Affiliate Regulation Watch: UK, DE, SE, ES

You do not hold a gambling licence. That does not put you outside gambling regulation — it changes the route by which the rules reach you. This is a dated round-up of four regulated markets an affiliate is most likely to publish into, separating what is settled from what is still moving, and saying plainly where the position is unclear. Everything below was read from the regulators' own texts in early September 2026.

How regulation reaches an affiliate who holds no licence

Two routes. The first is the operator's licence: its conditions flow into the contract you sign with the program, so the operator becomes answerable for what you publish and gets a contractual right to cut you off. The second is general advertising law, which applies to a marketing communication regardless of who published it — your page is a marketing communication for gambling whether or not you call it a review.

The practical consequence: enforcement rarely arrives as a letter from a regulator. It arrives as a closed account, a withheld payment, or a program manager asking you to take a page down today. Our guide to affiliate compliance in the UK, Germany, Sweden and Spain works through the page-level requirements; this post is about what moved and what it costs. If the underlying concept is new, start at licence jurisdiction in the glossary.

United Kingdom: advertising codes and operator responsibility

The mechanism is written down. Social responsibility code provision 1.1.2 of the Gambling Commission's Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice states that "licensees are responsible for the actions of third parties with whom they contract for the provision of any aspect of the licensee's business related to the licensed activities", and that the contract terms must "require the third party to conduct themselves in so far as they carry out activities on behalf of the licensee as if they were bound by the same licence conditions and subject to the same codes of practice as the licensee". The same provision requires the operator to be able to terminate promptly where the third party is in breach, "including for affiliates where they have breached a relevant advertising code of practice". Affiliates are named in the licence conditions of the operators you promote.

The relevant code is CAP Code section 16. Rule 16.1: "Marketing communications for gambling must be socially responsible, with particular regard to the need to protect children, young persons and other vulnerable persons from being harmed or exploited." Rule 16.3.12 forbids communications "likely to be of strong appeal to children or young persons, especially by reflecting or being associated with youth culture" — where children are 15 and under and young persons are 16 or 17.

What has not changed: Great Britain does not license affiliates. What you can do this week is check every brand you write about against the Commission's public register before the page goes live.

Germany: the GGL whitelist as the only safe operator source

Germany is regulated by the Gemeinsame Glücksspielbehörde der Länder under the Glücksspielstaatsvertrag 2021. The GGL whitelist is the official list of permitted operators, and the authority also publishes the permit-holders it has formally warned. If a brand is not on the whitelist, § 5(7) is unambiguous: advertising and sponsorship for unlicensed gambling are prohibited.

The clause that decides an affiliate's business model, though, is § 5(6) of the Glücksspielstaatsvertrag 2021. In translation: for advertising on the internet of games that self-excluded players may not take part in — "in particular in the form of affiliate links" — no variable remuneration, "in particular turnover-, deposit- or stake-dependent", may be agreed or paid. Read that against a standard revenue-share contract and the tension is obvious. Two further clauses bite on the page itself: § 5(2) makes advertising inadmissible where it creates the impression of being editorially produced content, and § 5(3) bars advertising in broadcast and on the internet for virtual slot games, online poker and online casino games between 06:00 and 21:00 daily.

What this costs you is concrete: a German-facing site cannot assume the commission model it uses elsewhere. Model both structures before you commit with the commission calculator, and read revshare versus CPA versus hybrid for what each one does to your cash flow.

Sweden: moderation as an enforceable standard

Sweden's marketing rule is one sentence in chapter 15, section 1 of the Gambling Act (spellagen 2018:1138): "Vid marknadsföring av spel till konsumenter ska måttfullhet iakttas. Marknadsföringen får inte riktas särskilt till personer under 18 år." Moderation must be observed when gambling is marketed to consumers, and marketing must not be specifically directed at people under 18. Section 3 of the same chapter requires commercial messages about gambling to carry clear information about the minimum age to take part.

Moderation is the standard a Swedish court applies. Two consequences follow. Superlatives and urgency — biggest, guaranteed, act now — are the framing that gets tested. And chapter 14, section 9 allows a licensee to offer a bonus only on the first occasion a player plays with them, so a Swedish page built around a running list of the best current bonuses is describing something the licensee may lawfully offer once per player.

Sweden is also the market that genuinely moved in 2026: the act linked from Spelinspektionen's laws and regulations pages is amended up to SFS 2026:1077, including a 2026 amendment to the credit rules. Read the current text, not a summary, and check operators against the Swedish licence register.

Spain: what RD 958/2020 still forbids

Spain names us directly. Article 2 of Royal Decree 958/2020 on commercial communications for gambling applies to information-society service providers "incluidos afiliados, páginas web y redes sociales" — affiliates, websites and social networks included.

The decree is not what it was in 2020. On 2 April 2024 the Supreme Court annulled several of its articles for want of statutory cover, and the annulments are recorded in the consolidated text at the BOE. Among them: article 13.1, which had banned promotions aimed at attracting new customers and allowed promotional offers only to clients whose account had been open at least 30 days and who had been documentarily verified; article 13.3, which restricted promotional communications to existing clients or to a separate section of the operator's own site; article 15 on public figures; and article 23.1 on information-society services.

What still stands matters more for a publisher. Article 8 requires truthfulness and forbids omitting material facts. Article 9 imposes social responsibility. Article 13.2 forbids promotional activity aimed at prohibited, self-excluded or at-risk players. Article 13.4 requires that promotional communications not create a false impression of being free, not use testimonials from previous beneficiaries of the promotion, not be based on player skill, and include clear and transparent information about the conditions.

Markets where affiliates are directly licensed or registered

In all four markets above the affiliate holds no gambling permission of its own. Some jurisdictions have gone further and required affiliates themselves to register or hold a permit. We have not verified the current position in any market outside the four we work in, and we are not going to publish a list we cannot source — that is how outdated compliance folklore spreads.

The method we use instead, before building anything for a new market, is three steps: open the regulator's own register or whitelist; read its rules pages for the words "affiliate", "marketing" or their local equivalent; then ask a program manager to state the market's affiliate requirements in writing. The registers for our four:

Choosing between these markets is a commercial decision as much as a legal one; we work through it in choosing your niche and market, and the commission structures available in each are visible on the individual pages in our affiliate program directory.

One change to make per market this month

1. United Kingdom: check every operator you name against the Commission's public register, and remove any imagery or reference likely to be of strong appeal to under-18s.
2. Germany: ask each German program, in writing, how its commission structure sits with § 5(6), and mark your review pages clearly as advertising so they cannot be read as editorial.
3. Sweden: strip superlatives and urgency from Swedish-facing copy, and make sure every commercial message states the minimum age.
4. Spain: re-read your promotional wording against articles 8, 9 and 13.4 of the current consolidated decree rather than a summary written before April 2024.

What we are still unsure about

• Whether a fixed per-acquisition fee counts as "deposit-dependent" remuneration under § 5(6) in Germany. We have seen programs treat it both ways and we have no regulator statement to point at.
• Whether Spain will re-legislate the annulled articles with proper statutory cover. Until it does, the 2020 restrictions circulating in older summaries are not the law.
• How Sweden's 2026 amendments will be applied to commercial messages published by affiliates rather than by licensees.
• Whether affiliate registration duties exist in markets we do not operate in. Unverified, and therefore not stated here as fact.

We read the rules that bind our contracts; we are not lawyers, and none of this is legal advice. Everything we publish about a licensed market carries an 18+ line and responsible gambling messaging naming the local self-exclusion service — a licensing requirement, and the right thing to put in front of a reader.