Chile Gambling License Gaming License

What key figures does Chile’s online betting bill set?

Boletín 14.838-03 sets a 5-year renewable license, a 100 UTM approval fee, a 1,000 UTM annual levy, 2,000 UTM minimum share capital, and a 20% gaming tax on gross gaming revenue. Every figure below is proposed, not enacted, and none of it can be paid or filed today.

• License term: 5 years, renewable, no cap on the number of licenses

• License approval fee: 100 UTM, about CLP 7.16M or USD 7,700, one time

• Annual fixed levy: 1,000 UTM per year, about USD 76,600

• Minimum share capital: 2,000 UTM, about USD 153,000, committed and maintained

• Gaming tax: 20% of gross gaming revenue, plus 1% responsible gambling contribution, plus 2% sports contribution

• On top of that: 19% VAT and 27% corporate income tax

• Corporate form: Chilean sociedad anónima cerrada, exclusive object, maximum 10 shareholders

Boletín 14.838-03 would create what its own drafters call a mercado semi-abierto, a semi-open market. Any applicant that meets the requirements can hold a general license, and nothing caps the number issued. That is the opposite of how Chile runs physical casinos, where operating permits are capped and operators compete for a fixed set of concessions. The semi-open design removes the scarcity risk that dominates capped markets and moves the whole Chile question to cost, tax, and timing.

Provenance and conversions. The statutory figures come from the text of Boletín 14.838-03 and remain provisional until the law is enacted and its implementing regulation, the reglamento, is issued. VAT and corporate income tax come from general Chilean tax law, not from the bill.

Chilean statutory amounts are set in UTM (Unidad Tributaria Mensual). 1 UTM = CLP 71,649 in July 2026. USD conversions use CLP 935/USD and move with FX.

Can you get a Chile online betting license in 2026?

No. There is no application to file and no regulator with power to grant one. Ley 19.995 of 2004, Chile’s land-based casino law, states that a casino operating permit "en ningún caso… comprenderá juegos de azar en línea", meaning it shall under no circumstances cover online games of chance. The Superintendencia de Casinos de Juego (SCJ) regulates physical casinos only and has no online licensing authority today.

The regulator today is the Superintendencia de Casinos de Juego, at scj.gob.cl. The SCJ publishes an information page on online betting platforms and runs a self-exclusion portal. Neither gives an operator a route in, because the SCJ cannot grant an online license under current law.

Under Boletín 14.838-03 the SCJ would be renamed the Superintendencia de Casinos, Apuestas y Juegos de Azar and would gain power to grant online licenses, set and audit technical standards, sanction infringements, and take real-time remote access to licensed platforms.

Boletín 14.838-03 is a bill, not a law. Until it passes, there is nothing in Chile to hold, price, or plan an application around.

MGL has completed 300+ license applications with 0 rejections to date across offshore, onshore, and EU regimes. Chile is not among them, because Chile has issued none. We say so on this page rather than take a deposit against a 2027 maybe.

What is the status of Chile’s online betting bill?

Boletín 14.838-03, "Regula el desarrollo de plataformas de apuestas en línea," is stalled in the mesa técnica with no enactment date, after four cycles of delay since 2022. The Piñera government filed the bill on 7 March 2022, the Senate approved it en general on 13 August 2025, and the Kast government granted it suma urgencia on 7 May 2026. The bill now sits in its second constitutional reading in the Senate.

The government filed the bill by presidential message and granted it suma urgencia, the highest legislative urgency available, which obliged the Senate to debate it within 15 days. Priority did not move it. Three administrations have now handled Boletín 14.838-03: Piñera filed it, Boric carried it through repeated urgency motions, and Kast accelerated it again. Four years of cross-party continuity have not produced a law, and that is the best available guide to how much weight to put on any new Chilean target date.

Boletín 14.838-03 runs to 75 permanent articles and 6 transitory provisions, and in mid-June 2026 the Senate and the Executive moved the article-by-article debate into the mesa técnica, a technical working group, to reconcile roughly 377 pages of amendments. Neither the Senate nor the Executive set a new deadline.

