What it is and what it covers
#The 2021 State Treaty on Gambling, agreed by all sixteen German states, legalised online slots, poker and sports betting nationally and created a joint authority to police them: the Gemeinsame Glücksspielbehörde der Länder, the GGL, which has run all regulatory tasks since 2023 from Halle.
Online casino table games, roulette and blackjack, are not part of the federal licence: they remain a matter for individual Länder, most of which have not opened them. A site offering them to German players nationally is operating outside the treaty.
What the rules guarantee, and impose
#The German regime protects by constraining. Deposits are capped at €1,000 per month per player across all licensed operators combined, enforced through a central system, LUGAS, that every licensee reports into: reaching the cap at one site blocks deposits at all of them. Slot stakes are capped at €1 per spin, spins carry a minimum duration, and OASIS, the nationwide exclusion register, blocks a self-excluded player everywhere at once.
Advertising is tightly restricted, and the treaty prohibits paying affiliates a share of player losses, which removed the revenue-share model that funds most gambling marketing elsewhere. The GGL publishes a whitelist of every operator permitted to serve Germany.
What it does not do
#The constraints created the largest licensed-versus-unlicensed gap in Europe: unlicensed sites advertising no limits and real casino games remain a click away, carry none of these protections, and are illegal to offer in Germany. The rules protect only inside the system they define.
German courts have also ordered unlicensed operators to refund player losses in a long series of cases, a genuinely unusual feature of the German situation, and one that depends on litigation rather than on the regulator.
How to check a licence
#The GGL's whitelist is public: an operator legally serving Germany appears on it, and one that does not is unlicensed for Germany regardless of what other licence it holds. With the deposit and stake caps being what they are, the absence of limits on a site is itself the tell.
Questions, answered
Why can I not play roulette or blackjack on a German licence?
The 2021 treaty left online table games to the individual Länder rather than the federal licence, and most have not licensed them. Sites offering them to the whole German market are operating outside the treaty, with none of its protections.
Is the €1,000 limit per site?
No, and that is the point: it applies across all licensed operators combined, enforced through the central LUGAS system every licensee reports into. Reaching the cap anywhere blocks deposits everywhere.
Do Germany's limits make gambling safe?
They cap how fast money can move, which is a real protection, and they leave the mathematics untouched: licensed slots keep their house edge inside the caps. The open question in Germany is how many players the constraints push to unlicensed sites with no protections at all.
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