Italy's €7m concessions: how the ADM tender reshaped the online market

Italy is one of Europe’s largest and longest-established online gambling markets, and in 2025 it rewrote the terms on which operators access it. The Agenzia delle Dogane e dei Monopoli (ADM) ran a wholesale re-tender of online concessions that raised the price of entry, abolished the multi-brand model that had defined the market for years, and pushed tax rates up. The effect was a market consolidation visible in the numbers.

The new concession model

The centrepiece is a new nine-year online gaming concession covering casino, betting, bingo and poker, priced at €7 million each — €4 million on award and €3 million on launch. Each concession now permits a single domain, and the old “skins” model — under which one concession supported many operator brands — has been abolished. That single change reshapes the market’s structure: where one licence once fronted a portfolio of brands, each concession now maps to one domain, and separate land-based betting, AWP and VLT concession regimes sit apart from it.

The €7 million ticket is the strategic filter. It is a sum only well-capitalised operators can commit, which is precisely what makes the tender a consolidation instrument as much as a licensing exercise. Under the old skins model, a mid-sized operator could reach Italian players by renting capacity from a concession-holder without ever bidding for a concession of its own. The new rule closes that door: reaching the market now means holding a concession, and holding a concession now means writing a large upfront cheque. That is a deliberate re-pricing of who gets to be in the Italian market at all.

How the tender played out

The process moved through 2025. By July 2025, 46 operators had applied for the online licences, and the approval process was extended to November. In September 2025 the ADM awarded 52 new nine-year online concessions to those 46 operators at €7 million each, generating roughly €364 million in state revenue. Smaller operators unable to fund the upfront cost exited, and the market consolidated around the larger groups. The transition to the new single-domain regime was completed between late 2025 and around March 2026, accompanied by an ADM reorganisation strengthening its gaming directorate.

Higher tax on top

The re-tender did not only raise the cost of the licence; it raised the ongoing tax. Under the new concession regime, online GGR tax rose to 24.5% on sports betting and 25.5% on casino and other games, plus a 3% of GGR regulatory fee and a 0.2% responsible-gambling contribution capped at €1 million. So an operator entering the new Italian market faces both a larger upfront outlay and a heavier recurring tax burden than under the previous framework — a deliberate tightening of the economics on both axes.

Why it matters

Italy’s 2025 tender is the clearest recent example of a regulator using licensing design, not just tax, to reshape a market. The €7 million price, the single-domain rule and the abolition of skins together push the market toward fewer, larger, better-capitalised operators — a structural outcome, not an accident. For the operators who paid in, it buys a nine-year runway in one of Europe’s biggest markets with a cleaner, one-brand-per-concession structure. For those who could not, it was an exit.

For suppliers, the consolidation changes the customer landscape: fewer, larger operator clients, each running a single domain under a nine-year concession. For anyone modelling market entry, Italy now demonstrates a pattern other governments may copy — pairing a high-value concession auction with elevated GGR rates to raise revenue and thin the field at once. Teams tracking how the single-domain regime and the new rates settle in can follow the Italian file in the iGaming regulatory tracker, and see the consolidation context in the State of European iGaming 2026 report.

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