Board Briefing
Guernsey's gambling market is defined by a hard legal division between two regimes. Guernsey proper operates a land-based-only framework under the Gambling (Guernsey) Law, 1971, with no remote or online gambling pathway provided under that statute. Online eGambling conducted from the Bailiwick is licensed exclusively through a separate regulator, the Alderney Gambling Control Commission, operating under the Gambling (Alderney) Law 1999 and the Alderney eGambling Ordinance 2009.
Commercial marketing materials frequently describe online licences as a 'Guernsey licence', though the operative regulator and legislation in every such case is Alderney's, not Guernsey proper's. For market-entry purposes the two regimes should be read as structurally and legally distinct rather than as a single jurisdiction-wide gambling framework, with the Alderney/AGCC regime carrying the entirety of the remote-gambling opportunity.
Summary
Guernsey's gambling market is defined by a hard legal division between two regimes.
Market Opportunity
Licensing & Regulation
Guernsey's licensing architecture rests on two separate statutory bases. Guernsey proper licenses bookmakers and betting offices under the Gambling (Betting) Ordinance, 1973, made under the Gambling (Guernsey) Law, 1971. The Alderney regime is built on the Gambling (Alderney) Law 1999 and the Alderney eGambling Ordinance 2009, with the Alderney Gambling Control Commission as the exclusive regulator for remote eGambling conducted from the Bailiwick. Two licence types anchor entry to that regime: the Category 1 licence, covering business-to-consumer operation including all aspects of player management, and the Category 2 licence, covering business-to-business software and platform supply to the online sector. Both licence types are operational as live authorisation routes. The land-based and online frameworks are administered separately, by the Committee for Home Affairs and the AGCC respectively, and an applicant should expect to engage the correct regulator for the product it intends to offer rather than assume a single licensing contact point covers both regimes.
Regulated Activity Classes
All 20 canonical activity classes are shown for every jurisdiction so the grid is directly comparable. 5 carry an assessed status here. Where a class has no statutory activity-class assessment of its own, the status shown is the product-coverage position for that jurisdiction and is marked via product coverage — it describes whether the product can lawfully be offered, not that the regulator operates a separate licence class for it. Not yet assessed describes the state of our coverage and is not a statement that the activity is unregulated.
Player products
Supply roles
Settlement rails
Standing brief, pending expert review.
Betting is recorded as open under both the Guernsey proper and Alderney regimes, licensed respectively under the Gambling (Betting) Ordinance, 1973 and the Alderney eGambling framework. Online casino and poker are recorded as open under the Alderney regime specifically, issued through the AGCC's Category 1 licence. Business-to-business supply of gaming software and platforms to the online eGambling sector is also open, issued through the AGCC's Category 2 licence. Beyond these core verticals, a wider group of product categories — including skill games, fantasy sports, esports betting, sweepstakes, crypto gambling, affiliate marketing and payment processing for gambling — carry no confirmed classification under either regime, and an operator should treat their status as unresolved rather than assume it mirrors betting, casino or poker.
Entry Pathways
Two licensing routes anchor entry to the Bailiwick's online gambling market, both issued by the AGCC under the Alderney eGambling Ordinance 2009. The Category 1 (B2C) licence authorises business-to-consumer operation, covering all aspects of player management, and is reported to carry an indicative first-year fee of approximately £17,500.
The Category 2 (B2B) licence authorises software and platform supply to the online eGambling sector, with an indicative first-year fee of approximately £35,000. Both figures come from commercial intermediary sources rather than the AGCC's own published fee schedule and should be treated as planning estimates rather than fixed costs. For land-based betting activity confined to Guernsey proper, the route runs instead through the Committee for Home Affairs under the Gambling (Betting) Ordinance, 1973, a separate process from either AGCC licence.
Player Protection
Consumer Protection
Distribution & Platform Rules
Enforcement
AGCC's enforcement record shows a regulator prepared to use its strongest powers once an operator's financial integrity or ownership basis is called into question. On 29 September 2011, the AGCC revoked the licences held by the three entities trading as Full Tilt Poker — Vantage Limited, Filco Limited and Oxalic Limited — citing serious breaches including false reporting and the unauthorised provision of credit to players.
