Australia’s Gambling Ad Ban: What the New Laws Actually Do

Big changes to betting advertising are set to land on 1 January 2027. Here’s what they mean for anyone with a betting account.

From 1 January 2027, the rules around how betting is advertised and promoted in Australia are set to change significantly. The Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026 passed the House of Representatives this week, 103 votes to 14, and now heads to the Senate with Coalition support locked in. Barring a surprise, passage is a formality.

If you bet, work in sport, or just watch TV between 6am and 8.30pm, this affects you. Here’s a breakdown of why it’s happening, what it does, and who wins and loses.

Why is this happening?

Australians lose more money gambling per person than any other country on earth, roughly $25 billion a year. In 2023, a parliamentary committee chaired by the late Labor MP Peta Murphy handed down a report with a title that summed up the problem: You win some, you lose more.

The Murphy Report’s headline recommendation was a total ban on online gambling advertising within three years. The committee heard evidence that kids could name more bookmaker brands than fast food chains, and that people who had self-excluded from betting were still being chased with offers to come back.

The government sat on the report for almost three years. What it has now delivered stops well short of the total ban Murphy recommended. The wagering industry, broadcasters and sporting codes all lobbied hard against a blanket ban, and the compromise that emerged reflects that pressure. Crossbench amendments to strengthen enforcement were voted down in the House, and the Greens withdrew support entirely, holding out for a full online advertising ban and a ban on all inducements. Whether you see the final package as a sensible middle ground or a watered-down version of what was promised depends on where you sit.

What the new laws actually do

The reforms land in phases over three years, starting 1 January 2027. The big ones:

TV ads get capped. No more than three gambling ads per hour between 6am and 8.30pm, with a complete ban during live sport broadcasts in those hours. The betting ad at every break in play is finished.

Online ads move behind a login wall. Gambling ads online are banned unless the person seeing them has a logged-in account, is verified as over 18, and has been given the option to opt out of gambling advertising entirely. Open-web betting ads, the ones that follow you around after you google a single racing result, are gone.

Influencers are out. Nobody with a public profile can be paid to promote a bookmaker. No more player-fronted ad campaigns, no more betting content creators pushing sign-up links.

Radio goes quiet during the school run. Gambling ads are banned during school drop-off and pick-up windows.

People who self-exclude get real protection. Anyone who has been on BetStop, the national self-exclusion register, cannot be sent inducement offers for 90 days after they leave it, and after that only if they actively opt back in. Bookmakers can no longer rely on marketing consent someone gave before they self-excluded. The penalties apply per message and escalate for repeat offenders.

Referral commissions are banned. Bookmakers can no longer pay anyone a commission or revenue share for delivering customers. This one hasn’t had much media coverage, but it ends the affiliate model that has funded most betting media and comparison sites since the early 2000s.

A broad anti-avoidance net. Any scheme designed to get around these rules cops the biggest penalty in the entire package, and it reaches arrangements set up offshore.

What it means for punters

Day to day, the average punter will notice less noise. Fewer ads during the footy. No bombardment on social media unless you’ve opted in. No celebrity telling you to have a punt.

Betting itself carries on as normal. Every bookmaker keeps operating, every market stays open, and promotions to existing, opted-in customers remain completely legal. Sign-up offers were already barred from public advertising under existing rules, what’s new is that general betting advertising now joins them behind the login wall, with federal per-message penalties that make the rules expensive to bend.

There’s a plausible upside for regular punters. Bookmakers are about to lose most of their acquisition channels at once, and marketing budgets don’t vanish when channels close. They get redirected. With promotions to existing, opted-in customers still fully legal, the smart money says that’s where a chunk of the spend ends up. Nobody can promise bigger bonuses in 2027, but the incentives now point that way.

For people struggling with gambling, the self-exclusion protections close a loophole that let bookmakers win back the exact people who had asked to be left alone.

What it means for bookmakers

Customer acquisition is about to get expensive. Every mass-market channel a bookmaker uses to find new customers is either capped or banned, and the affiliate networks that delivered sign-ups on a pay-per-customer basis are illegal from day one.

That hits smaller operators hardest. The big players have brand recognition and large existing databases. A challenger bookmaker trying to build a customer base from scratch in 2027 has almost no legal way to reach a mass audience. Expect consolidation, and expect the majors to compete harder for the customers everyone already knows about.

Compliance also becomes a real operating cost. Providers have to keep records proving compliance for three years, and the penalties apply to each individual message, so one badly targeted email campaign could stack up fines fast.

What it means for sport and media

Betting advertising has been a major revenue line for sports broadcasters, and the live-sport ad ban removes it from the most valuable inventory they sell. Sporting codes face their own reckoning on wagering partnerships as the definition of advertising expands.

Betting media changes shape too. The content sites and tipping services funded by referral commissions lose their business model entirely. Some will close. The ones that survive will need readers who are willing to pay them directly, which should weed out the sites that only ever existed to farm sign-up commissions.

What it means for matched betting

Matched betting depends on bookmaker promotions existing, and nothing in this bill bans promotions to ordinary opted-in customers. Bonus bets and deposit offers remain legal for the vast majority of account holders.

Two things do change. Offers become harder to find on your own, because they retreat behind logins and email rather than being advertised in the open. And the value on offer may well improve, because promotions to existing customers are the best marketing channel bookmakers have left.

Both of those shifts suit anyone who bets systematically rather than on impulse. Matched betting has always been about knowing which offers exist and working out the maths on each one, and that skill counts for more when the offers aren’t advertised anywhere public.

Where it lands

These reforms will change what Australians see on their screens. Ads largely disappear from public view and self-excluded people get protections with real teeth behind them.

Whether they reduce gambling harm at the scale the Murphy Report envisioned is a harder question. The final laws are a long way from what that committee recommended, and reasonable people disagree about whether a quieter advertising landscape changes how much Australians actually lose. That answer will take years to emerge.

There is also an elephant in the room that still needs to be addressed. Pokies drive roughly half of all Aussie gambling losses (compared with around 30% for online wagering as a whole) and three quarters or more of the harm. As state-regulated machines they sit entirely outside this federal bill. Australia holds less than 1% of the world’s population and 18% of its poker machines, and nothing in this bill touches that.

The one thing no law can change is the maths. Bookmakers still need customers, customers still respond to offers, and offers still have value for anyone willing to work them systematically. None of that changes on 1 January.

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