The Legal Age

In today’s day and age, many governments and legal jurisdictions have established mostly agreed upon age requirements for participating in certain activities, that require the decision making and judgement that you can only get from experience and maturing. These societies, reflecting their cultural norms and practices, have varying activities that they restrict with a legal age limit.

In most societies, gambling is an age restricted activity that is linked to a coming of age, when a teenager steps into adulthood and is understood to be able to make serious decisions and take on greater responsibilities. In the case of gambling, the responsibility is of one’s own finances.

The legal gambling age in the UK is 18 years old like the international convention. But some games and plays are kept an age bar about 16 years old. This game and gambles do not consist of high money prize or costly exchange. Some Ill-Effects, if Age is Not Legalized in Any Part of the World. Real Uk Legal Gambling Age money online casinos are protected by highly advanced security features to ensure that the financial and personal data of their players is kept safely protected. The legitimate sites that we list as the best also have a solid reputation for ensuring their customer data is truly safe, keeping up Uk Legal Gambling Age with data protection and privacy legislation. Legal Gambling Age In New Orleans Legal Gambling Age In New Orleans Legal Gambling Age In New Orleans Legal Gambling Age In New Orleans 88probet slot machines come with a wide variety of features. Choose your favorite slot games based on several pay.

Gambling is often divided into distinct categories; the most common being casinos and sports betting. There are frequently different age restrictions for these distinct gambling categories. For example, in New Zealand, one must be 20 before they can gamble at casinos, but they can wager on horses when they’re 18. There isn’t an age restriction on playing the national NZ lottery!

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The Legal Gambling Age Worldwide

So where in the world can you gamble under 18? Where is it illegal to gamble? Well, there’s a fair few oddities and distinct jurisdictions that we’ll take you through, continent by continent. For a comprehensive look at all the legal gambling ages around the world, check out this list.

Europe

Across this vast continent, with its many distinct cultures rubbing shoulders with each other, there’s a surprising similarity amongst the various European nation states. For the majority of European nations, one must be 18 years old to make a legal bet, but there are a few exceptions.

In Denmark, there are no restrictions on sports betting. Punters must be 18 for all other forms of gambling, such as in a casino or on a gaming machine in another venue, or online gambling, but can be any age to put a bet on a horse or their favourite football team.

Estonia, on the other hand, has a casino gambling age minimum of 21 years old, higher than the European average, but has a minimum age for all other forms of gambling of 16 years old. It’s not surprising that one of the most digitally advanced societies in the world allows their teenagers to gamble online!

Portugal has some pretty complicated gambling laws. The legal age to gamble at a casino can be 25, but can also be 18, it all depends on the specific casino. There are some casinos that even allow for tourists to gamble at 18, but restrict locals to 25 and older.

In both Andorra and Bosnia & Herzegovina, there is no legal minimum age to gamble, anywhere. Keen young punters from around Europe and the rest of the world can head to these countries and see what they have to offer. While Andorra doesn’t have any casinos yet, this small nation is still worth a visit!

Asia

Over in the eastern hemisphere on the Asian continent there are a fair few countries that have outlawed gambling of any kind, making it illegal to wager on a game or event. Here are the countries that travelling bettors would do best to avoid:

• Afghanistan
• Brunei
• Bahrain
• Indonesia
• Maldives
• Pakistan
• Qatar
• Syria

For the most part, the rest of the Asian countries follow the same pattern as Europe, in that they allow gambling for those 18 and older, while a handful of others restrict gambling to 21.

North & South America

Most nations in North and South America flit between a legal age for gambling of 18 and 21 years of age – notably, there are no nations without gambling restrictions. This could be perhaps due to the large impact the Catholic church has had on the culture of these societies.

In the infamously complicated collection of states that comprise the USA, the laws and minimum gambling ages vary from state to state, but always between 18 and 21. It’s handy to remember when travelling in the states that what’s legal in one state isn’t legal in another.

Africa

Like in Asia, many African nations outlaw gambling, such as Ethiopia, Eritrea, Libya, Sudan and Somalia, and funnily enough, Tunisia has no legal age, after an unsuccessful attempt to outlaw it across the country!

As much of Africa is in the global south economically and developmentally, many nations have no regulation for the technological side of online gambling, even some of the nations that outlaw all other forms of gambling, such as Ethiopia and Eritrea!

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Oceania

Lastly, at the bottom of the world, the collection of nations that comprise Oceania have largely similar gambling laws, with most of the nations having a legal gambling age of 18. Most notably, a few of the small Pacific Ocean states have outlawed gambling, while gambling in casinos require a minimum age of 20 in New Zealand.

Where Will You Go on Your Next Holiday?

There you have it, a worldwide snapshot of the gambling situation as it stands today. If you’re looking for a holiday gambling destination in the post-COVID world with a low legal age, we’d suggest heading over to the mainland and keeping in local (European). There’s both Estonia and Bosnia & Herzegovina to check out, which offer rich cultural offerings to boot!