Two structural delays are already written into the bill’s transitory provisions, and they run after enactment, not before:

• Boletín 14.838-03 takes effect on the first day of the month after publication, but only its illegal-gambling enforcement tools apply immediately.

• Licenses under the permanent regime cannot be issued until the reglamento is published, and Boletín 14.838-03 allows up to 6 months for that.

Two dates gate everything: enactment, then publication of the reglamento. Even if Congress passes the bill in late 2026 or early 2027, licenses realistically become issuable around six months after that. A 2027 go-live is the optimistic case, and the impasse in the mesa técnica has not resolved.

Boletín 14.838-03 does open one bridge across the reglamento gap. An applicant that did not offer services illegally in Chile in the prior 12 months, and that can show it already meets equivalent technical standards under a foreign license, may apply for a temporary license and operate before the reglamento is published. The bridge costs a guarantee deposit of 5,000 UTM, about USD 383,000.

That bridge is the only near-term route the bill creates, and it is closed to exactly the operators most likely to want it. Clean Chilean conduct for 12 months and an existing licensed platform elsewhere are both prerequisites, which is another reason to hold a live license in an open market before Chile moves.

How much will a Chile online betting license cost?

Boletín 14.838-03 sets the approval fee for a general license at 100 UTM, about USD 7,700 at July 2026 values, and the annual levy to the treasury at 1,000 UTM, about USD 76,600. Minimum share capital is 2,000 UTM, about USD 153,000, which is committed capital rather than a fee.

The circulating "USD 75,000 Chile license" figure is not supported by the bill text.

The USD 75,000 figure conflates the annual levy with the application fee. Industry coverage of the bill has reported the 1,000 UTM annual levy as the license fee itself, quoting it as CLP 64.2M or about USD 74,000, both as an up-front cost and as a recurring one. The annual levy is real. It is not what the license costs to obtain. The statutory approval fee is 100 UTM.

The real cost drivers sit elsewhere: the 2,000 UTM committed capital, the tax stack, and the build-out that Chile’s supervision model demands. A liquidity reserve is also mandatory before launch, and Boletín 14.838-03 defers its amount to the reglamento, so no one can price it yet.

Operators using the interim temporary license route face a separate 5,000 UTM guarantee deposit, about USD 383,000.

For planning purposes, non-statutory first-year costs for a mid-size operator land in an indicative range of roughly USD 90,000 to 250,000 one time and USD 200,000 to 370,000 per year. The non-statutory costs cover Chilean incorporation, platform and RNG certification by an accredited lab, AML and responsible gambling tooling, compliance staffing, and legal work.

The figures above are market estimates, not published figures, and they exclude gaming taxes and share capital. Scoped per operator profile.

What tax will licensed operators pay in Chile?

A licensed Chilean operator would pay 20% of gross gaming revenue as a specific tax, a 1% responsible gambling contribution, and a 2% sports contribution, then 19% VAT and 27% corporate income tax. Boletín 14.838-03 layers these gambling taxes on top of general Chilean taxation rather than replacing it.

The 2% sports contribution splits in thirds between the national sports federations, the Chilean Olympic Committee, and the Chilean Paralympic Committee.

Watch the tax bases, because they are not identical.

The 20% specific tax applies to gross gaming revenue. The 1% responsible gambling contribution and the 2% sports contribution apply to gross revenue, which is the wider figure. A model that runs all three off GGR understates the load.

Whether Chile will tax player winnings is unresolved

The original 2022 draft included a 15% withholding on winnings at withdrawal. One line of reporting says the Executive removed that withholding by amendment around 2023, on the reasoning that a withdrawal-time charge pushes players back to offshore sites, and replaced it with an obligation on platforms to report player winnings and losses to the Servicio de Impuestos Internos (SII). Industry press covering the May 2026 acceleration still lists a 15% tax on user winnings at withdrawal as part of the bill in its second constitutional reading.

We cannot confirm the removal against the current consolidated bill text, so we will not tell you the 15% is dead. Model your Chilean player economics both with and without it, and settle the point with Chilean counsel once the mesa técnica reports.

VAT is additive, which was itself a change

The original bill treated the 20% specific tax as a VAT substitute. The Executive’s amendment made both apply, mirroring how physical casinos are taxed, and roughly doubled the bill’s projected fiscal yield. The VAT base is amounts wagered less documented prizes paid.

