The online betting market grew by 965% in Kazakhstan last year, with residents placing $786 million in web-based bets.
Online gambling now accounts for almost two-thirds of the country’s entire betting market, per a report from the Kazakh media outlet Finprom, citing data from the Bureau of National Statistics.
In 2024, the online gambling industry accounted for just 6% of the betting market.
While the online sector’s rise is meteoric, the conventional gambling industry is on an opposite trajectory.
Land-based casino revenues fell by over 16% to $53 million. And slot machine revenues fell by 17% to $9.3 million.
Online Betting: Kazakhstan’s Web-Based Gambling Explosion
The online gambling explosion propelled the gambling industry’s total volume to a record-breaking $1.26 billion, a 2% rise on 2024’s figures, and a 30-fold rise on figures from the end of the last decade.
The data also showed that an influx of domestic operators is pushing foreign firms into a more peripheral role.
Private Kazakh companies accounted for just under two-thirds of the total volume in the gambling industry in 2025.
That almost completely inverts the picture from 2024, when foreign companies had cornered around 73% of the market.
The data also appears to refute the adage that the “house always wins” – at least in Kazakhstan. Punters placed a total of $3.4 billion in bets, but operators paid out winnings worth a staggering $2.3 billion.
Addiction Questions Remain
In January, the Ministry of Finance estimated that 0.7 million citizens (between 15% and 20% of the country’s adult population) now “regularly place bets.”
Some critics say the success of the industry is creating numerous gambling addiction-related problems.
The government has responded by creating a self-exclusion registry that lets problem gamblers voluntarily and temporarily ban themselves from land-based casinos and betting websites.
Per state-issued figures, some 457,400 people have used this system to date. As of May this year, 223,600 people remain on the registry.
Some experts say more than 350,000 people may have symptoms of gambling addiction. However, as of early 2026, only nine people in the nation have been officially diagnosed as gambling addicts.
In recent months, the government has introduced a range of new regulations. It has banned bookmakers’ advertisements, raised the official gambling age limit to 21, and barred civil servants from placing online bets.
Politicians claim that undiagnosed gambling addicts are finding themselves mired in debt.
At the beginning of July, a lawmaker called on the government to temporarily defer bank loan payments for residents diagnosed with gambling addiction.
The state, meanwhile, claims that domestic banks have blocked illegal betting transactions totaling $21 million.
However, the government has also recently authorized several new land-based casino zones and is still searching for investors to back the projects.
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