What this field is worth
The Moldovan gambling market is larger than its company count suggests. The National Lottery of Moldova, the state operator, reported sales revenue of 13.26 billion lei for 2025 against 10.3 billion the year before — growth of nearly 29 per cent in a single year, in a market a private casino sells into alongside it.
The shape of those accounts is worth understanding before you model anything, because gambling does not read like other trades. Cost of sales — overwhelmingly the winnings paid back out — took 12.72 billion, leaving a gross profit of 536 million and a net profit of 291 million lei. Gambling is a volume business: the margin per leu staked is thin and the volume is very large, which is why scale, floor design and cost control decide the outcome rather than price.
Three official counts describe the private side, and they measure three different things rather than contradicting each other. Thirty-two legal entities have declared gambling and betting as an activity in the state register of legal units. Eighteen filed financial statements under that division for 2025. And two hold a casino licence — a number that has been stable at every published date back to December 2024.
Two licences in a country of this size is the most commercially interesting fact on the page: this is an uncrowded market with a high entry threshold, which is the combination that protects whoever is inside it. The Public Services Agency reinforces that from the other direction. Its list of gambling sites, platforms and applications reachable without authorisation stood at 7,843 entries at its September 2026 update — a regulator actively removing unlicensed competition from the market the licence gives access to.
Where the growth is: gaming software
The fastest-moving business in Moldovan gambling is the one that is not gambling at all.
The law defines the field as five activities — keeping casinos, running lotteries, operating slot machine halls, taking sports bets, and organising play over electronic communications networks. Writing the software those activities run on is on none of that list, and nothing in the statute reaches it. A studio in Chișinău can build slot mechanics, a live-dealer platform, a sportsbook engine or the reporting layer an operator’s regulator demands, and hold no gambling permit of any kind.
It can also do something a casino cannot: join Moldova IT Park. Classes 62.01 and 58.21 are both on the park’s activity list, and a resident pays a single tax of 7 per cent of sales revenue in place of corporate income tax, payroll taxes and the local ones, subject to a monthly minimum per qualifying employee. Class 92.00 is not on that list, so the boundary is unusually clean and easy to plan around: building the game is a 7 per cent export activity, and running it is a licensed one.
That combination — no permit, a 7 per cent regime, an engineering workforce and buyers in every licensed market in Europe — is why this is the branch most new companies in this field are actually being registered for. We set the company up inside the park from the start, so the regime applies from the first invoice rather than from a year in.
What it costs to open
For two of the three branches, almost nothing. A software studio and a shop selling lottery tickets both register as an ordinary SRL with no minimum share capital, in a few working days at the Public Services Agency. The shop adds a trade notification to its town hall — 100 lei, effective by tacit approval from the third working day — and that is the whole of the paperwork budget.
The casino is a different order of magnitude, and the numbers are worth setting out in the order you meet them.
Share capital comes first: 5,000,000 lei, with at least 70 per cent of it — 3.5 million — in actual money rather than contributed assets. It must be fully paid up when you file, it may not come from budget funds, credit, loans or pledged assets, and capital whose origin cannot be confirmed disqualifies the application outright.
Then the room. A casino must hold at least five gaming tables and one roulette in a municipality, or four and one outside the municipalities, and falling below that minimum is itself a ground for suspending the licence. The licence fee follows the tables: 600,000 lei for each gaming table and 130,000 lei for each roulette unit, due within ten days of the file being approved and then again ten days before each licence year ends. Adding a table mid-year recalculates the fee across the days remaining. Reissuing the licence with a copy costs 3,600 lei, a duplicate 16,000 lei, and if the licence is withdrawn the fee is not returned.
Two costs that founders miss. The equipment must belong to the operator outright — leasing your tables is not available — and gaming equipment manufactured more than five years ago may not be imported at all. And the cash float is set by law in euro rather than lei: at the start of each working day the casino must hold the equivalent of 2,000 euro for every card or dice table and 3,000 euro for every roulette, converted at the day’s official rate.
The one saving other licensed businesses enjoy is written out of this one. A company registered less than a year before it applies normally pays half the licence fee; the law names casinos, together with alcohol, tobacco and petroleum, as expressly excluded from that halving.
What to know before you start
The experience condition is met through the shareholding
The casino licence asks the applicant for five years of organising and running gambling, in Moldova or in an EU member state — and the law is explicit that the condition is satisfied either by the company or by the shareholders who directly or indirectly control more than half its share capital.
That second limb is the whole answer, and it is the reason the shareholding structure is the first thing to settle rather than the last. A new Moldovan company carries the licence; a partner with the operating history carries the condition. Because the licensing file is examined on the company as it stands when it is submitted — capital fully paid, origin of funds confirmed, shareholders in place — this has to be built at registration rather than tidied up afterwards.
It is the part of the project we are most useful on. We structure the company and its shareholding to satisfy the condition on the day the file goes in, alongside the capital requirement and the founding documents, so the application is decided on its merits rather than sent back on its paperwork.
