students aged 14–18 who gambled online
Share who gambled in the last 12 months (ESTUDES).
Figures cover Spain’s nationally licensed online gambling market regulated by the DGOJ; they exclude land-based gambling and state lotteries. The 2017–2025 series comes from a compilation published in the Revista Española de Drogodependencias based on DGOJ data; the 2024 and 2025 detail comes from the DGOJ annual reports. Every figure lives in a single file with its source: spain.json.