Updated 31 August 202628 min read18+
Money · The 2026 charge on deposits and withdrawals

Zambia’s betting levy: 5 % in, 5 % out, and who actually pays it

Since 1 January 2026 a Zambian statute has charged 5 % on every kwacha moved into a customer’s gaming account and 5 % on every kwacha moved out of it. Not on your stake. Not on your winnings. On the movement itself, in both directions. Almost nothing written for Zambian punters explains this, and it is the single change that most affects what a betting balance costs to run. This page gives the text, the definitions that decide who is caught by it, the arithmetic on a normal deposit-and-cash-out cycle, and what to look for in your own cashier.

5 % on deposits5 % on withdrawalsIn force 1 Jan 2026Collected by ZRA
What the Act saysThe arithmetic

A charge on movement, not on winning

Most betting taxes anywhere in the world attach to one of two things: what an operator earns, or what a player wins. Zambia’s betting levy attaches to neither. It attaches to money crossing the boundary of a gaming account, and it does so in both directions.

That distinction is not academic. It means two people who bet identically, win identically and lose identically can end up carrying very different amounts of levy, purely because one of them moved money in and out six times while the other moved it once. It also means the charge applies to a deposit you never got round to betting, and to a withdrawal of your own untouched money. Once you understand that the base is movement rather than outcome, most of the practical consequences follow on their own.

The rule arrived quietly. There was no consumer campaign, no banner in the cashier of most sites, and the affiliate guides that dominate search results for Zambian betting either omit it entirely or mention it in a single line under a heading about tax. Meanwhile the same guides devote several hundred words each to welcome bonuses. The levy will outlast every one of those bonuses.

The rule in one line

The Betting Levy Act No. 27 of 2025 came into operation on 1 January 2026. It charges a levy at 5 %, calculated on all deposits made to a customer’s gaming account and on all withdrawals from it. The levy is charged, collected and paid by the betting company, and returns go to the Commissioner-General within ten days of each month end.

On this page
  1. The three operators this page uses as examples
  2. What the Act says, clause by clause
  3. Who the levy actually catches, and who slips past it
  4. The exemption almost nobody mentions: betting shops
  5. What the Act does not say
  6. The arithmetic on a real deposit-and-cash-out cycle
  7. Where the levy sits among Zambia’s other betting charges
  8. What happened to the market when the charges landed
  9. How to check what your own operator is doing
  10. Questions people actually ask

The three operators this site follows in Zambia

The levy is a rule about Zambian licensees, not about brands, so it does not apply evenly across the three sites this guide follows. That unevenness is the point of the section below on who is caught, and it is worth knowing before you read the numbers.

Logo 1win

1win

Account held in kwacha with all three mobile wallets, and a casino catalogue noticeably wider than either of the other two. No Zambian licence is claimed anywhere on its pages, and we could not find one. Publishes nothing about a Zambian levy, consistent with claiming no Zambian licence.

ZMW accountMTN, Airtel, ZamtelNo Zambia licence found
Widest casino catalogueOpen the site
Logo Betwinner

Betwinner

The only one of the three with a Zambian-domain site that publishes a local licence number in its footer and renews it annually. That is still the operator's own statement, but it is the most specific one on this market. The one of the three whose published local licence would put it inside the statutory definition, if the licence is current.

Publishes a Zambia licenceZambian domainRenewed annually
Strongest local signalOpen the site
Logo 1xBet

1xBet

Runs a full Zambian domain and states it has worked the market since 2020 under the state regulator, while its global rules name an offshore company and a Curaçao title. Both claims sit side by side and are worth reading together. Its Zambian-facing pages claim local standing; its global rules point offshore. Which of the two governs decides whether the levy reaches it at all.

Zambian domainClaims local standingOffshore title in the rules
Most used of the threeOpen the site
Why we do not give one single ranking

An operator can come first on casino breadth, second on how clearly it states its legal position, and third on how fast money comes back. Forcing one order would hide those differences behind a number. Every page ranks by the question that page answers, and says so.

