The National Police Board told Yle on 23 September that it had received 75 gambling licence applications as of 22 September. The figure was 50 in June and was described as around 50 as recently as August.

Twenty-five further applications in seven weeks.

No application has been decided. The Board says it has not yet granted a single gambling licence, and that the processing target is six to eight months.

What changed, and what did not

Senior inspector Sanna Kuusela told Yle that applications have been accepted since 1 March 2026 and that the first three months produced the most: 24 in March and 23 in May.

Two points from her account matter more than the headline number.

There is no deadline. Applications can be filed freely from here on. Reporting in the summer suggested that filings made by the end of August were the ones that would go live at the opening; that was an inference about processing time, not a rule.

There is no cap. The number of licensed operators is not limited by law. Finland is not running a tender for a fixed number of places. Every application that meets the test gets a licence.

Why we had this wrong

We published a chart on this site yesterday under the heading that filings had stalled after June. That reading is now wrong, and the correction is logged.

The error was not in the figures, which were sourced and dated. It was in treating two identical readings, in June and August, as a trend. Two points do not make a plateau, and a regulator restating a round number in an interview is not the same as a regulator publishing a fresh count.

What 75 changes for anyone modelling this market

A field of 50 and a field of 75 are different businesses.

Channelisation assumptions. More licensees means more licensed supply competing for the same players, which supports channelisation but compresses the share available to any one operator. The Swedish and Danish comparisons that have been used to size Finland assumed a narrower field.

Acquisition costs at launch. Seventy-five operators opening into a market where marketing is restricted to an operator's own channels, with no affiliates and no influencers, means the few remaining routes get expensive. Sponsorship is one of them, which is part of why a Superpesis deal was signed nine months before the market opens.

Supplier demand. Every licensee needs a platform, payments, identification and compliance reporting. Half again as many operators is half again as much procurement, in a window where the software licence regime does not itself open until July 2027.

Regulator capacity. Seventy-five applications at six to eight months each, with no decisions yet made and the market opening on 1 July 2027, is a queue with a hard date at the end of it. The Board has not said how many it expects to decide before the opening.

The question nobody has answered

If an application filed in September takes eight months, it is decided in May 2027. An application filed in January 2027 is decided after the market has opened.

Nothing in the Act prevents that. A licence can be granted at any time, and an operator can launch when it has one. But it means the market that exists on 2 July 2027 is not the market that exists at the end of that year, and any forecast that treats the opening as the moment the field is set will be wrong.

What we do not know

  • Which companies the 75 applications come from. The regulator has published no names, and we have traced six.
  • How many of the 75 are gambling licences rather than other permits under the Act.
  • Whether any application has been refused or withdrawn.
  • How many decisions the Board expects to have made by 1 July 2027.

The Licence Tracker has been updated to 75 and the chart on that page now carries the new figure.