On 12 October, MPs met in Westminster Hall to debate the petition calling for the UK to rejoin the European Union, signed by more than 112,000 people. Whatever comes of it, Britons living in Portugal already know how many rules stop at a border, from driving licences to residency cards. Online gambling is one more, and a busy year of changes in Britain has widened the gap.
Since April, British online casino operators have paid tax on their profits at nearly double the old rate, and new limits on bonuses and deposits have followed. None of it travels with a British passport. What governs an account is where the player is physically sitting, so for readers who split the year between the Algarve and family back home, the British rules only apply on the British leg of the trip. Those readers can learn more about how individual UK sites are tested and rated at WhichBingo before their next visit home.
What actually changed in Britain, and what did not
The biggest change is a tax. Remote Gaming Duty, charged on online casino profits, rose from 21% to 40% on 1 April 2026. The government expects the wider package of gambling duty changes to raise more than £1 billion a year. It is paid by operators, not by players on their winnings, but it shows up in what players see: Evoke, the group behind one of Britain's oldest bookmaking names, listed "reduced bonusing" among its responses when it reported to investors.
Rules on the products themselves have tightened too. Since 19 January 2026, wagering requirements on casino bonuses have been capped at ten times the bonus amount. Online slot stakes have been limited to £5 a spin since April 2025, and to £2 for players aged 18 to 24 since May 2025. On 30 September 2026, deposit limits became gross limits, counting every pound paid in rather than netting off winnings.
One item in the headlines is older than it looks. The autoplay ban on online slots is not a 2026 measure. It took effect on 31 October 2021, together with a ban on spins faster than two and a half seconds. Anyone told that autoplay has only just gone is reading old news.
Why a UK account does not move with its owner
A British gambling licence covers customers in Great Britain. Operator terms are usually blunt about this: they name the United Kingdom as the permitted jurisdiction and define it by where the player is located, not by nationality or where the account was first opened. Logging in from a flat in Lagos or Cascais can breach those terms, and operators reserve the right to freeze accounts and withhold winnings when it happens. Using a VPN to look British is a breach in its own right.
Portugal runs its own system. Online gambling here has been regulated since the legal framework known as the RJO came into force on 29 June 2015, and only operators licensed by the Gambling Regulation and Inspection Service, SRIJ, may offer games to people in the country. At the end of June 2026, 17 companies held 30 licences between them, 17 of them for games of chance such as slots and roulette.
The regulator is active against everyone else. According to the SRIJ report for the second quarter of 2026, it had sent 1,834 closure notices to unlicensed operators since 2015 and ordered internet providers to block 3,043 websites, 113 of them in the latest quarter alone.
What the Portuguese numbers show
The licensed market is growing quickly. Online operators in Portugal took €328.2 million in gross revenue in the second quarter of 2026, up 14.4% on a year earlier, with casino games accounting for 61.9% of it. The special online gambling tax, IEJO, brought in €92.1 million over the same three months.
Foreign nationals make up a small slice of the 4.9 million player registrations: 93.6% belong to Portuguese nationals, and Brazilians account for 46.1% of the rest. British players do not appear as a separate group in the published figures.
One number deserves more attention. By 30 June, 413,700 registrations were self excluded, up 26.8% in a year, and 60,900 of those exclusions were new in the quarter. In Portugal, self exclusion can be requested through the regulator and applies across licensed operators, which matters to anyone who has used GamStop in Britain and assumed it follows them abroad. It does not.
What expats should check, and what comes next
For a British resident of Portugal, the practical checks are short. First, work out which country's rules apply on the day: where the device is, not where the bank account is. Second, in Portugal, confirm an operator appears on the SRIJ list of licensed entities before depositing. Third, check whether any old UK account is still open, because a dormant balance in an account that can no longer be used legally from Portugal is easy to forget. Fourth, back in Britain, the UK licence and the protections that come with it apply as normal, including the new deposit limit rules.
More change is coming on both sides. In Britain, the Chancellor's Budget on 28 October is expected to settle a fight over machine gaming duty in high street venues, and remote betting duty rises to 25% from April 2027. In Portugal, the regulator publishes its third quarter figures later this year, and the self exclusion trend is the one to watch. A market where exclusions are growing almost twice as fast as revenue is telling its regulator something, and British readers in Portugal should expect tighter rules here before long, not looser ones.
Disclaimer:
The views expressed on this page are those of the author and not of The Portugal News.