What the Act says, clause by clause

The statute is short. That is unusual for tax legislation and it is why the few clauses it does contain carry so much weight.

Title and commencement

The Act may be cited as the Betting Levy Act, 2025. It was assented to on 23 December 2025 and came into operation on 1 January 2026 — nine days later. There was no phased introduction and no transitional relief for balances already sitting in accounts on 31 December 2025.

The charge

A betting levy at the rate of 5 per cent is charged, levied, collected and paid by a betting company. Four verbs, all of them pointing at the company. The player is not named as the person liable anywhere in the charging provision.

The base

The levy is calculated on all deposits made to a customer’s gaming account and on all withdrawals from a customer’s gaming account. The word doing the work is all: there is no threshold, no exemption for small sums and no netting of deposits against withdrawals.

What is not a deposit

The definitions section carves one thing out, and it matters more than its length suggests: money credited to your account as winnings from previous bets placed with funds already in the account is not a deposit. Winning, and letting the winnings sit there, does not trigger a fresh charge. The levy is on money crossing the boundary from outside, not on money circulating inside.

The account

A customer gaming account is defined as an account maintained by a betting company for a customer in which deposits, bets, winnings and withdrawals are recorded. If money sits in such an account, movement across its boundary is in scope.

Returns and payment

Within ten days after the end of each month the betting company must submit a return of the levy collected to the Commissioner-General, in the manner the Commissioner-General determines, and pay it over. Ten days is tight, and it is tighter than the fourteenth-day deadline that applies to several other charges in the sector.

Withholding agents

The Commissioner-General may appoint a person as an agent to withhold the levy before facilitating any payment to or from a betting company. That clause reaches the payment rails themselves, which is how a charge of this kind gets collected reliably in a market that runs on mobile money.

Penalties

An operator that misses the monthly return or the remittance is liable to a penalty of three hundred thousand penalty units for each month, or part of a month, that the failure continues. The Commissioner-General may waive all or part of it.

Records, and one revealing phrase

Records must be kept for six years, and the electronic record of every transaction must show the account number, the date and time, the amount, and — in the Act’s own words — the levy calculated and deducted. The systems holding those records must be capable of integrating with the revenue authority’s own systems for automated reporting and verification.

Inspection

The Commissioner-General may enter premises at any reasonable time without prior notice to inspect records, verify returns or demand further information.

Enforcement

For the purposes of enforcing the Act the Commissioner-General has all the powers conferred by the Zambia Revenue Authority Act and the Income Tax Act, and the Act is administered by the Zambia Revenue Authority itself. The levy is enforced with the same machinery as ordinary tax, not with a bespoke gambling procedure.

One drafting detail is worth flagging because it trips up secondary sources. The Act borrows the meaning of “betting” from the Customs and Excise Act rather than defining it afresh, and it cross-refers to the Betting Control Act by chapter number. Published sources do not agree on that number, and the disagreement runs right through the official texts. The gazetted levy Act carries a marginal note citing Cap. 155 against the Betting Control Act, alongside Cap. 321 for the Zambia Revenue Authority Act, Cap. 322 for Customs and Excise and Cap. 323 for the Income Tax Act. But the Betting Control Act as published in the Laws of Zambia is headed, on its own title page, Chapter 166 — which is also the number a widely used international law-firm guide uses. A third set of affiliate pages cites a “Betting, Lotteries and Gaming Act, Chapter 169”, which does not correspond to anything we could find in the primary sources at all. We point at the primary text and let you see the discrepancy rather than picking one silently.

Why the drafting matters to you

Because the charge is on gross movement in both directions with no netting, the levy is insensitive to whether you are up or down. A losing month and a winning month of the same turnover generate similar levy. This is deliberate in design terms — movement is easy to measure and hard to disguise — but it is the opposite of how most people assume gambling taxes work.

