Regulation · Limit
Germany’s 1,000 euro monthly deposit limit
One thousand euro per calendar month, counted across every operator licensed in Germany together, not per account: that is the standard ceiling in § 6c of the Glücksspielstaatsvertrag, the interstate treaty on gambling. It is enforced through the limit file in LUGAS, which is queried before every single deposit. Lowering your limit takes effect at once; raising it only works after seven days. Higher limits exist, but they are tied to documentary evidence of income, available only from the age of 21, capped by a quota at each operator, and stop absolutely at 30,000 euro.
By the Casinohafen deskUpdated: 14 October 2026Checked: September 2026
In brief
- § 6c(1) sentence 2 GlüStV: the cross-operator deposit limit may as a rule not exceed 1,000 euro per month, and sentence 7 makes clear that the calendar month is meant, not a rolling thirty days.
- Without a limit having been set, participation in play is not permitted at all (§ 6c(1) sentence 6). There is no way past the decision.
- A reduction takes effect immediately; an increase only after a seven-day cooling period (§ 6c(3)).
- The tiers of 10,000 and 30,000 euro, the one per cent quota and the minimum age of 21 are not in the treaty. They come from framework rules and ancillary conditions of the Gemeinsame Glücksspielbehörde der Länder (GGL).
- Self-declarations by players are expressly not sufficient as evidence. Tax assessments, other proof of income and bank statements are; the use of credit-scoring reports is legally contested.
- Advertising the availability of raised limits is prohibited, and the interim evaluation report of the federal states points towards revising the 1,000 euro figure downwards rather than upwards.
- Standard ceiling
- 1,000 € per calendar month, across all operators
- Cooling period on an increase
- 7 days; a reduction is immediate
- First tier
- 10,000 € with proof of income, from age 21
- Absolute ceiling
- 30,000 €; nothing above is permitted
- Quota above 10,000 €
- 1 % of an operator's active players
- Registered players in the central files
- 5.3 m as at 2025
What the statute says, and what it does not
The provision itself is short. § 6c(1) sentence 2 of the Glücksspielstaatsvertrag 2021 says that the cross-operator deposit limit may as a rule not exceed 1,000 euro per month. Sentence 7 clarifies that the calendar month is the reference period, not a rolling window of thirty days. And sentence 6 turns setting a limit into a precondition: without one, participation in play is not permitted.
Everything else circulating in the market is not in the treaty. The tier up to 10,000 euro, the tier up to 30,000 euro, the one per cent cap and the minimum age of 21 for raised limits come from framework rules and ancillary conditions issued by the GGL, the joint gambling authority of the sixteen federal states. The legal hooks for them are the opening clauses in § 6c(1) sentence 3 — an ancillary condition attached to the permission — and sentence 5, which allows the authority to issue binding framework rules for online casino games.
This distinction is not pedantry, and it is the single most useful thing on this page. It explains why the figures can change without any treaty being amended, why a guide written in 2022 can be confidently wrong today, and why the authority's own pages rather than a summary are the place to check before relying on a number.
How the thousand euro are counted
Deposits are counted. Stakes are not, and losses are not. Someone who deposits 1,000 euro, turns it over several times, wins along the way and stakes again stays inside the limit even though the sum of the stakes may be many times larger. Someone who wants to deposit again after losing it does not.
Withdrawals do not top the budget back up. Taking 500 euro out creates no new deposit headroom; the calculation runs in one direction only.
The counter resets at the change of month rather than rolling. Deposit 1,000 euro on the 28th and you can deposit again on the 1st. This is known, and it is named in the professional discussion as a weakness of the calendar month; the legislator chose it anyway because it is simple to administer and simple for a player to understand.
And the decisive part: the limit attaches to the person, not to the account. Registered with three licensed operators, you have one thousand euro, not three. A second account at a different permission holder counts against the same monthly budget. Offers advertising the absence of a limit are, by that fact alone, not licensed in Germany.
The asymmetry of the deadlines is the protection
§ 6c(3) makes a reduction effective at once and an increase effective only after a seven-day cooling period. The unequal treatment is deliberate: the way down is easy and the way up is slow. Seven days between a decision and its effect is, in hindsight, often the difference between a decision and a reaction.