The combined burden is contested, and both numbers matter to your model. An industry-commissioned Deloitte study from December 2023 put the theoretical cumulative burden at 37.6% and recommended around 23% as internationally competitive. The Deloitte study put the average in regulated markets near 22%.

The Subsecretaría de Hacienda disputes 37.6%. Because VAT runs on a credit and debit mechanism, the ministry argues the real effective burden does not exceed about 28%. Treat 28% and 37.6% as brackets on the gambling-specific load, before income tax, with the final rate structure still open in the mesa técnica.

One tax number on this page is moving too. A separate Chilean tax-reform bill, unrelated to Boletín 14.838-03, proposes phasing the general corporate rate from 27% down to 23% by 2029 and moving to full integration by 2030. That bill is also a proposal, so model 27% and treat any lower rate as upside. The 25% rate for SMEs and the reduced 12.5% ProPyme rate for 2025 to 2027 are unlikely to reach a licensed operator.

The repatriation problem most Chile models miss

A Chile online betting license must be held by a Chilean company, so operating profit is taxed in Chile at 27% corporate income tax, and dividends to a foreign parent trigger Chile’s 35% Additional Tax (Impuesto Adicional).

Chile has around 35 tax treaties, including Spain, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Ireland, and the United States. The US-Chile treaty entered into force on 19 December 2023, with withholding effective 1 February 2024.

Note the "Chilean Clause": Chile’s treaties do not cut the 35% headline dividend rate, they improve the credit. A treaty holding jurisdiction saves about 9.45 points. The non-treaty figure works out as 27% + (35% minus 65% of 27%) = 44.45%, and the treaty figure as a flat 35%.

Nothing eliminates the two-tier charge, and there is no participation exemption at the Chilean layer. Confirm anti-abuse and principal-purpose-test compliance with counsel before you build the structure.

Does Chile license B2B gaming suppliers?

No. Boletín 14.838-03 creates no separate B2B or platform-supplier license. The bill does not split authorization into B2C and B2B, nor into sports betting and online casino verticals. Boletín 14.838-03 grants authorization per bettable "object" that the regulator approves, and any activity without express authorization stays prohibited.

For a platform, RNG, or aggregator business, Chile publishes no entry route at all. Boletín 14.838-03 sets out no standalone supplier registration, no cross-border supply regime, and no rule on supplier liability for a client’s compliance. How suppliers get treated becomes knowable only when the reglamento is published.

Boletín 14.838-03 defines two licenses, both operator-side:

The interim temporary license is a third instrument, and it is not the single-event license above. It sits in the bill’s transitory provisions rather than the permanent regime, and it covers only the window between enactment and publication of the reglamento.

If a broker tells a B2B supplier that a Chilean supplier license exists, that broker is wrong. Anyone selling a Chilean certification route is equally wrong, because Boletín 14.838-03 defines none. A B2B business planning Chile should hold a B2B gaming license in a jurisdiction that actually issues one, and treat Chile as an unresolved question rather than a roadmap item.

What happens to operators already taking bets from Chilean players?

Grey-market operation in Chile is a disqualifier, not a head start. The draft transitory provisions bar any operator that offered services illegally in Chile in the 12 months before applying. The only route back is a one-off substitute tax of 31% of gross income over the prior 36 months, plus 0.07 UTM per user account. This reading is not only ours: Chilean law firm ECIJA reaches the same conclusion in its published analysis of the bill and the current legal gap.

Read the regularization route as a pricing exercise. At July 2026 UTM values, 0.07 UTM is roughly CLP 5,015 or about USD 5 per registered account. An operator with 200,000 Chilean accounts is looking at roughly USD 1.07M in per-account charges alone, before the 31% on three years of gross income.

Building brand in the Chilean grey market now can cost you the license and then charge you for the privilege.

Enforcement is already running ahead of regulation, on three separate tracks:

• Courts. The Supreme Court (Rol 18.080-2025, September to November 2025) ordered Chilean ISPs to block illegal betting sites within 5 days, and reinforced the order against mirror sites in April 2026. Named blocked brands included Betano, Betsson, and Coolbet. Blocking is porous. The legal exposure is not.

