Italy plans €700m gambling levy in 2027 budget, draft targets slots
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni says gambling will fund €700m of Italy's 2027 budget, with a leaked draft putting the cost on land-based machines and concessions rather than online operators.
Italy's Council of Ministers approved a draft 2027 budget worth roughly €26bn on 28 October, with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni telling reporters afterwards that "another €700 million" would come from the gambling sector.
Energy companies face a contribution of similar size. Meloni did not specify which parts of the gambling industry would pay, framing the package as asking those facing fewer difficulties to contribute more.
The precise tax and concession measures have not yet been published, and Parliament retains the power to amend the bill before it is finalised.
The €700m figure appears to round down the government's own projections. Italy's draft budgetary plan forecasts €718m from gambling in both 2027 and 2028, falling to €478m in 2029, for a cumulative total of almost €2bn across the three years.
A draft circulating ahead of formal publication, reported by Jamma on 29 October, fills in some of the detail. Under that draft, concessions covering land-based slots, betting and bingo would run through to the end of 2029, a change expected to generate roughly €305m in 2027, while the Gratta e Vinci scratchcard licence would be prolonged in exchange for an upfront payment.
The same draft would increase machine levies: the PREU tax on AWP slot machines would rise from 24% to 25% of stakes, a change put at €150m in additional revenue, while the rate applied to VLTs would climb from 8.6% to 9.6%, adding a further €165m.
Combined, the quantified gaming measures in the leaked draft total roughly €770m in 2027, exceeding the figure Meloni cited publicly. Notably, none of the items quantified so far is an online levy, meaning venue operators, machine concessionaires and holders of land-based licences would carry the cost as currently drafted. The measures land shortly after Italy's online licensing tender concluded.
The retail trade body EGP-FIPE, which represents venues offering licensed gaming, responded within a day of the leak. Its 29 October statement cautioned that raising the machine levy could tip at least a fifth of specialist gaming halls into loss and threaten thousands of jobs.
The warning comes against a backdrop of a broadly stable overall tax base with pockets of online growth. Total turnover across Italy's gaming market climbed 5% year-on-year to €165.33bn in 2025, while gross gaming spend — the amount staked minus winnings paid out — grew 1.36% to €21.869bn. Gambling generated €11.5bn in tax revenue for the state, little changed from €11.6bn the year before.
Within that total, virtual betting revenue grew 23.14% and online casino and cash games rose 17.74%, according to the figures cited by CasinoBeats. A package concentrated on machines and physical halls would therefore draw more heavily on land-based products than on the online segments that expanded fastest.
The definitive form of these measures will remain unclear to operators until Parliament has finished work on the legislation. The Chamber of Deputies and the Senate must each examine and approve the budget bill before the end of the year.