Spain Will Require Online Gambling Accounts and Payment Methods to Belong to the Same Person
Royal Decree 813/2026, published on 8 October and in force from 28 October, obliges Spanish online gambling operators to verify that the holder of the payment method used for deposits and withdrawals is the account holder. Existing players get six months.
Depositing with a partner's card, a parent's bank account or a friend's e-wallet will soon stop working at Spain's licensed online casinos and sportsbooks.
Royal Decree 813/2026, dated 7 October and published in the Boletín Oficial del Estado on 8 October, amends Article 21.2 of Spain's anti-money laundering regulation. For online gambling operators the key line is short: the person who holds the payment method used for deposits and withdrawals must also be the person who holds the gambling account. That covers cards, bank accounts and e-wallets alike.
The decree enters into force on 28 October, twenty days after publication.
Six months for players already on the books
New customers will be checked from day one. For players who were already registered, and for operators' own systems, there is a six-month transition from the date the rule takes effect.
During that period, existing players can keep depositing and playing. What they cannot do is withdraw winnings until the operator has confirmed that the payment method and the account belong to the same person. If the match still hasn't been verified when the six months run out, the operator has to terminate the contract, notify the Dirección General de Ordenación del Juego (DGOJ), and return the remaining balance, including pending prizes, in the way the regulations require.
What the new Spain gambling payment rules mean in practice
For operators, the work is mostly in the cashier. Card schemes and many bank transfers carry a name that can be matched to the account; some e-wallets and vouchers make that harder, and those are where the friction will show up first. Operators will need to review their verification flows and decide how to handle players whose payment details cannot be matched automatically.
Spain AML gambling regulation: the wider package
The change sits inside a broader anti-money-laundering package. The same decree touches other sectors too, from crypto ATMs to notaries, but for gambling the payment-holder rule is the part customers will notice. It closes a common route for third-party funding, one of the patterns AML rules are designed to catch.
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