Pagcor: Moratorium on new online gaming licenses since March 2024

Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (Pagcor) — File photo

[Updated Aug. 20, 2025, 2:27 p.m.]

MANILA, Philippines — The Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. (Pagcor) on Wednesday revealed that it has been enforcing a moratorium on new licenses for online gaming sites for over a year now.

During the House committee on appropriations hearing for the agency’s budget for 2026, Pagcor chair Alejandro Tengco said the agency had issued a board resolution last March 1, 2024, suspending the granting of new licenses for online gaming sites and apps.

Currently, he said, there are over 70 licensed online gaming sites and apps, including BingoPlus, ArenaPlus, and OKBet.

“We have not been licensing new online gaming since so that the industry would not proliferate so much,” he said. “We only entertain those who have applied prior to March 1. 2024.”

This moratorium, he said, came well before President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. announced in his third State of the Nation Address that he would ban Philippine offshore gaming operations (Pogos), an industry that has been linked to trafficking, smuggling and other high crimes and human rights violations.

READ: Resolution urging Marcos to ban online gambling eyed in Senate

Since then, he said, “100 percent” of the 48 Pogos that erstwhile had licenses under Pagcor have been cancelled, and “even if they try to rebrand (as online gaming apps), it would be easy to flag them.”

“We still monitor those Pogos whose licenses we cancelled, and visit their offices every now and then to make sure that they truly do not have operations anymore,” Tengco said. “At present, only law enforcement agencies have the power to find, hunt, and shut down illegal Pogos.”

Still, even with the moratorium on new licenses, online gaming still constituted the lion’s share in Pagcor’s annual revenue, Tengco said.

This year alone, he said, he expected that the agency would net P60 to P62 billion from online gaming alone, or around 62 percent of the agency’s total revenue.

This is a tenfold increase from the P6 billion it earned from the industry in 2021, he said.

Calls to ban online gambling have intensified in recent weeks following reports of Filipinos falling into financial ruin — either from drowning in debt to sustain the habit or from devastating losses.

READ: Digital ruin: The rising epidemic of online gambling

The ongoing search for the missing “sabungeros,” who were allegedly abducted and killed over unpaid debts, has also brought renewed attention to what many see as human rights abuses linked to online gambling. /das /mr