Colombia Lines Up a New Tax Reform That Targets Gambling Again

Colombia's tax administration is preparing another tax reform that would raise levies on games of chance, the third squeeze on the country's gambling operators in under two years. Carlos Emilio Betancourt, director of the Dirección de Impuestos y Aduanas Nacionales (DIAN), told the Bogotá daily El Tiempo that the bill will be filed in Congress on July 20 and that higher taxes on juegos de suerte y azar sit alongside changes to wealth, income, alcohol and fuel taxes. The reform lands in the same regional pattern as Chile's push to tax offshore betting sites, where governments lean on a fast-growing online sector to close fiscal holes.

Betancourt framed the package as structural rather than emergency revenue. He said the government believes the fiscal deficit could fall to 4.5 percent of GDP by 2027 if Congress approves a reform covering a shortfall of more than 30 trillion pesos (about $7.4 billion). The bill would be debated by the next Congress and take effect mainly from 2027, under the government that follows President Gustavo Petro, whose term ends in 2026 with elections set for that year. That timing matters: the gambling clauses would outlast the administration that wrote them.

What the bill actually proposes

The published detail is thin because the text is not yet filed, but Betancourt named the components. On VAT, the plan is to cut exemptions "in the medida de lo posible" while trying to spare the basic family shopping basket. "En algunos casos sí, pero en este punto toca tener mucho cuidado para que no sean bienes de la canasta familiar," he said. The reform would also revive so-called healthy taxes, raising duties on high-proof spirits while protecting beer, and may bring back fuel levies including on gasoline, a decision he said is still under evaluation. For individuals, a more progressive wealth tax with three brackets is proposed, plus steeper income-tax scales so that, in Betancourt's words, "haya una carga mayor para los que más ganan."

Gambling is named explicitly: the reform "también incluiría mayores tributos para los juegos de suerte y azar." No rate or mechanism has been published yet. What the bill does not say is as relevant as what it does, because operators have already lived through two emergency measures that arrived without a published rate and then bit hard.

Why operators are wary of the small print

The precedent is concrete and recent. On February 14, 2025, the Petro government issued Decreto 0175, suspending the VAT exemption in Article 420 of the tax code and applying a 19 percent VAT to online gambling deposits from February 21. It covered cash, bank transfer and crypto top-ups, with the tax carved out of each deposit (a 100,000-peso deposit left about 84,000 for wagering). The stated purpose was funding the humanitarian emergency in the Catatumbo region, where violence displaced roughly 30,000 people. Penalties for non-compliance ran to 48 to 108 months of prison plus administrative sanctions, and Coljuegos gained power to ask ISPs to block illegal sites.

The market reaction was fast and measurable. Industry body Fecoljuegos reported in April 2025 that online gross gaming revenue had fallen about 30 percent since the deposit VAT took effect. Stake Colombia ran a "Cashback IVA" promotion to absorb the 19 percent for players, a sign operators were eating the tax to defend volume. Lawyer Juan Camilo Carrasco warned at the time about the absence of any transition period and was blunt on the "temporary" label: "nothing is more permanent than something that comes in temporarily."

He was close to right. The deposit VAT was set to expire in December 2025, the Senate's Fourth Committee rejected making it permanent through the Financing Law in December 2025, and Colombia's Constitutional Court suspended the measure in January 2026 on constitutionality grounds. Rather than let the revenue lapse, the government reissued it. A later decree shifted the base from deposits to gross gaming revenue, cutting the effective burden from over 70 percent of real income toward roughly 34 percent of GGR, and in March 2026 a fresh emergency decree reintroduced a 16 percent consumption tax on deposits to help raise about 8.6 trillion pesos ($2.3 billion) for flood relief. Operators are now being asked to absorb a fourth change, this time a permanent statutory one, while the rate is still blank.

The stakes for the channel are large. Colombian online gambling generated roughly $1.29 billion in revenue in 2024, with sports betting around 66 percent of GGR. Legal gambling transferred more than 926 billion pesos to public health by July 2025, and domestic-game contributions grew 26.9 percent in the first half. Players deposited 638.4 billion pesos through licensed portals in the first quarter of 2025, up 10.69 percent year on year, a base that the deposit VAT then knocked back. The comparison with Brazil's maturing regulated market and Spain's 454 million euro Q1 GGR shows the scale Colombia risks pushing toward unlicensed sites if costs climb again.

For affiliates, the read is on conversion economics. Each emergency tax cycle since 2025 has compressed player bankrolls at the deposit stage, the exact point where affiliate-driven signups convert, and the 30 percent GGR drop after the first VAT shows how quickly net-deposit traffic erodes when the take rate moves. A permanent 2027 levy with no published rate makes media planning and revenue-share forecasting harder, and it widens the gap that black-market and not-on-Coljuegos operators exploit, the same dynamic that followed Decreto 0175 when licensed volume fell and offshore alternatives kept marketing. The opportunity sits with affiliates and operators positioned on compliant, locally licensed brands if regulators pair the new tax with stronger ISP blocking, since enforcement of the kind Coljuegos already won under the 2025 decree can shift share back to the legal market.

The next fixed date is July 20, when DIAN files the bill. Until the text lands, the gambling rate is unknown.