Italy’s gambling sector will contribute €700m to the country’s 2027 budget, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni confirmed after the Council of Ministers approved the draft budget law on Wednesday.

“Settecento milioni arrivano dal settore dei giochi” (seven hundred million comes from the gaming sector), Meloni told the post-cabinet press conference, listing gambling alongside energy companies, banks and insurers as the main sources of funding for a package worth around €26bn. Banks and insurers, together with a higher financial transactions tax, are expected to provide more than €5bn, while energy companies have been asked for a contribution of a similar size to gambling.

Meloni presented the levies as a matter of burden-sharing rather than a targeted attack, arguing that sectors with fewer difficulties should help in a difficult moment. The bill now goes to Parliament, which must approve it by 31 December.

How the money could be raised

The government has not yet published a line-by-line breakdown, and the gambling measures are not final until Parliament has voted. Reporting by Italian trade outlets Agimeg and Agipronews points to a mix of measures that falls mostly on land-based gaming.

The largest lever under discussion is an increase of up to one percentage point in the PREU, the levy charged on stakes in slot machines and video lottery terminals. Agimeg reported that a smaller rise had met resistance within the governing majority. A second strand would extend retail betting, slot, VLT and bingo concessions that are due to expire, for two to three years, at a considerably higher price than previous rollovers. Current concessions for slots, retail betting and bingo run out on 31 December 2026, and the existing extension brings in around €232.8m a year, according to Jamma.

Other options reported include folding the Gratta e Vinci scratchcard concession, which expires in September 2028, into a three-year extension, and recovering residual debts from the slot supply chain linked to an extraordinary levy introduced in 2015. Il Sole 24 Ore reported that the full gaming package could raise as much as €900m and include a fifth weekly Lotto draw, while Agi, citing majority sources, put the figure at €800m.

Online gambling appears to have been largely spared. Agimeg said only modest adjustments were being considered for the online channel, which must remain consistent with the principle of fiscal neutrality. Italy’s new online licensing regime has only been live since November 2025, with each licence costing €7m, an annual concession fee of 3% of net margin and a continuing ban on gambling advertising under the Dignity Decree.

Land-based operators under pressure

The draft budgetary plan sent to Brussels earlier this month reportedly put gambling’s contribution at €718m a year for 2027 and 2028 and €478m for 2029, around €1.9bn over three years.

Retail operators have warned that further increases could push the land-based network past breaking point. Dario Peirone, director general of the Istituto Milton Friedman, said ahead of the cabinet meeting that further tax tightening “would spell the final collapse of land-based gambling”, according to iGaming Business.

What comes next

The budget law will be debated in both chambers through November and December, and the detailed gambling provisions are likely to be fought over line by line as trade associations lobby on the PREU rate and the cost of concession extensions. With retail licences expiring at the end of this year, operators need the extension terms settled before the bill is passed.

Utah has filed criminal charges against prediction market operator Kalshi and its co-founders, chief executive Tarek Mansour and chief operating officer Luana Lopes Lara, escalating the state’s fight over whether sports event contracts are illegal gambling.

Attorney General Derek Brown filed 14 counts in state court in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, according to the Deseret News, the Salt Lake Tribune and Reuters. The complaint lists one count of pattern of unlawful activity, a second-degree felony, 12 counts of online gambling promotion, each a third-degree felony, and one count of general gambling promotion. Local reports differ on whether the last count is charged as a misdemeanour or a felony.

“Gambling is illegal in Utah, whether you place the bet, run the game, or promote it,” Brown said, according to the Deseret News.

Undercover bets on local teams

The charges rest on an undercover investigation. Charging documents say a state investigator opened a Kalshi account on 13 September using an undercover name, a Visa debit card, a local phone number and a bank account identifying him as a Utah resident. Over 11 days he placed around a dozen wagers on NFL and MLB games, the Utah versus Utah State college football game and a Real Salt Lake match.

The wagers totalled $114.87 and the investigator finished $25.10 down, according to reports of the filing. One example cited was a $5 spread contract on Utah beating Utah State by more than 27.5 points, which paid $4.13 when Utah won by 36. Prosecutors say Kalshi took a fee of between three and 78 cents on each transaction.

Kalshi rejected the case. “This is a crazy overreach; Utah is clearly playing politics,” a company spokesperson said. Kalshi maintains that its contracts are federally regulated derivatives traded on a CFTC-designated exchange, not gambling.

A fast-moving three-way fight

The criminal complaint is the third major development in Utah in little more than a week. On 20 October the state sued Kalshi in civil court, calling its markets a public nuisance. That 63-page complaint alleges the company earned between $30.5m and $61.1m from Utah accounts between February and mid-October and seeks to stop it operating in the state.