On 11 September 2013, the AGCC suspended the licence of Bubble Group BV, trading as Sheriff Gaming, pending investigation into the basis on which the group and its sponsors had originally been approved. Commentary describes the Commission's enforcement approach as graduated: a rectification proposal, then a written caution if unresolved, then a hearing or fine, then suspension, then revocation. The Alderney eGambling Ordinance 2009 was amended in 2024 to add Schedule 5 information-gathering powers, broadening the basis on which the AGCC can compel information from licensees. No enforcement action beyond the two historical cases appears in the public record.
Extraterritorial Reach
Sub-jurisdictions
Regulatory reach of this parent jurisdiction into 1 member territory.
AML / CFT
No dedicated AML/CFT statute for gambling has been identified for either the Guernsey proper or Alderney regime. The only AML-adjacent citation located is a Schedule 2 reference in the Criminal Justice (Proceeds of Crime) (Bailiwick of Guernsey) Law 1999, which classifies bookmakers and betting offices as relevant business for AML purposes.
This reference appears within a bookmakers' licensing policy document rather than in the AML statute's own text as directly retrieved. No FATF or MONEYVAL mutual-evaluation citation, statutory suspicious-transaction or currency-transaction reporting threshold, or designated-reporting-entity confirmation specific to gambling has been located for either regime. The absence of a sourced AML/CFT instrument beyond this Schedule 2 reference should be read as a gap in the public documentation available rather than as confirmation that gambling operators in the Bailiwick sit outside AML obligations entirely.
Data Protection
Data protection obligations are not covered in this report. They are not specific to gambling licensing: the controller and processor duties that apply to a licensee are the same ones that apply to any business handling personal data in this jurisdiction, so this report links to the specialist source rather than restating it. Gambling-specific privacy duties -- player data retention, age and identity verification, marketing consent -- are covered in the player protection and operational obligations sections above.
Technical Compliance
Operational Obligations
The clearest documented ongoing obligation for AGCC licensees is material-event reporting to the Commission. This obligation surfaces through its role as a contributing ground in the 2011 Full Tilt Poker licence revocation, where failure to report material events was cited alongside false reporting and unauthorised provision of credit, rather than through a standalone published obligations list.
For Guernsey proper bookmakers, usage and policy reporting to the Committee for Home Affairs is documented under the land-based regime. Beyond these two items, the public record does not set out a comprehensive list of ongoing reporting, technical, or data-retention obligations for either regime, and an operator should expect to confirm the full scope of ongoing duties directly with the relevant regulator at application stage.
Cost to Operate
Bailiwick-incorporated gaming companies benefit from a 0% standard corporate tax rate, alongside no VAT and no capital gains tax, and no gambling-specific duty regime such as a gross-gaming-revenue tax has been identified. Licensing costs sit on top of this fiscal position: indicative first-year fees are reported at approximately £17,500 for a Category 1 (B2C) licence and approximately £35,000 for a Category 2 (B2B) licence.
These fee figures come from commercial intermediary sources rather than the AGCC's own published schedule and should be treated as planning estimates. Taken together, the cost-to-operate picture is favourable on the tax side, with the principal remaining uncertainty sitting in the precision of licence fees rather than in corporate tax exposure.
Payments & Money Flow
Competitive Landscape
A non-regulator licence tracker reports approximately 22 gambling licence records in Alderney, though no AGCC-published operator count, market-concentration rating, or unlicensed-market-share estimate has been located to corroborate or contextualise that figure. The AGCC does not appear to publish a public operator register or market-share data, which limits the precision with which competitive dynamics in the online eGambling sector can be assessed from public sources alone.
An operator weighing entry should treat the approximately 22 figure as a third-party estimate rather than a regulator-confirmed count, and should expect to supplement it with direct enquiry to the AGCC or commercial due diligence before sizing the competitive field.
Reform Horizon
The only concrete reform data point identified for the Guernsey/Alderney regime is the 2024 Amendment Ordinance to the Alderney eGambling Ordinance 2009, which added Schedule 5 information-gathering powers for the AGCC. This amendment is already enacted and in force. No active consultation or draft legislation affecting the licensing structure or product scope of either the Guernsey proper or Alderney regime has been identified.
The reform horizon for this jurisdiction is therefore narrow: the structural licensing architecture established under the 1971, 1973, 1999 and 2009 instruments has not been substantively revisited, and the most recent change has been confined to expanding the regulator's supervisory information-gathering capacity rather than to the scope of regulated activity.
Trust & verification
Provenance of this record.