Online Casinos in Belarus

Belarus Licenses Online Gambling

Belarus licenses online gambling. The licensable activity is called maintaining a virtual gambling establishment (содержание виртуального игорного заведения), and it sits alongside the four land-based activities of maintaining a casino, a slot-machine hall, a bookmaker's office and a totalisator. The framework instrument is Decree of the President of the Republic of Belarus of 6 June 2025 No. 226, On Activity in the Sphere of the Gambling Business, which the Ministry of Taxes and Duties describes as directed at improving the conduct of activity in the sphere of the gambling business, including in the global computer network Internet.

The main provisions of Decree No. 226 took effect nine months after its official publication, on 11 March 2026; the provisions on using cryptocurrency for settlements took effect earlier, on 11 June 2025. The procedure sits in Resolution of the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Belarus of 24 December 2025 No. 764, On the Procedure for Carrying Out Activity in the Sphere of the Gambling Business, adopted to bring the Council of Ministers' resolutions into line with Decree No. 226. It approves a separate regulation for each gambling activity, including a regulation on the procedure for maintaining a virtual gambling establishment and a regulation on the requirements a virtual gambling establishment must meet and how it is tested against them. The same resolution repealed, among others, the Council of Ministers resolution of 1 March 2019 No. 139 on measures to implement the Decree of the President of the Republic of Belarus of 7 August 2018 No. 305.

What a Licensed Operator Has to Do

A virtual gambling establishment is run by a legal entity of the Republic of Belarus. Resolution No. 764 sets the minimum sum such an operator must hold on a special account opened with a Belarusian bank or non-bank credit and finance organisation: ninety thousand base units, or 4.05 million roubles, as the general rule, and twenty thousand base units, or 0.9 million roubles, where only online bookmaker games or online totalisator games are organised. The base unit has been 45 roubles since 1 January 2026, set by Resolution of the Council of Ministers of 20 November 2025 No. 651.

Operators had to bring their virtual gambling establishments into line with Decree No. 226 from 11 March 2026, and have until 1 July 2027 to obtain from OOO Monitoring Centre for the Gambling Business a testing protocol covering the modifications made. Between 11 March 2026 and 1 July 2027 an establishment may operate without that protocol; from 1 July 2027 the protocol must be held at the operator's place of business, and carrying on the activity without it is unlawful and prohibited.

Approval of game rules by the Ministry of Taxes and Duties was abolished on 11 March 2026. Operators now approve their own rules and must transmit them within two working days to the special computer cash-register system that monitors gambling turnover; organising games under rules that do not meet the gambling legislation, or that have not been transmitted to that system, is an administrative offence under part 6 of article 13.6 of the Code of Administrative Offences. From 11 March 2026 operators must also keep video surveillance recordings for at least 60 days, and failing those requirements is both an administrative offence under the same provision and grounds for licence sanctions up to termination of the licence.

Rules for Players

The minimum age is 21: organisers are forbidden to admit anyone below that age, and doing so draws a fine of up to twenty base units. Each participant may hold only one game account in one virtual gambling establishment, and repeat accounts are blocked. Registering a game account requires identification: the player supplies the necessary documents and must either complete a video session over the internet or visit a land-based gambling establishment belonging to the operator of the virtual gambling establishment where the account is being registered. A payout from a game account in a virtual gambling establishment is possible only where at least 70 per cent of the money the player paid in has been spent on stakes.

Players may not use accounts, payment cards or electronic wallets that are not their own, stake money transferred from another person's account, present another person's identity documents, hold more than one game account, or pass on their account login and password. The Ministry of Taxes and Duties states that passing that information to third parties for participation in gambling is treated under article 170 of the Civil Code as a transaction prohibited by law, under which everything received by both sides is recovered to the state, and that unlawful distribution of authentication data for gain can constitute the offence in article 222 of the Criminal Code.

Payments to Foreign Operators

Decree No. 226 prohibits banks from transferring individuals' payments to foreign gambling organisers, which the Ministry of Taxes and Duties gives as a measure to reduce the outflow of money from the country for online gambling on foreign internet platforms. The Ministry states that from 11 March 2026 individuals who are citizens of the Republic of Belarus cannot transfer money in favour of foreign online casinos in order to take part in gambling, because the banks that issue payment cards refuse such operations.

Harm Minimisation

Under paragraph 13 of the Regulation on carrying out activity in the sphere of the gambling business, approved by Decree of the President of the Republic of Belarus of 10 January 2005 No. 9, a person may restrict themselves from visiting gambling establishments and virtual gambling establishments, and from taking part in gambling, for a period of six months to three years. The application is made in writing to an organiser with an identity document, and an application to any one organiser is treated as an application to every organiser in the republic. A court may impose the same restriction under paragraph 14 of that Regulation where a person's gambling puts themselves or their family in serious financial difficulty. For a debtor the restriction runs until the court rules that it is lifted, that is, until the debt is paid. The Ministry of Taxes and Duties publishes, for players, a list of state healthcare organisations of the Republic of Belarus that provide specialised narcological care to people suffering from a pathological attraction to gambling.