New Zealand · 18+

Written for readers in New Zealand

Since the first of May 2026 it has been unlawful to advertise online casino gambling in New Zealand without a licence, and no licence has yet been issued to anybody. This page names no operator and carries no link to one, and it explains what the new regime does and when it is worth looking again.

A regime that arrived this year, and changed the answer

For more than twenty years New Zealand answered the question that this site asks with a gap, and we would locate that gap in the definitions rather than in the enforcement; the two are not the same thing, and the difference is what changed this year. The Gambling Act 2003 excluded from its definition of "remote interactive gambling" the gambling "by a person in New Zealand conducted by a gambling operator located outside New Zealand". That exclusion, sitting in a list of definitions where almost nobody looked for it, left an offshore operator outside the reach of the Act altogether, while advertising overseas gambling was already an offence under section 16, where the offence required publication "in New Zealand" (a territorial foothold a foreign publisher could argue about) and carried a penalty of ten thousand dollars.

That gap closed on the first of May 2026, and in our reading it closed in a way that reaches a publisher rather than only an operator, which is the reason we have written this page at all rather than a shorter notice. The Online Casino Gambling Act 2026 amended the old definition so that the offshore exclusion no longer covers online casino gambling at all, and it created a licensing regime with a prohibition on advertising attached to it. The prohibition is the part that governs a page like this one, and we would stress that it is in force now (not from 2027), in a market where nobody yet holds a licence.

Section 10 permits an advertisement for online casino gambling only where it is published "in accordance with a licence", so that with no licences issued there is no advertisement of online casino gambling capable of satisfying the section at all. That is why this page carries the law and the help rather than a list; the Department of Internal Affairs (the "DIA") puts the transitional position in one sentence of its own, which is that the only obligation on providers operating in the transitional market is not to advertise.

Where the licensing process stands

The process has run in three stages and two of them are finished, which is the part you are most likely to have read about in a headline rather than in a document. Expressions of interest closed on the fourteenth of August 2026, and the "auction" ran from the twenty-ninth of September to the twelfth of October with thirty-two bidders over ten rounds, closing at fifteen million New Zealand dollars a licence (which is the price of entry, before anybody has taken a bet).

Applications opened in October, and the Department expects to issue the first licences "from early 2027", which is the date everything else on this page waits for.

Eleven entities were admitted to apply, and admission is not a licence: the Department says so in terms.

Baytree Interactive Limited holds three "rights", Playvia Gaming and Rock Swift Group two each, and one each goes to Christchurch Online NZ, One Casino, Rush Entertainment, Skill On Net, the two SkyCity online entities, Stake New Zealand and TAB New Zealand. Two of those names will be familiar to a reader of the rest of this site (Baytree and Skill On Net), because they also licence brands that serve Canada; we watch this market for that reason rather than for its size, which beside Canada's is small.

Two dates follow from the stage that the process has now reached, and both of them are worth your marking in a diary rather than your remembering. From the first of December 2026 the operating restrictions bite, and a provider that has not applied for a licence must stop serving New Zealand. The exemption from section 9(1) ends finally on the first of June 2027 (seven months later), and we would treat the earlier date as the operative one.

A public register of licensed operators is required by section 74 (the section obliges the Secretary to "maintain a register") and will be published once the licences exist, which is a document we will go and read when it appears. At the time of writing it does not exist, because there is nobody to put on it, and we checked five plausible addresses on the Department's own site before saying so (all five returned nothing).

The age, the help and the self-exclusion

The age is eighteen, and the Act fixes it in two places rather than one. The Act obliges an operator to "take all reasonable steps to ensure" that a participant is at least eighteen years old, and a separate offence covers gambling on behalf of a person in New Zealand who is under that age, which closes the obvious way around the first rule.

We would give the helpline before the law here. The Gambling Helpline answers free on 0800 654 655 and by text message to 8006 (both free), and Safer Gambling Aotearoa holds the directory of services, funded by Health New Zealand (Te Whatu Ora) and described as "free and confidential". A reader looking for a service near him will find the regional list there, under "services near you", rather than on the government's own health index, which describes the services in general terms and carries no telephone numbers at all.

"Self-exclusion" is for the moment a matter for each operator rather than a national register, and the difference matters to anybody who has used a national one elsewhere (GAMSTOP, in Britain, is the obvious comparison). The regulations oblige an operator to make it "readily accessible on the gambling platform" and to let the player set the duration himself.

An indefinite exclusion must be treated as permanent, and the guidance is blunt about what that means, because such an exclusion "cannot be undone for any reason". The national exclusion register that the Act provides for must be established by regulation no later than the first of December 2027 (section 75(3)), and it does not yet exist.

By the Canadian Dollar Casinos editorial team · Last updated October 2026 · Online since 2012