Who the levy actually catches, and who slips past it

The whole practical weight of this statute sits in six words of its definitions section.

A betting company, for the purposes of the Act, means a person licensed under the Betting Control Act or any other written law to provide betting services in the Republic. Licensed. That single qualifier decides the reach of the entire charge.

An operator holding a Zambian licence is inside the definition and owes the levy on every deposit and every withdrawal its Zambian customers make. An operator with no Zambian licence, accepting Zambian customers from offshore, is not a person licensed under the Betting Control Act or any other written law to provide betting services in the Republic, and therefore falls outside the charging provision as drafted. Access from Zambia is not licensing, and the Act does not reach for accessibility as a test.

Betting with a Zambian licensee

  • Your money sits with a company the Zambian state has authorised to take it.
  • There is a named authority attached to the licence, so a complaint has somewhere to go.
  • The operator is inside the country’s tax and supervisory machinery, which is a form of scrutiny even when it is imperfect.
  • Disputes are argued under Zambian law, in Zambia, in English, on your time zone.

What that costs you

  • The levy applies, so every movement of your money carries 5 % in each direction.
  • The 10 % excise on stakes sits on the same operator and has to be absorbed somewhere, usually in margins and odds.
  • Several licensed operators responded to the charges by suspending products or trading altogether, so availability became less predictable, not more.
  • The licence itself cannot be checked against any public register, because Zambia does not publish one.

And the mirror image, which is the position of most of the internationally known brands Zambians actually search for:

Betting with an offshore operator

  • No Zambian levy is chargeable on your deposits and withdrawals under this Act.
  • No local excise sits on your stakes, which usually shows in slightly better pricing.
  • The operator did not withdraw from the market over the 2025 charges, because it was never inside them.

What that costs you

  • No Zambian authority licensed the company holding your money.
  • A complaint has no domestic route: you are arguing under an offshore licence, in another jurisdiction, on their terms.
  • The territory clause in the operator’s own terms can exclude Zambia at any time, and you will find out at the withdrawal stage rather than the deposit stage.
  • Nothing about the arrangement is verifiable locally, because there is no register to check it against.
The honest version of the trade-off

Being outside the levy is a saving, and it is a real one. It is also the same fact as being outside Zambian supervision, stated from the other side. Anyone telling you that offshore sites are cheaper is telling you the truth; anyone telling you that this makes them safer is adding something the fact does not contain. We link to offshore operators on this site and earn a commission when you sign up with them, which is exactly why this paragraph is here and not buried in a footer.

There is a second-order effect worth naming. A charge that binds licensees and not their unlicensed competitors does not merely raise revenue; it changes the relative price of the two, in favour of the unlicensed side. Whether that was intended is a policy question we have no standing to answer. That it is the arithmetic consequence of the definition is not in doubt. How the licensing side of that picture works, and why the licence cannot be independently verified in Zambia, is set out on our licensing page.

The exemption almost nobody mentions: betting shops

Section 6 of the Act contains one line that changes what the whole charge is for, and we have not found it stated on any other page written for Zambian punters.

The exemption in the Act’s own terms

Brick and mortar betting companies are exempt from payment of a levy. The Act defines brick and mortar betting as a betting activity conducted at a physical premise where a customer places a bet in person, whether by cash, electronic means or any other payment method. The Minister may exempt others by statutory instrument.

Read that against the charging provision and the shape of the policy appears. The levy is not a tax on betting. It is a tax on online betting, or more precisely on betting conducted through a customer gaming account rather than across a counter. Walk into a shop in Lusaka, hand over cash, take a paper slip, and no levy arises on that money. Do the identical thing through an app and every kwacha in and out is chargeable at 5 %.

That asymmetry has consequences worth naming. It gives operators with physical estates a structural cost advantage over purely online ones, on the same bets. It gives players a reason to prefer the counter that has nothing to do with odds or convenience. And it means the charge falls hardest on exactly the customers who use mobile money, which is to say nearly everyone betting outside the largest towns.