• Tax authority. Via Resolución Exenta N°69 of 2 June 2026 the SII created a VAT-registration system for offshore platforms. When none registered, it activated cambio de sujeto from 15 July 2026, forcing payment processors to withhold 19% VAT from 10 named non-compliant platforms, with a further expansion flagged for 1 August 2026. Twenty-five other platforms registered voluntarily.

• Payment rails. Any banking or processing relationship built on grey-market Chilean flows is now exposed to that withholding at the processor level.

Registering for VAT does not make an operator legal. The SII itself disclaims any ruling on legality, and Chile’s licensed casino industry has attacked the measure as backdoor regularization. An operator that registers is paying tax on activity a Chilean court has treated as illegal, and is still inside the 12-month bar.

How will the Chile online betting license application process work?

A Chile online betting license application would run in seven steps: incorporate a Chilean company, assemble a suitability dossier, file with the SCJ and pay 100 UTM, pass fit-and-proper checks, certify the platform, meet pre-launch conditions under article 17, and launch on a .cl domain. None of these steps can be started today.

The sequence below describes the route the bill would create once enacted and once the reglamento is published.

1. Incorporate in Chile. A sociedad anónima cerrada with an exclusive object, a maximum of 10 shareholders, minimum share capital of 2,000 UTM, and identified beneficial owners.

2. Assemble the suitability dossier. The SCJ vets shareholders and beneficial owners under article 11 and assesses financial soundness on the last financial statements, updated net-worth position, and three-year revenue evolution.

3. File the application with the SCJ and pay the 100 UTM approval fee.

4. Pass fit-and-proper checks, including the 12-month bar on anyone who operated illegally in Chile.

5. Certify the platform. Platform, RNG, and systems must meet standards the reglamento will set, and the regulator must receive real-time remote monitoring access.

6. Meet pre-launch conditions under article 17. Final SCJ certification, a constituted liquidity reserve, certified responsible gambling policies, and designated operating bank accounts.

7. Launch on a .cl domain. Boletín 14.838-03 requires licensed platforms to operate through a Chilean address.

The SCJ publishes no processing time, because the regime is not live. Any consultant quoting you a Chile application timeline in weeks is quoting a number that does not exist.

What ongoing obligations will a Chile online betting license carry?

Licensees must grant the Superintendencia de Casinos de Juego (SCJ) remote real-time access to platform systems covering bets, payments, and financial flows, maintain a liquidity reserve, report player winnings and losses to the Servicio de Impuestos Internos (SII) annually, and certify responsible gambling policies before launch.

Real-time regulator access is an architecture decision, not a compliance line item. Build for it from the start or pay to retrofit it later.

The rest of the ongoing load:

• Player winnings and losses go to the SII once a year. The annual reporting duty replaced the abandoned withholding tax.

• A liquidity reserve must sit in cash or immediately liquid securities at all times, with the amount set by the reglamento.

• Boletín 14.838-03 creates a Política Nacional de Apuestas Responsables, issued by the Ministry of Finance. The policy covers the whole gambling industry, not online alone. Operators certify responsible gambling policies before launch and integrate a self-exclusion mechanism that binds across online platforms and physical casinos. Secondary reporting puts the minimum exclusion period at 6 months.

• Accounts are barred for minors, people under judicial interdiction, anyone the operator cannot identify, self-excluded players, SCJ staff or their proxies, relevant public officials, and anyone linked to the operator. Article 58 bans payment instruments in a minor’s name outright. Boletín 14.838-03 classes extending credit or loans to players as a gravísima, most-serious, infringement.

• Promotion must not target minors under article 52, and bettable objects must not be designed to appeal to minors under article 28.

• Renewal of the general license at 5 years depends on demonstrated compliance, so the SCJ can refuse renewal outright.

Boletín 14.838-03 sets up structured information sharing between the SCJ, the financial-intelligence unit (UAF), the financial-market regulator (CMF), the SII, the telecoms regulator (SUBTEL), and the Ministerio Público, mainly to pursue illegal gambling. Treat anything you file in Chile as visible to all six.