The limit file in LUGAS and the query before every deposit
Enforcement is set out in subsections 4 to 8 of § 6c. The limit file is part of LUGAS, the Länderübergreifendes Glücksspielaufsichtssystem or cross-state gambling supervision system, operated by the GGL since 1 January 2023 with Dataport as technical service provider. Players are held there under a pseudonym. As at 2025 the central files held 5.3 million registered players.
Every operator has to query the file before every single deposit to establish how much of the monthly budget is still open. This is not a reconciliation at the end of the month and not a retrospective check — it is a prior authorisation. That is precisely why the system still works when somebody tries to deposit at three operators within a few minutes: the second and third queries already see the first deposit.
The deposit data themselves are deleted after the end of the month. What persists is the limit you have set, not the history of what you paid in.
Running alongside the limit file in the same system is the activity file under § 6h, which prevents play at more than one operator at the same time: a player is set to inactive after 30 minutes without activity, and there is a five-minute wait when switching operator. The two files together are the technical core of what the treaty means by cross-operator player protection; the full set of instruments is collected under responsible gambling.
Raising it to 10,000 euro: what the authority accepts as evidence
The first tier requires proof of sufficient economic capacity, in the words of the rule, in a suitable and verifiable manner. What that means in practice was set out by the GGL in its frequently asked questions of 25 August 2026.
Acceptable: income tax assessments, other proof of income, and bank statements. The decisive sentence concerns what is not acceptable — self-declarations by players are not sufficient. That expressly closes off the practice, long common in the market, of treating a ticked box about one's own income as enough.
One point is genuinely open, and it is the point that affects the commonest practice. On credit-scoring reports the authority writes in its activity report for 2025 that the report used until now is being intensively discussed in legal terms and addressed in litigation as regards its suitability. The federal states' interim evaluation report is blunter: querying a score value alone is on no account sufficient. Anyone assuming that a good score by itself opens the tier is mistaken, whatever individual operators may have done in the past.
Raised limits are available only from the age of 21. For players below that age the ceiling stays at 1,000 euro — there is no reduced special limit for younger players, and no route to a higher one either.
Above 10,000 euro: the one per cent quota and the hard stop at 30,000
The second tier is not only tied to evidence; it is additionally capped by volume. The authority's wording is that setting a limit above 10,000 and up to 30,000 euro is permissible for no more than one per cent of the players active at the operator concerned, measured by the average number of active players at that operator over the preceding three months.
This cap is regularly misread. It is operator-specific, not a market quota. Each permission holder calculates it for its own book against its own three-month average. In practice that means the tier depends not only on your own financial position but on whether there is still room in that operator's allowance — and an operator has no obligation to explain its arithmetic to you.
No limit above 30,000 euro per month may be set at all. That is the absolute ceiling in the framework rules of 30 December 2025. Two flanking duties come with the tiers: operators must report raised limits to the supervisory authority quarterly, and advertising the possibility of raised limits is prohibited. If an operator draws your attention to a higher limit as a benefit, that is itself a regulatory problem.
A note on reach that we would rather state than gloss over: the framework rules of 30 December 2025 apply expressly to online casino games. Whether identically worded rules apply to sports betting and virtual slot machines cannot be established from the published documents, so we do not assert it.
The evaluation report, and the direction of travel
The public debate in 2026 has been about loosening the rules. On the deposit limit the official finding points the other way.
The federal states' interim report on the evaluation of the treaty, dated 31 January 2024, records that there is a strand of evidence indicating that the monthly deposit limit of 1,000 euro in the online segment should in future be corrected downwards. The states nonetheless conclude that no reliable statement can yet be made about any foreseeable need for change. The summary report required by § 32 of the treaty is due by 31 December 2026 and, as at the end of September 2026, has not appeared.
It is worth separating this from what did change in 2026. The Second Amending Treaty of 26 March 2026, in force since 1 July 2026, does not touch § 6c at all; its subject matter is network blocking under § 9, § 4b and the governance of the GGL. The loosening that did happen in 2026 concerns stakes rather than deposits, and it happened in an authority decision guideline rather than in the treaty. The background is set out under the German gambling treaty.
