The Growing Popularity Of Online Casinos In South Africa

South Africans handed licensed gambling operators R74.5 billion in the financial year that ended on 31 March 2025. The National Gambling Board audited that number and put it 25.6% above the previous year. Casinos did not earn it.

Casino revenue actually shrank over those twelve months. Betting grew, most of it placed on a phone, and that is where any honest account of casino play over the internet in South Africa has to start. The licences the operators point to are betting licences, and a province issues each one.

The licence behind a casino section belongs to a province

Nine provincial licensing authorities regulate gambling in South Africa, and the Board names all nine as the source of the quarterly returns it audits. Mpumalanga’s is the Mpumalanga Economic Regulator.

The operator behind Virgin Bet South Africa Casino, a section covering slots, table games and live dealer tables, states on its own site that it is licensed and regulated by that provincial regulator under licence no. 9-2-1-09938. The sports book carries the same number.

That is a checkable statement about one company’s paperwork. It is not a statement about the country. No national online casino licence exists in South Africa, and the wider question of where internet casino games sit has not been closed by Parliament, the courts or the provincial boards. What can be verified is narrower: which authority issued which licence, to whom, and under what number.

Betting took the market while casino revenue went backwards

These returns are compiled under section 65(2)(e) of the same Act, which makes the Board responsible for monitoring market conduct and market share. It does not license anybody. The provinces do that, and they send it the quarterly numbers.

The Board’s audited figures for 2024/25 split gross gambling revenue four ways. Betting produced R51.97 billion of the R74.50 billion total, or 69.8%. Casinos produced R16.65 billion, or 22.3%. Limited payout machines accounted for 5.6% and bingo for 2.3%.

Growth rates in the Board’s audited national gambling statistics tell the sharper story. Betting revenue rose 44.7% year on year. Casino revenue fell 4.1%, bingo fell 8.6%, and limited payout machines finished flat at minus 0.04%.

Financial year

Casino GGR

Betting GGR

Bingo GGR

LPM GGR

Total GGR

2021/22 R13.75bn R15.47bn R1.51bn R3.70bn R34.43bn 2022/23 R17.34bn R23.75bn R1.85bn R4.23bn R47.17bn 2023/24 R17.36bn R35.91bn R1.89bn R4.15bn R59.31bn 2024/25 R16.65bn R51.97bn R1.73bn R4.15bn R74.50bn

Fifteen years earlier the ratio ran the other way. Casinos took 81.9% of all gambling revenue in 2010/11 against 11.7% for betting. By 2024/25 the casino share had fallen to 22.2% and betting stood at 69.9%.

Read the casino column on its own and the picture is not collapse. It is stagnation. Casino revenue sat at roughly R17 billion for three years running while the total market grew almost 60% around it.

The quarterly detail is bleaker than the annual line suggests. Every one of the four quarters in 2024/25 came in below its counterpart a year earlier, ending at R4.01 billion against R4.31 billion. Casino floors are not losing money. They are simply no longer where the new money goes.

The growth was a channel, not a product

The same audited return breaks betting into its two channels, for the six provinces that report the split. Online betting produced R44.46 billion. Retail betting, meaning the shops and the racecourse, produced R7.52 billion.

Put those against the whole market and the proportion becomes hard to argue with. Online betting alone accounted for 59.7% of every rand of gambling revenue earned in the country. Retail betting managed 10.1%.

The series behind that is short and steep. Bookmakers earned R8.18 billion from sport and other contingencies in 2020/21. Four years later the same line read R47.89 billion. Horse racing, the older business, moved from R1.68 billion to R3.52 billion over the same period, and the totalisators lost ground.

Turnover, which counts the rand value of everything staked including money staked more than once, reached R1.50 trillion across the four licensed modes. Betting accounted for 75.0% of that and casinos for 19.5%, a gap far wider than the revenue split, because a bet settles and returns to the account faster than a chip leaves a table.

