Ireland Leaves Online Gambling Levy Out of First EU Budget 2028 Draft

^{The Bank of Ireland building on College Green sits opposite Trinity College Dublin. Ireland chairs the Council of the EU and drafted the budget proposal that left out a planned online gambling levy. (Photo: Dieglop / Wikimedia Commons)}

Ireland's Presidency of the Council of the EU has left a proposed levy on online gambling out of its first full draft of the bloc's 2028 to 2034 budget. The 'Negotiating Box', circulated on 10 October 2026, lists several new EU-wide revenue sources, and gambling is not one of them.

The omission matters because a gambling levy had real momentum behind it. The European Parliament's Socialists and Democrats group had pushed a 1% unified tax on licensed gambling revenue across the EU, projected to raise between €2 billion and €4 billion a year.

What the Irish Draft Actually Proposes

The draft sets an overall spending ceiling of €1.62 trillion in constant 2025 prices for the seven-year Multiannual Financial Framework, equivalent to roughly €1.85 trillion in current prices. That is about 8%, or €141 billion, below the European Commission's original proposal.

On revenue, the Irish Presidency's document proposes new 'own resources' built around emissions trading, electronic waste, tobacco consumption and carbon offsetting. Tánaiste and Minister for Finance Simon Harris said the package could stabilise member states' contributions while meeting the EU budget's competing demands, a tightrope Ireland has walked before on gambling taxation decisions closer to home. Officials estimate it could raise around €55 billion a year, though the figure depends on further negotiation.

'As it stands, the budget contains no proposal on the application of a common EU levy on online gambling income,' the negotiating document confirms, with the measure originally proposed by Romanian MEP Victor Negrescu left outside the final list of revenue options.

Gambling Levy Not Dead, Just Parked

Malta's prime minister, Robert Abela, has backed the wider Budget 2028 package while specifically welcoming the absence of a gambling tax, a sensitive point for a country where licensed gambling is a significant part of the economy.

The European Parliament has not dropped the idea. MEPs in Strasbourg continue to list an online gambling levy among potential new funding sources for the next budget cycle, which could put pressure on the Irish Presidency to revisit the measure as negotiations continue.

Ireland itself already taxes betting domestically through its own betting duty, charged on bookmakers' turnover rather than gambling revenue, and has debated raising that rate in past budgets. A separate EU-wide levy on gambling revenue would have applied on top of whatever national regimes, including Ireland's, already charge operators.

The Negotiating Box itself is non-binding. Ireland's gambling regulation agenda runs on a separate track from the EU budget talks, but the same government is now shaping both. Adoption of the final Multiannual Financial Framework needs unanimous agreement among all 27 member states plus the European Parliament's consent, and leaders were due to discuss the proposal at the European Council in Brussels on 15 and 16 October 2026. The full text of Ireland's proposal is available via the Department of Foreign Affairs' own press release.