For an English-speaking reader in Germany there is one further practical point. The limit page inside a player account, the evidence you will be asked for and the correspondence about it are in German, and the decision on a raised limit is taken by the operator under the authority's rules, not by a public office you can appeal to directly. If the real question behind the increase is that the current limit keeps being reached, the more useful instruments are the immediate reduction under § 6c(3), the panic button under § 6i(3), and the nationwide exclusion register described under OASIS. Free and anonymous counselling is available from the Bundesinstitut für Öffentliche Gesundheit (BIÖG) on 0800 1 37 27 00, Monday to Thursday 10:00–22:00 and Friday to Sunday 10:00–18:00, with self-tests at check-dein-spiel.de.
Step by step
| Step | What happens | Who acts | Time frame |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Set the initial limit | A limit has to be set before play is possible at all; without one, participation is not permitted under § 6c(1) sentence 6. | Player, at the operator |
| 02 | Lower the limit | The reduction is entered and written to the limit file. No reason has to be given and no evidence supplied. | Player, at the operator |
| 03 | Request an increase up to 1,000 € | The new figure is entered but does not yet apply; the old limit continues to govern deposits in the meantime. | Player, at the operator |
| 04 | Apply for a tier above 1,000 € | Proof of sufficient economic capacity is submitted: tax assessment, other proof of income or bank statements. A self-declaration is not sufficient, and the applicant must be at least 21. | Player, at the operator |
| 05 | Operator assesses the application | The operator checks the evidence against the GGL framework rules and, above 10,000 €, against its own one per cent quota measured on a three-month average. | Permission holder |
| 06 | The raised limit becomes effective | The new figure is written to the limit file in LUGAS and applies across all operators, subject to the same seven-day cooling period. | Permission holder and limit file |
| 07 | Report to the supervisory authority | Raised limits are reported to the supervisory authority; advertising the possibility of them is prohibited. | Permission holder |
| 08 | Monthly reset | The deposit data for the month are deleted; the counter starts again at the change of calendar month while the limit itself stays as set. | Limit file in LUGAS |
Frequently asked
Does a withdrawal free up room under the limit?
When does the counter reset?
Would a second account at another operator give me another 1,000 euro?
How quickly can I lower my limit?
Is a good Schufa score enough to get a higher limit?
Can I get a raised limit at 19 or 20?
My operator says the higher tier is full. Is that allowed?
Is the 1,000 euro figure about to be raised?
Sources
- Glücksspielstaatsvertrag 2021, § 6c — cross-operator deposit limit, calendar month, seven-day cooling period, limit file — <a href="https://www.gesetze-bayern.de/Content/Document/StVGlueStV2021-6c" rel="nofollow noopener">gesetze-bayern.de</a>
- Gemeinsame Glücksspielbehörde der Länder — FAQ on the deposit limit and the maximum stake, 25 August 2026 — <a href="https://www.gluecksspiel-behoerde.de/de/fuer-spielende/informationen-fuer-spielende-faqs/faq-einzahlungslimit-und-hoechsteinsatz" rel="nofollow noopener">gluecksspiel-behoerde.de</a>
- Gemeinsame Glücksspielbehörde der Länder, activity report 2025 — credit report suitability, 5.3 million registered players in the central files, framework rules of 30 December 2025.
- Interim report of the federal states on the evaluation of the Glücksspielstaatsvertrag 2021, 31 January 2024 — <a href="https://www.im.nrw/system/files/media/document/file/zwischenbericht-zur-evaluation-glustv-2021.pdf" rel="nofollow noopener">im.nrw</a>
- Glücksspielstaatsvertrag 2021, § 6h (activity file) and § 6i (early detection, panic button).
- Bundesinstitut für Öffentliche Gesundheit (BIÖG), counselling helpline 0800 1 37 27 00 — <a href="https://www.check-dein-spiel.de/" rel="nofollow noopener">check-dein-spiel.de</a>