What Is The Legal Gambling Age

Just remember, if you are accessing online casinos, the legal gambling age where you are still applies!

Frequently Asked Questions

As comprehensive as these guides can be, there are oftentimes gaps that we don’t see until our great readers point them out. We’ve compiled the most commonly asked questions we get about the legal age to gamble around the world, and answered them below.

Can you gamble anywhere at 18?

No, there are many countries that have a minimum legal age of 21, and many that outlaw gambling outright. In the USA, there are quite a few states that restrict gambling to 21+, but luckily there are a few that allow gambling from 18. If you are gambling in other countries, you can bet at 18. For example, you can access the best UK online casinos as long as you are 18.

What country has the lowest gambling age?

There are a handful of countries that actually have no gambling restrictions to name of, for various cultural or developmental reasons. Most countries tend to restrict gambling to over 18s or over 21s, like with online casinos in the US.

There are so many arbitrary decisions that are made in life that we all accept without any real question. If you went to a pub and ordered a pint when you were seventeen-years and three-hundred-and-sixty-four days old then you would be breaking the law. Do the same thing the following day and you won’t be. Why is it that an eighteen-year-old can be trusted to drink alcohol and not be daft with it but a seventeen-year-old can’t be? Add to that the fact that the law in the UK dictates that it’s OK for an adult to buy beer, cider or wine for someone over sixteen if they’re having a meal at a table in a licensed restaurant and you can see that the whole thing becomes even more complicated. That’s to say nothing of the fact that a child aged five to sixteen can drink alcohol at a private premises such as home without breaking any law. The fact that the United States of America says that people must be over the age of twenty-one to drink alcohol merely serves to confirm the idea of the age selection being arbitrary.

Regardless of the arbitrary nature of the cut off point for the legality of drinking, we all accept it because it is the law. The same thing can be true for the age at which we’re allowed to have sex, drive and, of course, gamble. Just as with alcohol intake, however, there are a host of various different rules and regulations around the age limit for gambling that muddy the waters somewhat. The age you need to be to gamble in a casino or place a bet at a bookmaker’s is different to the age you need to be to buy a lottery ticket, for example. So how were the rules decided on that front? Why is one form of gambling seen as less problematic than another? Should it not be a blanket decision regarding an acceptable age for gambling, regardless of the event that you’re gambling on? That’s not to say that the age should be lowered to sixteen across the board, of course; perhaps some feel that it should be raised to twenty-one. In this piece we’ll explore the various rules, how they came about and what might happen to them in the future.

New Age Verification Laws Come Into Place In 2019

Following a review of age verification procedures for UK licenced gambling business the Gambling Commission announced in 2019 that companies that offer gambling to UK citizens must now verify the age of any customer before they make a deposit or bet.

Previously brands were allowed to let people sign up, deposit and bet as long as they verified age within 72 hours or before a withdrawal was made. The commission argue however that this still potentially allows minors to gamble, even if they ultimately may not be able to withdraw.

The effects of this mean there will likely be longer delays between signing up and betting, however it will mean children are less able to bet online. The rules also extend to demo and free-to-play games online, such as slots. While this is not technically gambling as no prizes are provided the GC argue rightly that kids should not be able to play these games as they are a clear gateway to gambling proper.

What Are The Current UK Laws?

If we’re going to have a look at the age restrictions that are in place over gambling then it makes sense to first explore things as they currently are. In the United Kingdom there are several different age limits depending on what exactly it is that people are gambling on, as the table above demonstrates.

You can see from the table that the current laws are slightly complex, with the age limit in place depending entirely on what it is that someone’s hoping to gamble upon. A sixteen-year-old could spend £100 on scratchcards, football pools or the National Lottery, for example, but wouldn’t be allowed to bet £1 inside a casino. Theoretically, a five-year-old could sit and spend thousands of pounds on coin pusher-type games or teddy grabbers without stepping outside of the legal boundaries for gambling. Quite where a five-year-old would get thousands of pounds from is another matter, of course, but the point still stands that they wouldn’t be breaking the law if they did.

The issue around the age of gamblers is further complicated by the rules that individual premises choose to put in place. It is not illegal for someone under the age of eighteen to enter a bingo hall, as an example, but if they were to do any gambling whilst they were in there then that would be against the law. For that reason, most licensed bingo clubs choose to instigate a blanket ban on anyone under the age of eighteen from entering the premises. Similarly, it’s legal for those under eighteen to play bingo at a private members clubs or institute, though they need to be a member of that club to do so and membership is often limited to eighteen-year-olds and over. For more see our article on UK gambling licensing and law and our article on the Gambling Commission.

Why Are There Different Age Limits?

