Study estimates online gambling now accounts for 35% of Chilean gaming market
A study by the Centro de Estudios Públicos estimated that the online casino and sports betting market, still unregulated in Chile, generated gross gaming revenue of approximately 431.489 billion pesos, equivalent to about 473 million dollars, during 2025. This figure represents around 35 percent of the total revenue of the country's entire gambling industry, according to the work prepared by researchers Andrés Araya, Fabián Belmar, Xiomara Kuwae, and Sebastián Aliaga.
The report quantifies for the first time the economic weight of the unregulated online segment and its impact on tax collection, in a context where Chile continues to debate a regulatory framework for online betting platforms. According to the study, the regulated gambling market recorded gross gaming revenue of 787.281 billion pesos, about 843 million dollars, and contributed 148.712 billion pesos, about 160 million dollars, in specific sector tax collection, not including VAT or income tax. Around 70 percent of these revenues corresponded to land-based casinos.
In contrast, the center estimates that unauthorized online platforms achieved revenues equivalent to more than half of those generated by the regulated casino market and represent about a third of the total Chilean gaming industry. The report also calculates that, if this market were subject to a specific tax of 20 percent on gross gaming revenue, potential collection would be around 86.298 billion pesos annually, about 94 million dollars. This estimate is very close to the 84.090 billion pesos, about 90 million dollars, that the Government projected during the discussion of the bill seeking to establish a comprehensive regulatory framework, something the authors interpret as an external validation of their methodology.
The researchers clarify that these figures do not come from administrative records or financial statements of operators, but from an indirect estimate based on the historical evolution of the regulated market between 2013 and 2018 and a counterfactual projection of how it would have evolved without the emergence of digital platforms. Therefore, they warn that the observed difference cannot be attributed solely to the growth of the online market, as changes in consumption habits, the persistent effects of the pandemic, and transformations in the land-based offering could also have influenced it. Even so, they maintain that the persistence of this gap after the reopening of casinos, coupled with its coincidence with the commercial expansion of platforms, suggests that a significant part of the demand was captured by unauthorized operators.
Beyond the numbers, the study suggests that Chile faces a mismatch between a regulatory model designed for land-based casinos, lotteries, and racetracks, and a transnational digital market. According to the center, this discrepancy complicates oversight, taxation, and user protection, in addition to posing challenges in terms of money laundering prevention, sports integrity, and responsible gambling. The work was released at a time of changes in the tax treatment of the sector, after the Internal Revenue Service enabled a registry in June for foreign platforms to register and pay VAT on digital services, and then began to apply the reverse charge mechanism for companies that did not register, transferring the obligation to withhold tax to payment media operators.
Tags: Centro de Estudios Públicos, Chilean regulated market, Internal Revenue Service, unregulated online gambling