How to read a licence register entry

Most gambling regulators publish a register of the businesses they licence. It is the single most useful public document available to a player, and the most frequently misread. A register entry is a precise record of a narrow fact: that a named legal person holds a stated authorisation, of a stated type, in a stated condition, on the date you looked.

The fields, and what each one means

Licensee name. The legal person holding the licence. This is the name that matters. It should correspond to the company named as your counterparty in the terms and conditions; where it does not, you are looking at a structure of the kind described in Operator, platform, white label.

Trading names. Brands the licensee is permitted to operate under. A register may list several, or none, or an incomplete set — some regimes require notification of trading names, others do not. The absence of a brand from a trading-name list is not proof that the brand is unlicensed, but its presence is strong evidence of the link between brand and licensee.

Licence number. A stable reference for the authorisation, which may be structured to encode the licence type. Quote it in any correspondence: it removes ambiguity where similar company names exist.

Licence type or activity. What the licensee is authorised to do — remote or premises-based, casino, betting, bingo, lottery, software supply. A licence to supply software is not a licence to operate a gambling site. Distinguishing the categories is essential, and confusing them is the most common misreading of all.

Status. Active, suspended, revoked, surrendered, lapsed, expired or pending, depending on the regime's vocabulary. What each implies is examined in Licence status changes and what they signal.

Dates. Issue, expiry and — where published — the date of the last status change. The status-change date is the most analytically valuable field on the entry, because it anchors any claim about when a situation altered.

Conditions. Some registers publish conditions attached to a licence, including those imposed following regulatory action. These are worth reading in full.

Reading it correctly

Work from the terms and conditions to the register, never the other way round. Take the legal name of your counterparty from the contract, search the register for that name, and then check whether the brand you used appears as a permitted trading name.

Starting from the brand invites two errors: finding a similarly named but unrelated licensee, and accepting a footer claim as if it were a register record. Footer text is page content. It can be inaccurate, out of date, or copied.

Then record what you found. Capture the register entry itself — a screenshot or saved page with the date and the register's own URL. Registers are live systems; today's entry may differ from next month's, and if a status changes during your dispute you will need to show what it said when you looked.

What a register entry cannot answer

• Whether the operator may lawfully serve you. A licence authorises activity in the issuing jurisdiction and, sometimes, in specified markets. It says nothing about whether the operator is permitted to accept customers from your country. See What a regulator can and cannot do for you.
• Whether the operator is solvent. Registers record authorisation, not financial condition.
• Whether player funds are protected, and to what degree. Segregation requirements differ sharply between regimes, and a register entry rarely discloses the level applied.
• Whether the operator pays its players. Complaint history and payout behaviour are generally not register fields.
• Who owns the licensee. Corporate ownership sits in company registries, not gambling registers. See Who actually owns the site you are betting on.
• Whether the website you used is operated by the licensee. A domain can be transferred, mirrored or redirected; see Domain, host and brand.
• Whether the licence was valid at some past date. Most registers show the current state only. Historical status generally requires an archived capture — which is why capturing the entry at the time matters.

A register entry answers "is this company authorised, for this activity, right now?" Every other question you might have is outside the document.

Where the registers are

Regulators publish registers on their own websites, in formats that vary widely — searchable databases, downloadable files, or static lists updated periodically. GambleLABS lists the authorities it has recorded, with their official register addresses where published, under jurisdictions. Always verify against the authority's own register rather than a third-party copy, including this one; the standard applied is set out in the methodology.