Is Crypto Gambling Legal in Australia?

August 2026 note: a federal Gambling Reform Bill is now before Parliament. It does not change the player position described on this page; the dated update at the end covers where the bill stands.

What the Interactive Gambling Act prohibits, and who it targets

The Interactive Gambling Act 2001 (Cth) prohibits the provision of 'prohibited interactive gambling services' (online casino games such as pokies, roulette, blackjack and poker, plus in-play sports betting) to customers physically located in Australia. Section 15 carries the core offence; section 15AA adds unlicensed regulated services such as online wagering offered without an Australian licence. The prohibition applies to any provider serving Australians, whether based onshore or offshore.

The decisive point is who the offence falls on. The Department of Infrastructure and ACMA both state plainly that the Act targets the providers of interactive gambling, not their customers. There is no offence in the Act for an individual in Australia who uses an offshore casino, and we found no case in which a player has been penalised for doing so.

ACMA enforcement: blocking the sites, not the players

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) enforces the Act against operators with formal warnings, infringement notices and civil penalties, plus the tool players actually notice, website blocking. Since its first request in November 2019, ACMA has directed Australian internet providers to block illegal offshore gambling sites at the DNS level; well over a thousand sites and affiliate domains have been blocked under the program. Hit one and you see a notice that the service is illegal.

Two honest caveats. The blocking is aimed at the service, never the user. And it is DNS-based, so it is circumventable and is better understood as friction and a warning signal than an absolute barrier.

The June 2024 credit-card and crypto ban: what it does and doesn't cover

This is the most misreported part of Australian crypto-gambling law, so be precise. The Interactive Gambling Amendment (Credit and Other Measures) Act 2023 received assent on 11 December 2023, and its payment ban took effect on 11 June 2024. It stops licensed interactive wagering operators from accepting credit cards, credit-linked digital wallets, and digital currency (that is, cryptocurrency) from customers in Australia, with a carve-out for very small providers under an A$30 million annual wagering-turnover threshold.

Tax: winnings versus crypto

Two separate questions again. For a recreational player, gambling winnings are not assessable income in Australia. The ATO treats them as a windfall from a luck-based activity (rulings IT 2655 and IT 2584). The exception is the rare case of someone carrying on a business of betting or gambling, which the ATO says is unusual precisely because chance dominates the outcome.

Crypto is treated differently. A crypto asset is a CGT asset, and disposing of it is a CGT event: selling it for dollars, swapping one crypto for another, gifting it, or using it to pay all count as disposals. If you win crypto, the ATO disregards the gain on receipt and sets the cost base at its market value at the time you won it, but disposing of that crypto afterwards is a CGT event. So the winning can be untaxed while later moving the crypto is taxable.

What's changing in 2026 (and what isn't)

In April 2026 the federal government announced a major gambling-harm package: a ban on wagering advertising around live sport broadcasts commencing 1 January 2027, a strengthened BetStop self-exclusion register, and more enforcement against illegal offshore operators. Keep these in the right box: they are advertising and harm-reduction measures. They do not change the legality of online casinos (still prohibited to provide) or the player’s position (still not the target of an offence).

Update, August 2026: where the Gambling Reform Bill actually stands

The April 2026 package described above now has its legislative vehicle. The Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026 was introduced to the House of Representatives on 2 July 2026, together with a companion National Self-exclusion Register (Cost Recovery Levy) Amendment Bill funding the BetStop register, and the Prime Minister has called it the strongest anti-gambling regulation Australia has ever seen. As of 11 August 2026 it is not yet law: the bill sits with the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee, whose report is due on 17 August 2026, and the Senate is where passage is genuinely contested.

What the bill regulates is wagering advertising and harm reduction, not casino legality. Schedule 1 bans the broadcast of wagering ads during live sport coverage between 6am and 8.30pm, caps them at three an hour on free-to-air television in that window, bans the broadcasting of odds, and extends the prohibitions to sporting venues and uniforms and to gambling promotion by athletes, celebrities and influencers. The measures are slated to commence on 1 January 2027.

The live negotiation is over inducements: sign-up offers, bonus bets and the promotions that arrive by app and email. Witnesses at the Senate inquiry criticised the bill for leaving online inducements untouched, the government has been in talks with the opposition on curbing them, and the Coalition, the Greens and several crossbenchers argue the bill falls short of the Murphy inquiry recommendations. Senate amendments are a realistic prospect, and what emerges may be stricter than what was introduced.

Update, 17 August 2026: what the Senate committee recommended

The Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee, which closed submissions on 24 July and heard two days of evidence in Canberra on 3 and 4 August, tabled its report on 17 August 2026. The headline is one sentence: the committee recommends that the Senate pass the bills. The fine print carries more weight. The committee view describes the bill as an advance on the status quo that "may also require some amendment", and names five matters that "should be addressed in the bill": inducements, the continuation of gambling advertising around live sport broadcasts, the opt-out model for online wagering ads, a commencement date the affected industries called unachievable, and uncertainty in the definitions that decide what the law actually catches.

