Uzbekistan's Gambling Law Since January 2025

On 1 January 2025, a ban that had been in force since 1 September 2007 stopped applying to one narrow slice of gambling in Uzbekistan: licensed online betting, online games of chance and lotteries. Casinos didn't come back. Slot-machine halls didn't come back. Fourteen months later, the regulator was still telling reporters that nobody had even applied for a licence, and the first two licences only arrived in July 2026, nineteen months after the ban lifted.

That gap between "legal" and "actually happening" is the most interesting part of the story, so it's worth taking the pieces in order.

The documents, and the odd order they came in

The change started with a presidential decree, UP-68, signed on 19 April 2024 and titled (in the English versions law firms use) "On measures to improve the regulation of organising and conducting risk-based games and lotteries". It did three big things. It lifted the ban on online risk games and bookmaking from 1 January 2025. It named the National Agency for Perspective Projects, usually shortened to NAPP, as the licensing body. And it set the tax treatment.

Next came the detail. The Cabinet of Ministers adopted Resolution No. 814 on 6 December 2024, which laid out who could get a licence and on what terms.

Then the timeline gets strange. Gazeta.uz reported that the Legislative Chamber, the lower house of parliament, approved the implementing amendments in their second and third readings on 14 January 2025, two weeks after the regime was supposed to have started. The first reading had been on 24 December 2024.

How can a law come into effect before parliament approves it? It didn't, quite. The 1 January date came from the presidential decree, and in Uzbekistan a presidential decree has legal force of its own. What parliament was doing in January was tidying up the codes that still contradicted the decree. A legal analysis on the Uzbekistan Law Blog listed the clashes: Article 983 of the Civil Code (gambling debts get no court protection), Article 191 of the Code of Administrative Offences (penalties for illegal gambling), Article 278 of the Criminal Code (organising gambling), and Article 46 of the Law on Advertising, which banned gambling adverts outright. Gazeta's report specifically mentions Article 278 being amended to deal with gambling services offered over telecommunications networks.

One correction to the way this is often summarised: 14 January was approval by the lower house only. Gazeta noted that the bill then went to the Senate, the upper chamber. So "parliament approved it on 14 January" is half the process, not the whole of it.

Date	What happened
1 Sep 2007	Gambling ban takes effect (date given by Gazeta.uz)
19 Apr 2024	Presidential Decree UP-68 signed
6 Dec 2024	Cabinet Resolution No. 814 sets licensing rules
24 Dec 2024	Legislative Chamber, first reading of the amendments
1 Jan 2025	Ban lifted for licensed online betting, games and lotteries
14 Jan 2025	Legislative Chamber, second and third readings; bill sent to the Senate
18 Mar 2026	NAPP official says no licences issued and no applications filed
Jul 2026	First online gaming licences issued, to Olimpbet LLC and Aurum Vale LLC, valid to 30 Jul 2031

A note on the length of the ban: much of the coverage calls it a "16-year prohibition". Counting from September 2007 to January 2025 gives a little over seventeen.

What's permitted, and what isn't

Everything legal happens online. The Cabinet resolution, as reported by the Tashkent Times, prohibits "stationary or mobile gaming halls, casinos, slot machine halls" and any other venue that needs players physically present, with one exception: points of sale for lottery tickets. Paper and electronic lotteries are both allowed, but only through licensed sellers.

Participation is limited to people aged 18 and over, and the decree covers both residents and non-residents. Payments from accounts belonging to anyone under 18 are banned. Player identification and transactions have to run electronically, which is what makes the age and exclusion rules enforceable at all.

If you're travelling there, the practical upshot is short. There's no casino to walk into anywhere in the country, and anything set up like one is operating outside the law.

