Spain’s Council of Ministers has approved a royal decree introducing the country’s first cross-operator deposit limits, capping player spending at €700 per day, €1,750 per week, and €3,300 over any four-week period across all licensed online gambling sites, with the measure signed on June 23, 2026.
The decree amends Royal Decree 1614/2011 and closes a structural gap in the existing framework, under which deposit limits applied per operator rather than across the licensed market. A player holding accounts with multiple operators could previously exceed any practical market-wide budget simply by distributing deposits. The DGOJ will operate the central tracking system that must verify a player’s cumulative deposits across all licensees before each transaction is accepted. Players can apply to raise or remove their chosen limits, but any increase is subject to a three-business-day delay and cannot be requested more than once every three months.
Pablo Bustinduy, minister of social rights, consumer affairs and the 2030 agenda, advanced the decree as a consumer-protection measure targeting the segment of the market where multi-operator activity is concentrated. The ministry said: “The weight of this figure reinforces the need to incorporate new preventative and protective tools, such as this royal decree on joint deposit limits, which represents an additional and complementary tool to the per-operator deposit limit system.” The government cited DGOJ data showing that 31% of active players in Spain use more than one operator as the primary justification for the cross-operator mechanism.
JDigital, the trade body for licensed online operators, said it viewed the decree “with concern,” arguing that the same DGOJ data also shows 80% of online players use only a single operator – a figure it said demonstrates the rule “affects a very small segment of the market.” The body warned the measure could “achieve even greater concentration” by advantaging larger operators with more established compliance infrastructure, while raising integration costs for smaller licensees. JDigital also questioned whether the centralised system could “react in real time to the simultaneous activity of thousands of players” and said early technical failures should not result in sanctions against operators. The legal basis matters here: Spain’s November 2020 advertising decree, also enacted by royal decree rather than primary legislation, was partially struck down by the Supreme Court in April 2024 on proportionality grounds, and JDigital is applying the same argument to the deposit cap. The proportionality challenge is reinforced by the comparison with Germany, where the equivalent cross-operator cap stands at €1,000 per month – Spain’s four-week limit of €3,300 is substantially more permissive, though the daily and weekly sub-limits add a structural constraint absent from the German model.
JDigital’s displacement concern is backed by EY data it commissioned, which found 23.4% of surveyed players had used unlicensed sites at least once and 9.3% had done so knowingly. The unregulated market was estimated at €231 million in 2024, roughly 16% of the licensed market. The body warned the decree could “continue to encourage the displacement of some consumers towards unlicensed, unauthorised operators” – a risk also evident in other markets where deposit limit frameworks have faced operator and consumer resistance during rollout.
The next procedural step is official publication of the decree in the Boletín Oficial del Estado, which will start the implementation clock for operators integrating with the DGOJ’s central deposit tracking system. The DGOJ is expected to issue technical integration standards for licensees, and a testing period is anticipated before the system becomes fully operative. Whether the measure faces a legal challenge mirroring the 2020 advertising case will depend on how JDigital and individual operators assess the proportionality argument once the DGOJ publishes its compliance guidance.
Source: European Gaming
Petra Vanhoof has spent the better part of a decade following the shifting tides of gambling regulation across Europe and beyond. She came up through the compliance side of the industry before pivoting to writing, which gives her a grounded, no-nonsense perspective on the rules, loopholes, and political maneuvering that shape how operators actually do business. She is particularly drawn to the gap between what regulators say and what the market ends up doing in response.