Beneath that recommendation the committee split three ways, and the instruments matter. The Australian Greens lodged a formal dissenting report through Senator Sarah Hanson-Young: do not pass in its current form, amend for a complete ban on online gambling advertising, a national gambling regulator and an outright inducements ban, and legislate separately to make operators forfeit proceeds of crime. Coalition senators Sarah Henderson and Dean Smith filed additional comments rather than a dissent: the opposition could not support the bill unamended, inducements go unaddressed, in their reading the bill weakens the 2018 protections against wagering ads during live sport as those protections apply online, and they oppose the foreign-matched-lottery ban outright. Senator David Pocock lodged his own formal dissenting report arguing the bill "fails each part" of the test the government set for itself, with twelve recommendations running from a three-year phase-in of a full advertising ban and an immediate inducements ban to a national regulator and an overhaul of federal lobbying rules.

The live issue going into the report was inducements: witnesses criticised the bill for leaving sign-up offers and bonus bets untouched. The report confirms that reading from every direction. The majority names inducements first among the matters that should be addressed in the bill, and each of the three non-government positions demands an outright ban.

For readers of this page the consequential part is Schedule 2, which advances with the pass recommendation and escalates enforcement against offshore operators rather than players. Proposed section 15J would require banks and payment-system participants to block outbound transfers from Australian accounts to designated interactive gambling services. Proposed section 15AB would put a proactive blocking duty on internet providers, DNS providers, app stores and search engines, and ACMA would gain removal, link-deletion and app-removal notice powers, with civil penalties up to 1,000 penalty units. The evidence also drew the regime's boundaries. VPNs sit outside the blocking framework: Racing Australia asked for their inclusion and the bill does not provide it. And ACMA told the inquiry it has not examined blocking inbound funds, meaning winnings coming back to players, which Racing Australia proposed. One industry-submitted figure for scale, attributed as such rather than as a committee finding: Responsible Wagering Australia cited research putting the offshore market at $3.9 billion, roughly 36 per cent of Australian online gambling, with half of surveyed BetStop registrants still gambling offshore.

Update, 18 August 2026: the government amends its own bill

Around the report's tabling, the government moved to amend its own bill. A ministerial release of 18 August 2026 from Communications Minister Anika Wells sets out the package: a ban on direct marketing of inducements for 14 days after sign-up, a ban on inducement marketing to customers flagged as at risk of gambling harm, a three-month inducement ban after a person deregisters from BetStop, a ban on commissions tied to customer activity, a live-sport advertising blackout extended to 15 minutes before play, and a Wagering Advertising Opt-out Register run by ACMA and funded by a levy on wagering providers. SBS News reported on 17 August that the amendments were expected to be debated the following day. All of this is reported and moving rather than settled law, and none of it touches the two facts this page turns on: providing an online casino to Australians remains prohibited under section 15, and the advertising and inducement rules bind licensed wagering operators. If anything, the direction of travel for offshore operators is tighter, because the same bill carries the Schedule 2 payment-blocking and site-blocking regime described above.

Update, 19 August 2026: the Gambling Reform Bill passes the Senate

The bill has passed the Parliament. The parliamentary record shows the House of Representatives agreed to a package of amendments on 18 August 2026 (26 government and 45 opposition amendments) and passed the bill the same day, and the Senate agreed to the second and third readings on 19 August 2026 without amending it further; the bill's status on the parliamentary record now reads "Passed Both Houses". Royal assent is pending, and a dated addendum will record it here when it lands.

ABC News reported the House vote at 96 votes to 9 on 18 August, with two Coalition MPs, Pat Conaghan and Andrew Wallace, crossing the floor to vote against the bill on the ground that it did not go far enough. Passage followed a Labor and Coalition deal, reported on 17 August, that toughened the original bill: inducement-marketing restrictions including a 14-day ban after sign-up and a 90-day ban after a person deregisters from BetStop, a ban on inducement marketing to customers flagged as at risk, a ban on commissions for staff, agents and affiliate marketers of gambling companies, the live-sport advertising blackout extended to 15 minutes before play, the ACMA-run advertising opt-out register, and a statutory review of the measures after three years.

For readers of this page, the point is the one made in the committee-report entry above, now upgraded: Schedule 2 is no longer a proposal. The payment-blocking duty on banks and payment participants and the proactive blocking duties on internet providers, DNS providers, app stores and search engines have passed the Parliament and await assent and commencement. One honesty note on timing: the commencement timetable of the Act as passed has not yet been published in a form we can verify against the amended text, so this page states no operative dates for those duties yet. The assent addendum will carry the dates from the Act as made rather than repeating the introduced bill's timetable, which the amendment process may have moved.