Colombia has established a 16% national consumption tax on all online gambling and betting conducted through Decree 0240, signed on March 12, 2026, with the levy calculated on gross game revenue, defined as total bets received minus prizes paid during each bimonthly period, and with operators holding a valid Coljuegos (the state entity that regulates games of chance) concession contract obligated to collect and declare the tax before the DIAN, Colombia’s national tax authority.
The rate is applied at the moment a user deposits funds, whether as cash, electronic transfer, or cryptocurrency, into a betting account, so the tax trigger is the deposit itself and not the final prize outcome, a design that places the compliance burden on operators rather than individual users and that gives the government a predictable, bimestrally verifiable digital gambling tax base across all licensed platforms.
A third attempt after two constitutional and legislative setbacks
The March 2026 decree is Colombia’s third effort to tax online gambling in 13 months, as each previous attempt ran into a different institutional barrier.
Decree 175 of February 2025 had imposed a 19% VAT on digital bets as a temporary measure tied to an internal public order emergency, valid only through Dec. 31, 2025, and it set the baseline understanding in the sector that internet gambling carried significant contributory capacity, according to legal analysis by the firm BendiksenLaw.
When Congress failed to pass a broader tax reform, the government issued Legislative Decree 1390 of December 22, 2025, which reinstated the 19% digital gambling tax through emergency economic powers, but the Constitutional Court provisionally suspended the measure by a 6-to-2 majority in early February 2026, with rapporteur magistrate Carlos Camargo raising procedural and substantive concerns about using emergency decrees as a substitute for failed legislative reforms.
#Colombia | 🎰 ¡Atención apostadores! Nuevo impuesto del 16% a juegos digitales 💸
— Diario Occidente (@Diarioccidente) March 13, 2026
En el marco de la emergencia invernal, el Gobierno creó un tributo para las plataformas de apuestas por internet. El dinero recaudado se destinará exclusivamente a atender a las familias…
From VAT to consumption tax: the legal architecture of decree 0240
By framing the March 2026 measure as a national consumption tax rather than a value-added tax (IVA), Colombia applied an instrument that has broader established precedent in the Estatuto Tributario (Colombia’s consolidated tax code), where Article 512-1 already governs consumption taxes on specific goods and services, and to which Decree 0240 now adds online gambling as numeral four for the fiscal year 2026.
The taxable base, the GGR computed per bimonth, distributes the fiscal burden across the operating cycle rather than on individual bets, which reduces the legal exposure of the deposit-trigger design that the Constitutional Court identified as potentially “irreversible” in its February ruling, since operators accumulate the liability and settle it periodically with a declared net figure rather than applying a charge to each user at the point of deposit.
Worth noting, only operators holding a valid concession contract with Coljuegos may offer, host, develop platforms for, intermediate payments on, or advertise online gambling in Colombia under the new framework, a restriction that concentrates the digital gambling tax collection in a regulated, auditable universe of licensed entities and theoretically excludes grey-market platforms from legal operation within the country.
Fiscal scope and what the tax means for the sector
Decree 0240 makes part of a broader emergency package alongside Decree 0241, which establishes a 19% tax normalization rate for undeclared assets and expands the wealth tax to foreign branches operating in Colombia with patrimony at or above 200,000 UVT, equivalent to approximately US$2.8 million in 2026, with the government framing the full package as an emergency fiscal instrument to finance climate disaster relief rather than as a structural tax reform.
The digital gambling tax trajectory from 19% VAT in early 2025, to a frozen second attempt in February 2026, to the current 16% consumption levy under Decree 0240, confirms that Colombia will continue pressing this sector for revenue regardless of the legal instrument used, and the medium-term test will be whether the Constitutional Court validates the March 2026 architecture or whether the government must eventually return to Congress for a legislative route that provides the sector with the regulatory certainty operators have sought throughout this 13-month cycle.