Beyond Brazil: Peru, Argentina and the Next Wave of Regulated Markets

Peru, Argentina and Chile sit at the centre of Latin America’s next wave of online gambling regulation. Source: iGaming Review.

Latin America Series: iGaming’s next regulated frontier

The three countries singled out here — Peru, Argentina and Chile — sit at that frontier for different reasons. Peru is the first fully national online framework in the region to move from law to licensing to a complete first year of operation. Argentina has extended online regulation across most of its provinces without a federal licensing law, creating a decentralised but increasingly dense ecosystem. Chile is the largest market in the region yet to implement a comprehensive online regime, but has a bill in the Senate designed to bring a largely unlicensed online channel into a formal framework.

San Isidro business district in Lima, Peru. © Wirestock / Alamy

Peru: Regulation as a Development Tool

Peru’s transition to a fully regulated online gambling market has been unusually structured by regional standards, with the sequencing of legislation, regulation and licensing windows laid out in advance and largely followed in practice. Law 31557, enacted in 2022 and later amended by Law 31806, provided the legislative foundation, with Peru’s Ministry of Foreign Trade and Tourism (MINCETUR) implementing a national framework that opened a 30‑day licensing window in early 2024 and drew 145 operator applications — a volume notable even by regional standards. According to Vixio GamblingCompliance, MINCETUR has since completed the initial review phase and issued licences to operators including Betano, Bet365, Betsson, Apuesta Total and Inkabet under a regime built around a 12 percent GGR‑style tax on net winnings, a rate that has been used as a benchmark in Brazil’s and Chile’s own tax debates.

In its first full year under the new rules, the regulated market generated around PEN 419.5 million (around USD 124 million) in gambling tax revenue in 2025 across casinos, slots, remote gaming and remote sports betting, according to figures published by MINCETUR. Yuri Guerra Padilla, head of the Directorate for the Authorisation and Registration of Remote Gaming and Remote Sports Betting at MINCETUR, argued that the country had demonstrated how “effective regulation can become a driver of development”, in an interview with Yogonet’s 2025 year‑end special on the sector. That narrative is reinforced, at least in the ministry’s own reporting, by enforcement data: MINCETUR cites a 40 percent reduction in illegal online gambling supply through a mix of ISP‑level blocking, engagement with payment institutions and on‑the‑ground enforcement, although independent validation of that percentage remains limited.

In July 2025, MINCETUR formalised this set‑up further by creating a dedicated Directorate for the Authorisation and Registration of Remote Gaming and Remote Sports Betting through Supreme Decree No. 004‑2025‑MINCETUR, updating its internal regulations for the first time since 2002. The reform is explicitly framed as a way to modernise institutional capacity, reduce bureaucracy and accelerate operator authorisations while aligning oversight with international standards. The structural question now facing Peru is the same one that follows every successful licensing window: whether the regulatory infrastructure can scale as the market it has helped to create grows more complex, with the first licence renewal cycle the natural stress test.

Unlike many markets that house gambling under finance or interior ministries, Peru has placed remote gaming under MINCETUR, signalling that it sees the sector as part of its broader trade and tourism

Argentina: Regulated but Decentralised

Argentina presents a different kind of regulatory challenge — not the absence of frameworks, but the presence of many operating in parallel. Gambling regulation in Argentina is constitutionally a provincial matter. According to GR8 Tech’s analysis of the market as of February 2026, 14 jurisdictions have established functioning online betting regimes with clear licensing paths, defined taxes, technical oversight and responsible gaming programmes; a further nine provinces permit online activity on a case‑by‑case basis; and one province — Santiago del Estero — explicitly prohibits online betting. The direction of travel is consistent: province by province, Argentina is building a regulated ecosystem. The pace is uneven and the architecture is fragmented, but the momentum is in one direction.

At the federal level, two regulatory developments in late 2025 are worth noting. Argentina’s federal Secretariat of Industry and Commerce published Resolution 446/2025 in November 2025, establishing mandatory national standards for online gambling advertising — such as age‑restriction markers, prominent responsible‑gambling warnings and limits on advertising aimed at minors — with the stated aim of standardising practices across the country’s 23 provinces. That same month, the Agencia de Recaudación y Control Aduanero (ARCA) issued General Resolution 5791/2025, updating the compliance regime for the Indirect Tax on Online Bets by clarifying the perception mechanism, setting clear registration deadlines for operators and intermediaries, and modernising registries and verification procedures for both domestic and foreign operators. Neither resolution creates a federal licensing framework — that remains a provincial matter — but both signal a growing federal appetite to set minimum national standards within which provincial frameworks operate.

For operators, the commercial implication is clear: entering Argentina is not a single licensing exercise. It is a market‑by‑market compliance process across up to 23 separate provincial frameworks, each with its own regulatory body, tax structure and technical requirements. Buenos Aires Province and the City of Buenos Aires — the two largest gambling jurisdictions by population — both have established online frameworks. San Juan passed a comprehensive online gambling law in December 2024, explicitly defining unlicensed online gambling as illegal and empowering authorities to block mechanisms used to facilitate unauthorised platforms. Operators building a regional portfolio should model Argentina as a multi-jurisdictional project rather than a single-market entry.