So the growth story is not really about a product. It is about a distribution channel that did not need a building.

Two provinces now book most of the money

Mpumalanga is not South Africa’s largest province by population or by casino floor space. It booked R22.25 billion of gambling revenue in 2024/25, second only to the Western Cape on R23.13 billion, and well ahead of Gauteng on R13.49 billion.

The betting column explains it. Mpumalanga alone accounted for 41.0% of national betting revenue and 41.5% of national turnover. Its casinos, by contrast, earned R453.6 million, about a sixteenth of what Gauteng’s casinos took.

The Western Cape sits in the same position for the same reason, with R19.52 billion of betting revenue, or 37.6% of the national figure. Between them those two provinces booked more than three quarters of everything South Africans lost on a bet.

Gauteng still holds the physical trade, with 45.0% of casino revenue against Mpumalanga’s 2.7%. Two maps sit on top of each other: one drawn by where people live and drive, the other by where operators file their licences.

What section 11 of the Act actually says

The governing text has not changed since 2004. Section 11 of the National Gambling Act, which Parliament passed in 2004 as Act 7, is headed “Unauthorised interactive gaming unlawful”, and it bars a person from offering or taking part in an interactive game unless the Act itself or another national law authorises it.

The Act defines an interactive game as “a gambling game played or available to be played through the mechanism of an electronic agent accessed over the Internet other than a game that can be accessed for play only in licensed premises”.

Then comes the part that gets quoted least. The Act’s own schedule required the Board to set up a committee on national policy for interactive gambling, and gave the Minister two years from the effective date to “introduce legislation in Parliament to regulate interactive gambling within the Republic”.

Twenty-two years on, that national framework has not arrived. The provinces kept licensing bookmakers in the meantime, the bookmakers moved online, and the gap between the two facts is the whole subject.

The bill that lasted five weeks

The most recent attempt came in 2024. Dean Macpherson of the Democratic Alliance introduced the Remote Gambling Bill, B11-2024 as a private member’s bill on 16 April that year.

Parliament’s record marks it lapsed under National Assembly rule 333(2) on 21 May 2024, five weeks later. Rule 333(2) is procedural housekeeping rather than a verdict: business that has not been revived falls away when a term ends. Nobody revived it.

That leaves the 2004 wording in force and the classification argument unresolved. Anyone who tells you the question was settled in either direction is reading something into a lapsed bill that is not there.

The tax take, and a warning from the regulator itself

Provincial licensing authorities collected R5.81 billion in gambling taxes and levies in 2024/25. Betting supplied 58.9% of that. Casinos supplied R1.72 billion, or 29.5%, well above their 22.3% share of revenue, because a casino licence is taxed harder than a bookmaker’s. Betting handed over R3.42 billion on more than three times the revenue.

Provinces have noticed. On 28 August 2026 the Western Cape’s Standing Committee on Finance took a Provincial Treasury briefing on the Twentieth Gambling and Racing Amendment Bill, which proposes an Economic Opportunity Tax on the province’s five licensed casino operators, with public hearings set for November.

At national level Parliament’s portfolio committee for trade, industry and competition heard the Board’s 2026/27 annual performance plan on 24 June 2026, alongside the National Lotteries Commission.

The regulator’s own tone has shifted with the numbers. On 16 August 2026 the Board urged South Africans to protect household income and to be cautious about gambling, citing the Statistics South Africa labour force survey for the second quarter of 2026. Its site puts gambling prevalence at 65.7% and employment in the sector at 34 316 people.

Everything above describes one market, South Africa’s, where gambling is restricted to adults aged 18 and over and every licence named here is a provincial South African licence with no reach beyond those borders. Growth of this speed is a commercial fact, not a recommendation. Anyone who does gamble, anywhere, should treat it as paid entertainment and fix a limit in advance.

*Figures are the audited National Gambling Board returns for 2024/25 and the parliamentary records cited, checked on 18 September 2026.*