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None of that is to say that the gambling age should be levelled out to just to stop confusion, of course. Yet there’s surely something of a contradiction when kids of any age an gamble on machines that have jackpots of less than £5 but can’t if the prize amount goes above that. Why is it that one form of gambling is seen as worse than any other? It surely can’t be because of the amount of money that can be won, given that a sixteen-year-old could play the EuroMillions and win over £100 million. It’s also difficult to believe that the rate at which young punters could invest their money on something likes roulette or blackjack makes a difference, given that you can buy, play and then re-buy a scratchcard in the same amount of time as either of those games.

Research suggests that underage gamblers are between two and four times more likely to develop a gambling problem than an adult is. What we don’t know, however, is why it was felt that one form of gambling is naturally less addictive than another. Given the high potential yield for a relatively low output, you’d have thought that something like a National Lottery would be the most addictive thing of all. It’s certainly odd that something so clearly in favour of the ‘house’ is legal for those under the age of eighteen, but other forms of gambling are not. The ‘edge’ in the lottery is around 50%, whilst in blackjack it’s closer to 1% and in roulette it’s around 2.7%.

One argument is that of rapid re-staking, as mentioned a moment ago. If you sit and play roulette you’ll be able to gamble more money within a minute or so of your previous bet, whereas with the lottery you have to wait a minimum amount of time of a couple of hours between placing your bet and finding out the result. Where that argument falls down, however, is once again in the fact that scratchcard gambling is legal for sixteen-year-olds. In 1998, four years after the National Lottery was launched in the UK, Oflot, the then lottery watchdog, released a report that suggested that 5% of those under sixteen had a gambling problem and 2% had an obsession with scratchcards. The question obviously remains, why isn’t the age eighteen for the lottery as it is for other forms of gambling?

The obvious answer is a rather cynical one, but it states that the National Lottery was introduced by the government and they didn’t want to miss out on the increased revenue that would be lost if they’d made the legal age two years older than it currently is. There is also little appetite to change the legal age limit for the lottery, meaning that it’s unlikely to be pushed by one political party or another when they can’t see the benefit of doing so. A petition to raise the age limit to eighteen that was set up during the Conservative Government of 2015-2017 garnered just nine signatures, for example.

Would Raising The Age Make A Difference?

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It’s intriguing that you are able to quite literally create a new life at the age of sixteen by procreating and at seventeen you can get into a motorised vehicle that would easily allow you to take a life, but you have to be another year older before you’d even be allowed to set foot in a casino. That obviously begs the question, ‘would changing the raising the legal age for gambling make any difference?’ For something approximating an answer we can turn to Finland, where a decision was taken to raise the legal age limit from fifteen to eighteen back in 2010. Research done on minors who used slot machines before and after the change in age limit was quite startling, as the table above suggests.

You can see that the difference in users of slot machines before and after the age was raised is fairly stark. Obviously, as with any survey, that is only the percentage of respondents that had used the machines, but you have to assume that it’s a fairly reflective example of the entire age group. That 40% of fourteen-year-olds were happy to gamble on slot machines a year before they were legally allowed to do so tells an interesting story, as does the fact that that figure dropped but close to one-third after the age limit changed. Of course, one of the reasons for the drop would undoubtedly be that less fourteen-year-olds will have looked close to the legal age once it was moved to eighteen, but it’s an intriguing shift nevertheless.

What’s also interesting to note is the ten percent drop between eighteen-year-olds and over using slot machines before the age limit changed and after. It’s suggestive of the idea that teens had grown accustomed to using slots in their earlier lives and had simply continued to do so as they’d grown older. It would have been interesting to see a more defined age range after eighteen, given the fact that there was a fifteen percent drop between sixteen-year-olds and eighteen-year-olds using slot machines prior to the change in the law. This is suggestive of the notion that they’d got excited when they were legally allowed to use the machines and then got bored after they’d done so. Might the same be true of nineteen or twenty-year-olds using the machines after the age range had switched to eighteen?

It’s also true that raising the legal age isn’t the only argument out there when it comes to talking about the legal age for gambling. As long ago as 2008 there were calls for the legal age for betting on horse racing to be lowered to sixteen. The argument put forward was that younger people will always struggle to get into racing if they’re allowed to get married before they’re allowed to place an each-way bet on a horse race. Whilst virtually every sport has its own language and communication barriers, it’s a lot easier for young people to get into football, cricket or rugby when they’re allowed to participate in those sports at school and so on. Few are able to get into horse racing in the same manner and one of the chief appeals of the sport is the ability to have a bet on it.

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As long as there’s no real appetite from the public for the age limit to change, it’s unlikely to do so. Whether there are louder calls for the age restriction to move in either direction in the coming years remains to be seen, but as long as politicians don’t think there’s anything in it for them then they’re not likely to lead the charge. One thing that might make people sit up and take notice is the 2017 decision by the Irish Government to move the age limit for all forms of gambling to eighteen-years-old. It was already set to eighteen for the lottery in Ireland, but those under that age could enter an amusement hall or arcade and use a slot machine. It may be a matter of the British government monitoring how things go in Ireland before making a decision about a similar law here.