Serbia

Serbia operates a licensed, centrally regulated gambling market under the Law on Games of Chance, administered by the Games of Chance Administration (Uprava za igre na sreću), a unit of the Ministry of Finance. Sports betting and casino-type products are "special games of chance" open to private licensees for both retail and online channels; classic games (lotteries, sports forecasting) are a state monopoly run by Državna lutrija Srbije.

Major amendments adopted in November 2024 took force on 6 December 2024 and applied from January 2025, tightening KYC, financial-transaction monitoring and technical standards. Online operators must now give the regulator real-time access via a mirror/replication server located in Serbia, supporting a shared national self-exclusion registry. Players use licensed Serbian-facing sites; offshore unlicensed sites are not authorised.

Horse-race betting is offered separately under the betting framework. The minimum betting age is 18 and the currency is the Serbian dinar (RSD).

Serbia runs a licensed, centrally supervised gambling market, and its gaming laws apply directly to internet gambling. The government licenses online gambling rather than banning it, and the obligations in the law fall on the licensed organisers. The end result is that you can play at any of the operators approved by the Games of Chance Administration for online play. The most important thing you can do is choose safe and reputable Serbia betting sites.

And on that note, the approval to look for is a Serbian one. The Games of Chance Administration approves and supervises the organisers offering special games of chance through means of electronic communication — organisers of such games are required to submit data to the Administration or provide access to data about players who have self-excluded themselves — and it publishes their Serbian-facing domains. Offshore sites without that approval are not authorised to take Serbian bets.

Betting Online With the Serbian Dinar

Many international gaming websites do not support the Serbian dinar, but Serbia licenses its own online operators, so local bettors are not limited to foreign sites. At a Serbian-licensed operator there is nothing to convert: the currency of play is the Serbian dinar, and the operator is one the Games of Chance Administration has approved, so the dinar question only arises if you go outside the licensed market.

Gambling Law in Serbia

Serbia licenses online betting outright. The Law on Games of Chance now in force entered into force on 11 March 2020 and has applied from 11 April 2020. Before 2005, the country’s gaming laws made no mention of internet gambling at all. That all changed in 2005 with the passage of the Games of Chance Act. This act formally recognized online betting for the first time and legalized the activity – but only for the government-controlled monopoly provider.

Lawmakers revisited the act more than a decade later and issued a new Games of Chance Act in 2011, which was itself replaced by the Law on Games of Chance of 2020. This law ended the government monopoly and paved the way for private operators to get licensed and offer real money games to Serbians in a legal environment. Online gaming sites are now licensed in Serbia by the Games of Chance Administration.

Many gaming sites located in other countries continue to accept Serbian customers despite a lack of licensing. Although they technically violate Serbian gaming laws, these international sites obey all laws where they’re located. Their argument is that they follow the law where they operate and have no obligation to follow Serbia’s laws. If Serbians choose to sign up and play, then so be it.

Serbia is not one of the countries that argument fits. It licenses and supervises online betting itself, and imposes on its licensed organisers the reporting and self-exclusion duties described above.

Serbian authorities did flirt with an ISP blacklist idea for a while. In 2012, various news sources reported that the government had a list of 70 online gambling websites that it demanded be blocked by local internet service providers. Some of the biggest betting operations in the world were named in the blacklist. Serbian ISPs resisted the order on legal grounds and nothing ever came of that.

The situation today is that online betting is legal in Serbia when it is offered by an operator approved by the Games of Chance Administration. Serbian gambling laws do not make it a crime to visit a website, place bets and get paid. Several of the big international brands now serve Serbia through locally licensed companies listed by the regulator. Serbian-language sites are now the norm: the regulator publishes the Serbian-facing domains of the licensed organisers.

In 2015, proposed amendments to the Law on Games of Chance would have made things more troublesome for gamblers by adding prohibitions on using credit cards to participate in games abroad and on domestic banks processing transactions to and from foreign gaming sites.

Those amendments did not pass, and what followed was not looser payment rules but tighter supervision of the licensed organisers themselves.

The framework in force is the 2020 Law on Games of Chance, as amended with effect from December 2024. The government has acted: amendments adopted in November 2024 entered into force on 6 December 2024 and tightened the controls applied to the organisation of games of chance. We will update this page if anything changes.