Denmark 2025: online casino overtakes lotteries as the biggest gambling sector

What the new market report shows

The Danish Gambling Authority (Spillemyndigheden) has published its annual report "The Gambling Market in Numbers 2025". For the first time since the partial liberalisation of the Danish gambling market in 2012, the monopoly lottery segment no longer sits on top of the list. Online casino does. The figures: online casinos generated a gross gaming revenue (GGR) of DKK 4,309 million. Monopoly lotteries, which include Lotto, the class lotteries and scratch cards, came in at DKK 3,492 million. That is a gap of around DKK 817 million, roughly 110 million euros. State-controlled lotteries had held the top spot for thirteen consecutive years.

Digital share keeps climbing

The second headline figure confirms the trend. In 2025, 73% of all gambling activity in Denmark happened on computers or mobile devices. A year earlier the share was 70%. The digital share rises by several percentage points every year and will likely cross the 75% mark in 2026 if the growth rate holds. For a country of just under 5.9 million people, this shows how quickly a tightly regulated market can shift online when the framework fits.

Land-based bingo enters the statistics

On 1 January 2025 Denmark liberalised land-based bingo, so the report includes reliable data for this sector for the first time. For bingo hall operators the opening means competition, but also investment options that were not possible under the old monopoly. A year-on-year comparison for this segment does not yet exist.

Revised calculation method

One detail matters for comparisons with older reports: from this year onwards, Spillemyndigheden adjusts gross gaming revenue in line with Danish GDP growth, based on the Ministry of Economic Affairs Economic Review of December 2025, expressed at 2026 price levels. The authority now follows the same regulation method as the rest of the Ministry of Taxation and Economic Growth. As a result, the numbers in the 2025 report are not directly comparable with earlier reports because the underlying baseline is different. Anyone comparing the DKK 4,309 million figure with an older value should keep that in mind.

What Germany can take from this

Denmark set up a dual regulated market back in 2012: sports betting, online casino and poker in open competition, classic lotteries in a state monopoly run by Danske Spil. Spillemyndigheden licenses operators, collects gambling tax and publishes this annual report. The current shift shows that a well regulated online casino market is attractive enough to pull revenue away from the classic lottery segment without pushing players into the black market.

The comparison with Germany is close at hand. The German State Treaty on Gambling from 2021 also legalised virtual slots and online poker. The regulator is the Gemeinsame Glücksspielbehörde der Länder (GGL) in Halle. Unlike Denmark, Germany imposes much tighter rules: a 1 euro maximum stake per spin, a monthly cross-operator deposit cap of 1,000 euros enforced through the central LUGAS system, and no table games such as roulette or blackjack outside a handful of federal states. The channelisation rate, the share of gambling that takes place with licensed operators, is estimated at around 50% for Germany. In Denmark the equivalent figure is above 90%. The difference is no accident: where players find an offer that matches their expectations for game variety and stake levels, they stay in the legal market.

What it means for players

For players in Germany, two things follow. First, licensed German online casinos can be identified through the official GGL whitelist. Anyone not listed there operates without a German licence and falls under the advertising ban of the German State Treaty on Gambling. Second, the trend Denmark made visible in 2025 is coming this way as well. Anyone interested in market statistics should keep an eye on the annual activity report of the GGL, which the authority traditionally publishes in the first half of the year for the previous year.