Australia Online Gambling Law

Updated: 2025

Online gambling laws in Australia are straightforward from a player's perspective. Simply put, there are no laws that prevent you from placing bets online. The Criminal Code doesn't address the act of gambling, playing poker or betting on sports at all.

The number one concern for Australian gamblers must be this: Is it safe to play online? There are plenty of sites that accept Australian players, but they cater to a global audience and not all of them are reputable. We recommend doing a little research before choosing a site and sticking with the biggest, most trusted brands in the business. Here are a few that we recommend: BetOnline, Bovada, SportsBetting.

Rules for Operators

Gambling operators exist in a much more complex regulatory environment. In 2001, Australia passed the Interactive Gambling Act (IGA) and with it a long list of rules that operators must follow. These operators don't just have to comply with the long, sometimes confusing list of requirements in the IGA. They also have to deal with a host of local regulations that aren't always the same from state to state. And at the root of all these confusing layers of law are basic legal principles that aren't always consistently followed, even by the courts.

Under the IGA, overseas-based operators are not permitted to offer most gambling services to Australians.

The IGA is primarily enforced by blocking the financial transactions of foreign operators (although this has not been particularly effective as major companies such as Betfair continue to operate in Australia). Countries like the United Kingdom, where many of these online sports betting companies are based, are signatories to the 2001 international agreement that enshrines the Internet as a free, open and universal medium.

However, websites operating from Australia can offer various gambling games to foreign customers around the world. But there's a catch: if a foreign country has laws in place that prohibit its own citizens from using Australian gambling sites, then Australians cannot gamble with people from those countries. There are currently nine countries on this list, which can be found in the Financial Review article linked above.

Australian citizens are not required to follow the rules and regulations set forth in the IGA. It is the operators who are solely responsible for ensuring that Australians are not exposed to forms of gambling that are not legal, which under the IGA would be anything other than sports betting. So what does that mean for you? If you're an Australian punter, don't bother trying to figure out which sites are legal and which are not. Just pick a safe site and don't worry about anything else.

Offshore Gambling Sites

The IGA text mandates its applicability to matters beyond Australia's borders with this language: “This Act relates to acts, omissions, matters and things anywhere in the world, unless otherwise stated.”

The law clearly tells offshore gambling sites that they are not allowed to accept customers from Australia, but it has no real power behind it. Many, many sites can and do accept Australian customers, mostly without any fear of being shut down.

Every once in a while, a politician or two makes some noise about shutting down Internet gambling, but there just doesn't seem to be any mainstream interest in actually doing something about it.

You can compare things down under to the situation in the US by examining the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), which the US passed in 2006. Like Australia, the US had general laws against online gambling, but not much in the way of means or methods to enforce them until the UIGEA was passed.

In the United States, the UIGEA went after the banking industry and required them to stop processing payments to Internet gambling sites. After the UIGEA went into effect, banks had to make their own decisions about which Internet businesses were safe and legal to send money to, and some decided that the safest way to do it was to simply not send money to any Internet business that was far enough away from their customers to raise doubts.

In-Play Betting is Prohibited

Live betting, also known as in-game betting or in-play betting, is a form of sports betting that allows you to bet while a game or event is in progress. For example, if you want to bet on a tennis match, you need to know the difference between pre-match betting and in-play betting. In pre-match betting, you place your bets before the match starts. Once the match is underway, you can place in-play bets on various outcomes.

The IGA doesn't allow online sportsbooks based in Australia to offer the types of bets that many people want to place. But if you can't get these types of bets from an Australian-based sportsbook, you're really not beholden to the whims of the IGA, and you can get them from any number of offshore sportsbooks. These sites can offer you a whole range of betting options.