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The French government did not roll out anticipated gambling tax hikes in its 2025 social security budget bill, which was submitted on Thursday evening.
It was reported last week by local newspaper Les Echos that the government would increase taxes for the lottery, horseracing, sports betting and poker sectors. The story was picked up by other outlets, including BFM business, which said that it had seen a copy of the bill which confirmed the story.
According to that supposed draft, lottery contributions to social security would increase from 6.2 percent to 9.2 percent of gross gaming revenue (GGR) for both land based and online, horseracing would increase from 6.9 percent to 10 percent for land-based and 15 percent for online, and taxes for sports-betting would increase from 6.6 percent for land based games to 10 percent and from 10.6 percent to 15 percent for online.
When the budget bill was finally presented on Friday (October 11), there was only one mention of a hike in taxes: “The National Sports Agency [separate from the National Gambling Authority] will no longer receive a levy from lottery revenue/proceeds, but it will get more levies from sports-betting revenue/proceeds due to a cap on sports betting levies being lifted.”
The National Gambling Authority (ANJ) said it had no comment initially, but later clarified that: “The process of such a bill is rather long and not easy to follow … It will now be discussed in the parliament and many parliamentary amendments could still appear.”
A few days ago, however, ANJ president Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin told local media that there could be an "increase by 3.5 points on the GGR".
“What worries us is that this measure will certainly go in the direction of the market concentration that we have been observing for some time,” in which smaller operators suffer and large international firms could be driven away.
A spokesperson for the French lottery monopoly Française des Jeux (FDJ) confirmed to Vixio GamblingCompliance that “the social security financing law project does not include any measure related to gaming”, but did not return a request for comment about what could happen in the near future.
Last week, when it was first reported, the CEO of the FDJ Stéphane Pallez said: "There is no (…) decision by the government to introduce this type of taxation…which is, in any case, an extraordinarily ineffective system... It's not as if we were undertaxed.”
