What the Swiss Gambling Act regulates — and what follows from it for winnings and tax

In Switzerland an online concession is not a standalone authorisation, it is an extension. It goes only to a company that already runs a land-based Swiss casino under a physical concession. That is a very small set of companies, and the set is fixed before any application is examined.

An operator based in Willemstad or on Anjouan therefore does not fail the procedure. It fails the entry condition. It is not rejected — it cannot apply. That is a distinction comparison sites are happy to blur when they write "no Swiss licence yet", as though one were on the way.

Of the 30 operators in our table, 25 name a jurisdiction in Curaçao, seven Anjouan — four of those in addition to Curaçao — and two Malta. None holds a Swiss concession and none can apply for one. Which number belongs to which operator is set out in the ranking, including the cases where several brands share one number.

The Act has two addressees, and the second is almost always described wrongly. The first is the operator without a concession. The second is the Swiss access provider: it is required to prevent access to the domains that the ESBK and Gespa put on their lists. The duty sits with the company operating the connection, and it takes the form of a condition imposed on that company.

Both lists are public and are updated continuously; in 2026 they hold around 3,000 domains, and the number keeps growing. Calling a listed address returns the authority's information page rather than the operator's site.

For a reader the useful property of these lists is not the block but the index. They say which domains the two authorities have recorded as unauthorised — an official statement about an operator that exists nowhere else in this form.

The ESBK states expressly that players are not prosecuted merely for having used an unauthorised platform. The sentence is exactly as narrow as it looks: it is about criminal prosecution.

It is not a permission. It says nothing about whether a contract with such an operator is enforceable, nothing about what happens in a dispute, and nothing about how a payout is treated for tax. This page draws no conclusion from it and is not legal advice.

Not being prosecuted and being protected are two different sentences.

For tax, the dividing line follows the concession rather than the currency, and it is sharp. Winnings from a Swiss concessioned casino stay tax-free up to a threshold of CHF 1.03 million. Winnings from an unauthorised or foreign platform are taxable in full — not above a threshold, but from the first franc.

For the 30 operators in this table that holds without exception: no allowance. Winning at any of them produces taxable income, and the size of the win decides only the amount, not the obligation.

A payout in cryptocurrency adds the exchange rate. Valuation is in francs, and the cantonal tax administrations expect conversion at the time of receipt; for wealth tax it is the holding on the reference date that counts. How to declare it in a particular case is a question for the tax administration of your canton of residence — not for a comparison site.

The CHF 1.03 million allowance is the most expensive sentence in the whole Act, and it sits on the side of the concessioned operators.

Three things, explicitly and in order. First: "is not prosecuted" produces neither a recommendation nor a permission here. Second: this page does not explain how a listed domain might be reached anyway; the block is a condition on access providers, and its technical side is not the subject. Third: a foreign licence number produces no protection under Swiss law.

What remains checkable sits in the operators' own documents — the figure that counts on the day something jams is the withdrawal limit, and next to it the language a dispute is actually conducted in. Both say more about the hard case than any licence badge.