Santiago skyline with modern office towers, Chile. © Jose Luis Stephens / Alamy

Chile: A Bill Moving Through the Senate

Chile enters 2026 as one of the largest Latin American markets still without a comprehensive online gambling licensing framework — and the one closest to having one. In August 2025, the Senate approved the government’s online betting bill in general terms by 27 votes in favour, 3 against and 5 abstentions, sending it to the joint Economy and Finance Committees for clause‑by‑clause review and amendments. The scale of the largely unlicensed market the bill is designed to address has been highlighted in the legislative debate: a study commissioned by Chile’s Online Betting Platforms Group and prepared by Yield Sec estimates that 5.4 million Chileans engaged with online gambling platforms in 2024, generating around USD 3.1 billion in gross receipts that currently fall outside the domestic licensing and tax net.

Presenting the bill to senators, Finance Minister Mario Marcel framed it as a response to a market operating outside the law and the tax base, with limited oversight. The bill — known as Bill No. 14838‑0 — would introduce a 20% tax on operator GGR, an additional 1% of gross income earmarked for responsible gambling initiatives and a 2% levy on gross sports‑betting income directed to the National Sports Institute, alongside measures to block unlicensed websites and apps, criminal sanctions for unauthorised operations and obligations on payment processors to cut off transactions to illegal operators.

The proposed tax load has been the central point of contention. Industry participants, including operators represented by counsel for Betsson and Betano, have argued in Senate hearings that combining a 20% GGR tax with a 19% VAT and additional levies risks an effective burden in the high‑30s percent of GGR and could push players toward unregulated offerings — a dynamic this series has already tracked in Colombia’s 2025 experience when tax design moved away from a GGR base. Whether Chile’s final rate mix delivers competitive channelisation or replicates that pattern is a question the bill’s passage alone will not answer; even so, the government has signalled that it expects the framework to generate significant additional tax revenue once fully implemented, with estimates in the debate pointing to tens of millions of dollars a year.

Lessons from Early Movers for Latin America’s New Markets

The four‑country picture that closes this series is not one of uniform progress. It is of markets at different stages of the same underlying process: moving from unregulated or under‑regulated online activity toward frameworks that try to serve three objectives at once — generating tax revenue, protecting players and channelling demand into licensed rather than unlicensed operators. The interaction between those three objectives, and the tensions between them, are visible in the way each jurisdiction has designed tax, licensing and enforcement, and in how those choices have affected onshore play.

Peru shows how a centralised national regime built around a defined tax rate on GGR and a structured licensing window can coincide with broad operator participation and measurable enforcement against unlicensed supply in the first year of operation. Argentina shows that a provincially led model can expand online regulation through multiple parallel frameworks in the absence of a federal licensing system, and that subsequent federal standards on advertising and tax administration can add coherence without displacing provincial authority. Chile shows how quantifying the scale of unlicensed online play and associated tax leakage can help build legislative momentum for a national framework, while ongoing debate over effective tax burdens and channelisation underlines that passing a law and calibrating it are separate steps.
Earlier in this series, the three anchor markets illustrated how compliance requirements and tax design influence whether licensed operators can match unlicensed competitors on product and price, rather than relying only on legal status. Colombia’s 2025 tax episode, in which VAT was temporarily applied to deposits rather than GGR, showed how moving away from a revenue‑based approach increased the effective burden on licensees and raised concerns about channelisation. Peru’s first year, by contrast, aligns with a model built around a defined GGR tax and coordinated enforcement, and will provide more data as renewal cycles begin.

For operators, the practical implication remains the same across the region: even as Peru, Argentina and Chile move towards clearer national or provincial frameworks, market entry still depends on local legal presence, local banking and locally compliant platforms, and in some jurisdictions on formalised partnerships with domestic licence‑holders.

Industry Implications

Vixio Regulatory Intelligence projects that regulated online GGR in Latin America could reach about USD 7.86 billion by 2027, based on scenarios in which Brazil and Peru launch and consolidate regulated markets within the 2024–2025 window. Peru’s initial tax‑revenue figures are broadly consistent with those assumptions for that market, while the regional outcome will depend on how Chile’s framework is finalised, how Argentina’s provincial ecosystem evolves, and how enforcement and tax policy interact with channelisation in Brazil and Colombia. In most of these jurisdictions, the primary laws are now in place; the variables that will matter most for operators and regulators are implementation, supervision and subsequent adjustments rather than the existence of legislation itself.

The first three articles in this series established the scale of the Latin American opportunity, the structural conditions of entry in its three anchor markets, and the gap between regulation as designed and channelisation as delivered. This final article looks forward. Brazil, Colombia and Mexico are not the end of the story; they are the opening chapter. Peru has implemented its first comprehensive online licensing framework and is moving through the initial licensing cycle. Argentina has been stitching together a regulated online ecosystem province by province, with most major jurisdictions now live under some form of framework. In Chile, the Senate has approved an online betting bill in general terms and sent it into committee for detailed scrutiny. The region’s regulatory frontier is shifting, and lessons from the markets that opened first are increasingly informing those opening next.

Further Reading & Key Sources