On Tuesday the federal government hit back, with the CFTC and the Department of Justice suing Utah to block enforcement of its gambling laws against event contracts. That complaint argues the CFTC has exclusive jurisdiction over derivatives traded on federally regulated exchanges and that federal law preempts state gambling statutes. Utah filed its criminal charges the following day.

Utah enters the criminal phase with a federal ruling on its side. In August, US District Judge Robert Shelby held that the state’s anti-gambling laws apply to Kalshi’s sports contracts and are not preempted by the federal statute the company relied on. That reasoning cuts against a separate federal decision in Arizona, where prosecutors brought criminal charges against Kalshi in March on a similar theory only for a federal judge to block the case in May. Arizona is appealing.

Why it matters

Naming individual executives raises the stakes well beyond fines or cease-and-desist orders, and it lands while dozens of states argue that the CFTC lacks authority over sports event contracts. New Jersey has already asked the US Supreme Court to settle which level of government has jurisdiction.

For licensed sportsbooks, several of which are building their own prediction products, the Utah case is a test of how far states are prepared to go. The next steps are the federal court’s response to the CFTC’s request to halt Utah’s enforcement and the first hearing in the criminal case, neither of which had been scheduled at the time of writing.

Gaming machines in British betting shops, casinos and bingo halls will pay Machine Games Duty (MGD) at 25% from 1 April 2027, after Chancellor John Healey used Wednesday’s Budget to redraw the thresholds that decide which machines fall into the higher rate.

Under the change, set out in the Treasury’s overview of tax legislation and rates, any machine with a maximum charge to play of more than £1 or a maximum prize of more than £100 will move from the standard 20% rate to the higher 25% rate. Until now the higher rate has applied only to machines costing more than £5 a play. The practical effect is to pull Category B machines, the mainstay of high street bookmakers and land-based casinos, into the top band. Lower-stake machines in pubs and seaside arcades stay on the standard rate. The measure will be legislated in Finance Bill 2026-27.

A second measure changes who pays. From 1 April 2028, suppliers will become liable for MGD on machines they own and run under profit-share deals with venues. Premises licence holders, permit holders and pub tenants will remain liable where they own a machine outright or rent it on fixed terms and control the takings. HMRC is consulting on how that switch will work until 20 January 2027, although the consultation does not seek views on rates or on stake and prize limits.

Relief that it was not 40%

The outcome is milder than many in the sector had feared. A Social Market Foundation report earlier this year had floated a 40% MGD rate, and the idea gained traction after 90 Labour MPs urged the Chancellor to double the duty on Category B machines. It also follows last year’s Budget, which almost doubled remote gaming duty from 21% to 40% from April 2026 and set the remote general betting duty on course to rise from 15% to 25% next year. Adult gaming centres also lose business rates relief under this year’s package.

Investors read the result as a relief. Rank Group shares rose about 8.8%, Entain gained about 4.7% and evoke added about 3.8% on Wednesday, according to market data cited by the trade press. Entain said it expects roughly £25m a year in additional UK and Ireland retail costs before mitigation and aims to cover the full amount by the end of 2028 through estate rationalisation, group-wide savings and potential market share gains. Its 2026 guidance and its 2028 adjusted cash flow target of £500m are unchanged.

“We’ve been clear about what’s at stake: jobs, investment and the future of betting shops on Britain’s high streets,” Entain chief executive Stella David said in a post on X.

Industry warns on shops and the black market

The Betting and Gaming Council called the rise a “deeply damaging decision”, pointing to modelling that suggests close to 9,000 jobs could be lost and around 1,000 betting shops and casinos could close or come under serious threat. Consultancy Regulus Partners estimated that the higher rate could close half of Britain’s betting shops over four years and cost horseracing £57m in levy and media rights income.

Retail estates are already shrinking. evoke closed around 270 shops in the period covered by its third-quarter trading update, and Flutter last week set out plans to cut up to 1,400 UK and Ireland jobs, citing the earlier tax rises.

Speaking to iGaming Business, Ismail Vali, president of Gaming Compliance International, said unlicensed operators were taking a growing share of online gross gaming revenue and warned that the UK was “knocking on the door of 10% illegal black market share”. He said he expected retail to consolidate, some operators to fail and more play to migrate online.

Dan Waugh, a partner at Regulus, told the same outlet the industry needed to work out “how it breaks this cycle of tax increases and regulatory tightening”.

What happens next

The rate change will be carried in Finance Bill 2026-27 and takes effect in April 2027, giving operators around five months to adjust their estates. The supplier liability change follows a year later, once the HMRC consultation has closed. With two consecutive Budgets now raising gambling duties, operators will be watching whether the Treasury treats this round as the end of the tightening cycle or the start of another.