Gross Gaming Revenue (GGR)
Total stakes minus winnings paid out — the standard base for gambling taxes and fees.
Gross Gaming Revenue is the industry's fundamental unit of account: total stakes minus winnings paid out — what the operator actually retains before any costs. Regulators tax it (the UK's 21% Remote Gaming Duty, Sweden's 22%, the Netherlands' 37.8% all apply to GGR), scale licence fees by it, and publish market sizes in it.
Its usefulness is comparability: a percentage of GGR means the same thing in every market, which is why this atlas can put ten tax regimes in one table. The notable dissenter is Germany, which taxes stakes rather than revenue — a structural difference with larger effects than the small-looking 5.3% rate suggests.
Reading regulatory news without this term is impossible: market-size reports, tax debates and licence-fee schedules all speak GGR. When the Netherlands raised its gambling tax to 37.8% from January 2026, the base was GGR; when Italy's 2024 re-tender set online casino at 25.5%, that was GGR too. The number lets a reader compare a Dutch operator's burden with an Italian one's without untangling two accounting systems.
GGR is also where regulation and economics meet: a regime that raises its GGR rate is betting that licensed operators absorb the cost rather than losing players offshore. The Dutch increases and Sweden's 2024 move from 18% to 22% are both live tests of that bet, and the change tracker logs each result as governments publish receipts.
A reader using this atlas meets GGR constantly: the country tables quote tax rates against it, the licence comparison prices compliance contributions by it, and the change tracker logs every rate move in it. Whenever a figure here lacks an explicit base, GGR is the safe assumption — exceptions like Germany's stakes tax are always flagged, because the base changes the meaning more than the rate does.