The tables are yours; the machines are the state’s
A licensed private casino owns its tables and its roulette outright — the law requires it, and leasing them is not available. The slot machines standing next to them on the same floor are operated by the National Lottery of Moldova.
That follows from the monopoly rather than from any rule about casinos, and it is genuinely useful to know at the planning stage: it means the Moldovan model is a table business, and the floor, the staffing and the revenue forecast are all built around the tables. Plan the room that way from the first drawing and the economics work; plan it around a machine floor you will not operate and they do not.
The address does the work of a marketing budget
Promotion of gambling is confined by law to your own main premises and to material addressed to people who already play there. The broader exceptions added in 2025 — broadcasting after 22.00, sponsorship of sport, up to 15 per cent of a periodical — are written for low-social-risk gambling, which is the state operator’s product, so a casino works within the narrower rule.
This is less of a constraint than it first sounds, and the statute tells you how it is meant to be answered: a casino stands in a building of its own or in a hotel classified at four stars or better. The four-star hotel option exists precisely because the guests are already there. Location, frontage and the hotel you sit inside are the marketing plan, and they are decisions made once, at the start, rather than a budget line renewed every quarter.
Where the room may stand, and the 200 metres that are often misquoted
A casino may be sited in a separate capital building with distinct entrances organised for direct access from the street, one for visitors and one for staff, or in a hotel classified at four stars or better. Inside, it sits in separate rooms with their own entrance, and the law expects connected rooms around it — the restaurant, the bar, rest areas, the machine floor, the cash desk, the cloakroom, a staff rest room, a surveillance room. That list is effectively a design brief, and it is worth using as one.
Gaming venues are not placed in buildings housing educational institutions, religious institutions, cultural objects including concert halls, libraries, museums, theatres and galleries, medical institutions, public authorities or specialised children’s entertainment centres, nor in residential buildings, at public transport stops, in stations, underpasses, markets or temporary kiosks.
The 200-metre rule is narrower than it is usually reported, and knowing that widens the search: it applies to entrances of educational institutions, medical institutions and children’s entertainment centres. Churches are covered by the same-building prohibition, not by the distance rule. We check a shortlisted address against both rules before a lease is signed.
How the money works
Gambling turnover is exempt from VAT without the right of deduction, so input VAT on the fit-out and the tables sits in the capital budget rather than being recovered later. Knowing that at the modelling stage is worth more than it sounds, because it is the difference between a cash-flow forecast that holds and one that does not.
The same provision leaves a deliberate opening. Services whose value was not included in the stake or the entry charge fall outside the exemption — the bar, the restaurant, the room upstairs. A casino with a restaurant therefore runs a mixed VAT position from its first month and recovers input VAT on that side of the business, which is the practical reason classes 56.10 and 56.30 belong on its CAEM table from registration rather than being added later.
On winnings, the operator withholds 18 per cent and remits it by the 25th of the following month. The definition is favourable and precise: for a casino the taxable winning is the documented positive difference between what the player won and what they staked, not the gross payout. That is why per-table daily takings and payouts are a bookkeeping obligation — get the records right and the tax follows the real margin.
For the software studio and the shop, an SRL is the answer, and the reasoning is the ordinary one. A software studio or a shop registers with no minimum share capital, in a few working days, with liability limited to the capital. A studio that intends to apply to Moldova IT Park needs nothing special in its constitutive documents beyond the right CAEM codes; the park admits the company, not a special legal form.
The entrepreneur’s patent is the wrong instrument here, and it is worth saying so early rather than discovering it in month six: a studio selling to operators abroad reaches both of the patent’s limits almost immediately — 300,000 lei of sales income over 12 consecutive months, and no right to employ anyone. The company is the structure that lets you hire the second engineer and sign the first framework contract.
For a casino the law requires a commercial company and sets the capital at 5,000,000 lei, so the choice is between an SRL and an SA and turns on how you intend to hold and transfer the shareholding rather than on tax. Since the five-year experience condition is usually met through a controlling shareholder, the shareholding structure is not a formality here — it is the thing the licence is granted on the strength of, and it has to be right when the file is submitted rather than tidied afterwards.
Whichever branch you are opening, the registration is where the decisions that matter get made. We draft the constitutive documents and the statute, select the CAEM codes across all five divisions this field touches, prepare the founders’ file and file it with the Public Services Agency, and hand you a company with its IDNO.
For a software studio we prepare the Moldova IT Park application alongside the registration, so the 7 per cent single tax applies from the first invoice instead of a year in, and we take on the monthly accounting and payroll that a resident’s reporting requires. For a casino we build the shareholding and the capital structure to satisfy the licensing conditions on the day the file is submitted, and assemble the licensing documentation with it. For a shop selling lottery tickets, the trade notification goes to the town hall alongside the registration so the shelf is earning in the same week.
Tell us which of the three you are building and we will tell you exactly what your file needs — before anything is filed.
