Georgia iGaming License Opens With 5% Tax and Banking Access

Georgia moved from draft legislation to a live regulatory regime in under three months. The country switched on its international Georgia iGaming license framework on 29 September. It runs on a 5% tax on gross gaming revenue, with corporate banking access and payment processing folded into the permit itself. Operators weighing up Malta, Gibraltar or Curacao now have another name on the shortlist, and this one sits next door to markets the established hubs have never served well.

What the Georgia iGaming License Actually Offers

The commercial terms carry the pitch. A Georgia iGaming license runs for five years, taxes gross gaming revenue at 5%, and charges nothing at all on profits that go back into the business. A 1% regulatory monitoring fee and an annual permit fee sit alongside those headline numbers.

Onboarding happens remotely, and the framework demands no physical office, which drops the entry cost for smaller brands considerably. Random Systems Georgia, the company the government appointed as regulator, claims it answers applicants within days. Georgia International Strategic Group handles applications as the exclusive authorised representative and has been pushing the framework abroad since early September.

More changes are coming. The promoters have promised another round of terms in October, described as favourable to operators. Nobody has published a single detail about what that involves. Anyone budgeting around a Georgia iGaming license right now should treat October as a variable rather than a guaranteed sweetener.

Why Tbilisi Already Hosts the Industry It Wants to License

Georgia is not starting from nothing here. Tbilisi has spent years as an operations base for Spribe, SmartSoft, Evolution, Flutter, Entain and Betsson, each running game studios, live casino floors or support teams out of the city. The engineering talent sits there. So does a great deal of the product development that keeps the global industry running.

What stayed elsewhere was the paperwork. Companies employing hundreds of people in Georgia held their permits in Malta or Curacao, banking outside the country entirely. Most of the value created locally leaked straight back out. The Georgia iGaming license exists to close that gap. Keeping licensing revenue where the work already happens is the entire economic argument behind it.

The Payments Problem Behind the Pitch

Tax rates grab attention, but payment access is what actually breaks operators. Curacao-licensed brands have spent years fighting card declines, frozen settlements and banking partners who treat the whole jurisdiction as a liability. A cheap permit counts for very little when money cannot move through it.

The Georgia iGaming license answers that by selling the entire stack at once. It bundles arrangements for MCC 7995 processing, the merchant category code that flags gambling transactions, together with access to Georgian corporate banking. Vakhtang Katamadze, a supervisory board member at the regulator, frames the ambition as a country-level ecosystem. Licensing, banking, taxation and regulation should work as one system rather than four separate headaches.

Georgian Players Stay Locked Out Entirely

The license covers international customers only. Georgian citizens cannot play on any platform operating under it, which walls the export business off from the domestic market completely. That separation was deliberate from the start, and it matches the line the government has taken on gambling at home for several years.

Georgia raised its gambling age to 25, one of the highest limits anywhere in Europe. It also built a national exclusion register that now covers roughly 1.5 million people. So a company holding a Georgia iGaming license operates inside the country while selling to nobody who lives there. The state collects tax revenue and skilled jobs without widening access for its own population.

Trust Is the Part Nobody Can Legislate

Every claim about this regime so far traces back to the bodies promoting it. Nobody has named a single licensee publicly, no enforcement record exists yet, and the banking relationships set out in the launch material remain unverified from outside. Operators will want to watch how the regulator behaves when something goes wrong, not when everything runs smoothly.

That is the genuine test facing the Georgia iGaming license over the next year. Players judge a jurisdiction by how it handles withdrawal disputes and operators who stop paying out. A five-year permit at 5% means nothing without real enforcement standing behind it. Georgia has built the framework and wired up the infrastructure around it, so the first wave of licensees will settle what the stamp is actually worth to players.