The licence conditions

This is where the regime shows its real intent, which is control rather than a boom. According to the Azizov & Partners summary of Resolution 814 and the Tashkent Times report:

Licences run for five years, and gambling, lotteries and betting each need a separate one.
The operator must be a legal entity registered in Uzbekistan.
The servers running the games must be physically in Uzbekistan, and each operator may use only one domain in the national internet segment.
Gaming software needs a certificate of conformity.
Capital can't come from loans, pledged funds or money with strings attached.
Founders and managers are disqualified for terrorism links, convictions for economic crimes, corruption or money laundering, or for running a company that lost a gambling licence in the previous three years.

The money is where most would-be operators stall. The rules are written in base calculation values (BCV), the unit Uzbekistan uses for fines and fees, so the som amount moves every time the BCV does.

Requirement	In BCV	At 375,000 som (value when the rules were adopted)	At 440,000 som (from 1 Sep 2026)
Authorised capital, online games and betting	150,000	56.25 billion	66 billion
Reserve fund, online games and betting	75,000	28.125 billion	33 billion
Authorised capital, lotteries	55,000	20.625 billion	24.2 billion
Reserve fund, lotteries	40,000	15 billion	17.6 billion

At the exchange rates of late 2024, the 56.25 billion figure was reported as roughly $4.3–4.4 million. The right-hand column is our own arithmetic, assuming the requirement tracks the BCV exactly as the resolution words it; the 440,000 som value from 1 September 2026 is the one given in PwC's tax summary for Uzbekistan.

We left the licence fee out on purpose. Published summaries don't agree on it, and one of them contradicts its own BCV-to-som conversion.

Tax

Operators pay a 4% turnover tax. The base isn't total stakes: Gazeta described it as total income net of winnings paid out and bets returned, which is what the industry calls gross gambling yield. Players' winnings were made exempt from personal income tax; Gazeta put that exemption at five years. Officials projected revenue of about $6 million a year, a modest figure that says a lot about how small the legal market was expected to be at first.

The protections built into the system

The centrepiece is a Unified State Register of Bets and Players, which every licensed platform has to connect to. Its job is to know who is betting and whether they're allowed to.

Two exclusion routes feed into it. A person can put themselves on the list for anywhere from six months to five years. And a court can add someone for up to five years at the request of relatives. That second route is aimed squarely at families watching someone lose control. Gazeta's report on the January 2025 vote also mentions barred categories of participants and a mechanism for tracking cases of gambling addiction.

Advertising remained a live argument. During the January debate, deputy Ilhom Abdullayev called for gambling adverts to be limited to the hours between 11pm and 7am. That was his proposal on the day, not a rule we could confirm was adopted.

Why the licences took so long

Here's the part the launch coverage missed. On 18 March 2026, Askarjon Zakirov of NAPP told Daryo that no company had been issued a licence for bookmaking, online risk games or lotteries, and that none had got as far as submitting an application. Firms had come in for consultations. The register was technically ready but still being finalised.

Read the licence conditions again and that's not surprising. Local servers, local incorporation, millions of dollars in capital that can't be borrowed, certified software and a live link to a state register: that's a high wall, and it was built on purpose. NAPP's own framing, as reported by Daryo, was that the old outright ban had "limited effectiveness" and had pushed money abroad and into fraud. The new system is meant to pull that activity into view, even if that happens slowly.

Our view is that the slow start is the system working roughly as designed, not failing. A regime that licensed a dozen operators in its first month would have been the more worrying sign.

The wall was eventually cleared. In July 2026 NAPP issued the first online gaming licences, to Olimpbet LLC and Aurum Vale LLC, each valid for five years to 30 July 2031, according to trade press reports in August 2026 (last checked: September 2026). Two licensed operators is still a small, tightly held start, and NAPP remains the body to check for who else has been added.

For the broader picture of what's regulated for visitors, our guide to Uzbekistan's laws and customs covers the rules that come up more often, and the customs rules page deals with what you can bring in. Connectivity questions, including blocked services, are in our SIM and internet guide.

Sources

This article is for general information and is not legal advice.