Spain plans new responsible gambling rules
Minister Andrés Barragán plans to oversee the launch of new betting limits and advertising controls.
Spain. Operators can expect a series of new safer gambling measures on the Spanish market. Andrés Barragán, Secretary General for Consumer Affairs and Gambling, has said that the government intends to centralise safer gambling tools and introduce several new restrictions this year.
Barragán was speaking at the annual conference of FEJAR, an association of rehabilitated gamblers. He said Spain currently had an irregular support framework and needed more coordination among national agencies to tackle gambling-related harms.
He said the Ministry of Consumer Affairs intends to take on full responsibility for oversight and public engagement on problem gambling. New measures will include cross-operator betting limits to prevent players from circumventing restrictions by opening accounts with multiple operators.
“Limits must be real limits,” Barragán stressed. “It mustn’t be possible to evade safeguards by moving from one operator to another. If protection is to be effective, it must apply across the entire system.”
New advertising rules are also on the way. Campaigns will need to highlight operator profitability and risk concentration, moving away from messaging that puts the responsibility solely on players – “operators design the environments, segment advertising towards certain profiles and concentrate almost all the profits. Regulation must reflect that reality,” Barragán said.
Meanwhile, a new monitoring framework designed by public health professionals will replace operator-led mechanisms. This will impose stricter reporting standards and risk-modelling criteria. “We want detection systems built on public health criteria, not purely commercial parameters,” Barragán explained. “Prevention must be structural, embedded in how platforms operate, not an afterthought.”
An imbalance in Spanish gambling?
Barragán also suggested that there exists an imbalance in Spain’s gambling market, through which a small group of high-spending customers “bear a large share of the heavy losses“. If we are serious about reducing harm, we must address that concentration,” he said.
The announcements come after the ESTUDES 2025 youth survey found that gambling participation has risen among adolescents aged 14–18, both online and via land-based offerings.,
“We have a serious public health problem with online gambling in Spain,” Barragán said. “That’s why we need to continue to reinforce regulation to reduce harms. The current system is not sufficiently balanced to protect those most at risk.”
A Royal Decree on Safer Gambling Environments was introduced in March 2023, but some of its provisions remain pending amid legal challenges and continued analysis by the ministry.
Barragán said the Royal Decree had been “an important step forward“ but was “not the end of the process“. We need stronger tools, better coordination and more effective mechanisms to detect and prevent problematic behaviours,” he said.
