Portugal's SRIJ licence: a practical guide for casino and betting operators

Portugal's regulator and its rulebook

Online gambling in Portugal is supervised by the Serviço de Regulação e Inspeção de Jogos (SRIJ), a department of Turismo de Portugal, I.P. SRIJ licenses operators, certifies their systems, monitors them in real time and blocks illegal sites.

The legal framework is the Regime Jurídico dos Jogos e Apostas Online (RJO), approved by Decreto-Lei n.º 66/2015 of 29 April 2015. Secondary rules come as SRIJ regulations and technical instructions; three of them, Instructions 23/2025, 24/2025 and 25/2025, recently harmonised XML reporting for baccarat, transactions and hourly financial summaries.

Licence types you can hold

Portugal licenses by vertical. An operator picks the licences that match its product and can hold several.

Online licence types under the RJO (SRIJ, checked September 2026)

Betting exchanges and some other formats are not permitted, and each game type offered under the games-of-chance licence has to be approved in advance. According to the Chambers Gaming Law 2025 guide, 18 operators held 31 licences in mid-2025, which gives a sense of how selective, but reachable, the market is.

IEJO: why sportsbooks and casinos pay tax differently

The Special Online Gambling Tax (Imposto Especial de Jogo Online, IEJO) replaces ordinary gaming duties for licensed online operators. Its bases differ by product, and that single fact changes margins more than any fee.

IEJO rates as summarised in Chambers Gaming Law 2025 (checked September 2026)

A tax on turnover is paid whether the book wins or loses. At an 8% rate, a sportsbook with a typical single-digit or low double-digit hold keeps far less than the same book would in a GGR-taxed market, so pricing and margin management matter more in Portugal than elsewhere. Casino games, taxed on GGR, behave more like the rest of Europe. The IEJO raised €163.9 million in the first half of 2025 (€82.7 million in Q1, €81.2 million in Q2), according to SRIJ data summarised by Chambers.

The three stages to a Portuguese licence

SRIJ runs licensing as a sequence: first the company, then the system, then the go-live check. Each stage produces its own document, and none can be skipped.

1. Suitability review. SRIJ assesses the applicant: company structure (a Portuguese company or an EU/EEA company with a registered branch), shareholders, directors, financial capacity, criminal records and fit-and-proper status.
2. Independent certification. An independent testing laboratory certifies the gaming system against SRIJ technical rules: architecture, RNG, game maths and return to player, encryption, data transmission and security.
3. SRIJ homologation. SRIJ's own technical team checks the certified system, its real-time connection to the regulator and its reporting before the licence becomes operational.

Fees are set by ministerial order (Portaria 211/2015 covers the application, certification and supervision charges). Operators also post financial guarantees covering player balances and the IEJO; practice guides quote €500,000 per licence for player liabilities plus €100,000 for the tax. SRIJ does not publish a single all-in price, so budget with local advisers.

Player protection obligations

• Mandatory consultation of the national self-exclusion registry before an account is opened; it held 326,400 registrations at the end of Q2 2025.
• Deposit limits, loss limits, reality checks and session time-outs available to every player.
• Identity verification of every player, completed before any withdrawal is paid.
• Account statements and self-assessment tools on the site.
• Advertising rules restricting targeting of minors and requiring responsible gambling messages.

Choosing certified content for a Portuguese site

In Portugal a game is only as legal as its certification. Each title must be covered by the independent laboratory's report and approved by SRIJ for the licence it runs under, so ask every studio for its Portugal certificate and the build it covers. Many global studios, including Pragmatic Play, Evolution, Play'n GO, NetEnt and Playtech, maintain Portuguese certifications for large parts of their portfolios.

The integration has to respect that list without engineering effort each time. With our casino game aggregator API every game comes with metadata (category, studio, currencies, market), so the Portuguese lobby can be filtered to certified titles; a country parameter at launch applies each studio's territorial restrictions; and demo sessions run through a separate getGameDemo call, never mixing with real-money reporting. EUR is native, and a site can be locked to EUR only. If you hold a betting licence too, the sportsbook API shares the same seamless wallet, which keeps turnover reporting for the IEJO in one place. Catalogue and currencies change continuously; the live list is in the API.

Portugal compared with its neighbour

Operators often weigh Portugal against Spain. Portugal accepts applications continuously and its fees are lower, but the turnover tax on betting is harsher. Spain taxes all products at 20% of net income but only opens general licences during occasional calls. Our Spanish DGOJ guide covers the other side of that comparison.

This guide is general information, not legal advice; take Portuguese counsel before filing.

Portugal SRIJ: what operators ask

Sources and last update

The legal references come from the RJO and SRIJ publications; market and tax-collection figures come from SRIJ data as summarised in the Chambers practice guide.

• Decreto-Lei n.º 66/2015 of 29 April 2015, Regime Jurídico dos Jogos e Apostas Online (RJO)
• Portaria 211/2015 (fees for licensing, certification and supervision)
• Turismo de Portugal / SRIJ, "Regulating and supervising gambling" pages, checked September 2026
• SRIJ technical Instructions 23/2025, 24/2025 and 25/2025
• Chambers Gaming Law 2025, Portugal: Trends and Developments (licence count, IEJO rates and collections, self-exclusion data)

Last reviewed: 24 September 2026.