Plan around one more marketing constraint

A separate bill, Boletín 16.471-29, would bar professional footballers and their agents from signing advertising and image contracts with online-betting operators, with fines of 150 to 2,000 UTM. Chile filed that bill in December 2023 and accelerated it in early May 2026.

All 16 Primera División clubs currently carry betting sponsors, and the Asociación Nacional de Fútbol Profesional (ANFP) had its Betsson deal terminated by ministerial order in 2023. Do not anchor a Chile go-to-market plan on football sponsorship.

How do banking and payments work for a Chile-facing operator?

Chilean banks treat gambling as a high-risk merchant category, and while private online betting is illegal there is no compliant merchant route to build. Under a live regime the bill requires an operator to designate its operating bank accounts as a pre-launch condition under article 17, but imposes no in-country account-domicile rule on the applying company itself.

A licensed operator would integrate Chile’s dominant local rails: card acquiring, bank-transfer initiation, and the local wallet products Chilean players actually use. Local rail integration becomes routine once a license exists. Banking built on pre-license grey-market flows does not, and it is now exposed to processor-level VAT withholding.

Crypto sits in a gap. Chile has no betting-specific crypto rule. Crypto-asset service providers fall under Ley Fintech (Ley 21.521, in force 2023), supervised by the Comisión para el Mercado Financiero with KYC and AML registration duties. DeFi, NFTs, and stablecoins remain unsettled, and the Open Finance component was pushed to July 2027.

Working assumption: crypto deposits and withdrawals for betting would sit under general Fintech Law AML duties rather than a betting carve-out. The crypto treatment is a genuine gap in Boletín 14.838-03 and needs Chilean counsel, not a vendor’s assurance.

How does Chile compare with LatAm markets that license operators now?

Chile cannot be licensed today, while Peru and Anjouan both issue licenses now. That single difference outweighs every rate comparison, because a 20% GGR rate on a license no operator can hold is not a rate.

The choice is not Chile versus Anjouan. The real choice is whether you spend 2026 waiting or spend 2026 licensed in an open market, ready to add Chile as a second license once Chile issues one.

What should an operator do before Chile opens?

Three moves are worth making before Chile opens, and none of them involve a Chile application. Stop or unwind any Chilean player exposure, because the 12-month bar is measured backwards from your filing date. Get licensed in a market that issues licenses today. Decide the Chilean corporate and platform structure on paper now, since those are the parts with long lead times.

Stop or unwind Chilean exposure if you have it

Every month of accepting Chilean players pushes your earliest clean filing date further out and grows both the substitute tax base and the per-account charge. Unwinding Chilean exposure is the single decision on this page with a deadline attached, and your own conduct sets the deadline.

Get licensed where you can operate now

For a LatAm-focused operator that means a regulated Latin American market, or an offshore license used only in markets that permit online betting while Chile stays closed. For an operator whose priority is speed and cost, the Anjouan gaming license typically runs 6 to 8 weeks, with 0% gaming tax, no local company requirement, and the lightest statutory fee stack of the routes we handle. For an operator that specifically needs a regulated Latin American license today, the MINCETUR-issued Peru license is the live route.

Build the Chilean structure on paper, not in Chile

Four parts of the future regime are already fixed, and each carries a long lead time: a Chilean sociedad anónima cerrada with a maximum of 10 shareholders and vetted beneficial owners, a treaty-resident parent to avoid the 44.45% repatriation charge, platform architecture that can expose real-time regulator access, and self-exclusion integration.

Deciding the corporate form, the holding jurisdiction, the platform architecture and the self-exclusion integration now costs nothing, and it strips months off your own lead time to filing. Deciding them after the reglamento publishes puts you behind every operator that did the work early.

MGL does not sell a Chile online betting license, because none exists. What we do is tell you where Chile sits in your licensing sequence and get you licensed in the markets that are open.

About the author

Ivan Kiselev, Co-founder, MyGamingLicense (MGL). MGL has delivered 300+ gaming license applications with 0 rejections to date across offshore, onshore, and EU regimes. Ivan leads the licensing practice and advises operators on LatAm licensing sequence and corporate structure.