Responsible gambling in the Netherlands

The Kansspelautoriteit — the Ksa — is an independent administrative body, funded by industry levies, supervising all gambling in the European part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Policy sits with the Ministry of Justice and Security; enforcement sits with the Ksa.

Its position on everything outside the licensed market is short. From 1 October 2021 there have been legal online gambling companies in the Netherlands holding a Ksa licence, and every other online game offered to players in the Netherlands is illegal. There is no partial version of that: no product category is exempt and no foreign licence substitutes.

The Ksa also runs an information line on 070 302 13 00, option 1, on weekdays from 09:00 to 13:00.

There is no domain shortcut in the Netherlands — a Dutch licensee is not required to sit on .nl — so the register is the check. Search it by company name, by website, by app or by licence number. Search the website address rather than the brand: one company frequently runs several brands, and a marketing name does not have to match the licensed entity.

The results table loads through JavaScript, so it will look empty in a text-only reader. That is the page working, not failing.

Cruks — the Centraal Register Uitsluiting Kansspelen — is run by the Ksa itself, and registering takes a few minutes with DigiD.

What it covers is the part worth being clear about: once you are in Cruks you can no longer gamble with legal Dutch providers, online and in arcades and casinos alike. Checking the register at every attempted registration is a condition of the Dutch licence, which is what makes one action cover the whole licensed market.

Six months is the floor, not the default length. It does not lapse on its own at the end of that period; coming out is a separate application you make yourself.

Somebody else can also start it. A family member, a friend, an employer, a guardian or an administrator can ask the Ksa to enter a person in Cruks when other routes have not worked, and the Ksa publishes the procedure on its player pages.

One change is on the way and is not law yet. On 12 June 2026 the Dutch cabinet announced it wants a full ban on online gambling advertising, a ban on signup bonuses, an overarching deposit limit with an affordability test before it can be raised, and improvements to Cruks including indefinite registration with no automatic removal. Those are stated policy intentions; nothing in this section changes until they are enacted.

OpenOverGokken is the national information and help service, free on 0800 24 000 22, with an English version of the site and a self-test. It also runs a regional help finder that maps you to services near you.

If you see the name “Loket Kansspel” in older material, it is the same service under its previous name: the old domain now redirects. Content still using the old name in 2026 has not been updated, which is a useful signal about the rest of that content.

Two more, both free at the point of contact. AGOG runs peer support groups for people who gamble and for the people around them. Jellinek is an addiction treatment provider with a gambling programme.

One address to avoid: cruks.nl resolves but is an unrelated third-party site whose text still says the register does not exist yet. It does. The official address is the one linked above.

Cruks binds Dutch licensees. It does not bind anyone else, and that gap is documented rather than theoretical: the Dutch affiliate certification body has published warnings about sites accepting Dutch players where people registered in Cruks were able to play, and in 2024 the Ksa investigated 33 affiliate and publisher sites advertising unlicensed supply and found breaches on 14 of them.

The practical consequence for you: if you are in Cruks and a site still lets you open an account, that site is outside the Dutch licensing system. Nothing that comes with a Dutch licence applies to it — not the deposit limits, not the identity checks, not the complaints route. A device-level blocker is the tool that works there, because it does not depend on anyone holding a licence.