Bet in a shop, in person

Outside the levy. The Act exempts brick and mortar betting companies from payment altogether, and the definition turns on the bet being placed in person at a physical premise.

Bet through an account

Inside the levy. Every deposit and every withdrawal across the boundary of that account is chargeable at 5 %, with no threshold.

One qualification, because we would rather flag an ambiguity than paper over it. The exemption is drafted as applying to brick and mortar betting companies, while the definition describes brick and mortar betting as an activity. An operator running both a shop network and an app sits awkwardly between the two readings, and the Act does not resolve it on its face. How the revenue authority applies it in practice is not something we can observe from published sources, and we will not invent an answer.

What the Act does not say

Several things widely repeated about this levy are not in the statute. Separating them matters, because one of them determines whether you see the charge at all.

  1. It does not say, anywhere, that the 5 % comes out of your money. The charging provision names the betting company as the person who charges, collects and pays. But the Act is not silent on deduction either, and honesty requires saying so: the record-keeping section requires every transaction record to show the levy calculated and deducted. Deducted from what, and from whom, is never stated. So the position is genuinely ambiguous rather than settled — liability sits on the company, while the machinery the Act builds assumes a per-transaction deduction. Anyone telling you the statute definitively puts the 5 % on the player, or definitively does not, has not read section 7.
  2. It does not net deposits against withdrawals. The base is all deposits and all withdrawals, taken separately. Moving K1,000 in and K1,000 out is not a nil event; it is two chargeable movements.
  3. It does not exempt small transactions. There is no floor in the text. A minimum deposit of K20 sits inside the base like any other.
  4. It does not distinguish sports betting from casino play at the level of the charge. The account is the unit, and the account records deposits, bets, winnings and withdrawals regardless of what was played.
  5. It does not tax your winnings. That is a separate charge with a separate rate and a separate history, and it is set out on our page on tax on winnings. Confusing the two is the most common error in Zambian betting content, including on sites that otherwise do careful work.
“

Legal incidence and economic incidence are different things. The statute settles the first and says nothing about the second.The distinction that decides whether you ever see this charge

That last distinction is the one to hold on to. A tax lawyer would say the legal incidence of the levy is on the operator and the economic incidence is an open question. In plain terms: the law decides who writes the cheque to the revenue authority; the market decides whose pocket the money comes out of. In a market where several licensed operators suspended trading rather than absorb the neighbouring excise, it would be optimistic to assume the answer is always the operator.

The arithmetic on a real deposit-and-cash-out cycle

The numbers below assume full pass-through to the customer — that is, an operator that recovers the whole levy from the player. That is a modelling assumption, not the law. It is the worst realistic case, and it is the right one to plan against.

ScenarioMoved inMoved outLevy on the way inLevy on the way outTotal levyAs a share of the deposit
One deposit, one cash-outK500K800K25K40K6513.0 %
Deposit, no withdrawal yetK500—K25—K255.0 %
Break-even round tripK1,000K1,000K50K50K10010.0 %
Minimum depositK20—K1—K15.0 %
Same K1,000 cycled five timesK5,000K5,000K250K250K50050.0 % of the original K1,000

The last row is the one that surprises people, and it is not a trick. Cycling the same thousand kwacha five times means ten chargeable movements, not two. The betting behaviour behind it — deposit, play, cash out, redeposit next weekend — is completely ordinary. Nothing about it is aggressive or unusual. Under a levy on movement it is simply expensive.

What the table does not charge for

Winnings credited to your account from bets placed with money already in it are excluded from the definition of a deposit. A run of winning bets that stays inside the account generates no further levy however large it grows. The charge is triggered by the boundary, not by the balance — which is why the expensive pattern is frequent cashing out and redepositing, not heavy betting.

5 %on every deposit
5 %on every withdrawal
10 %of a break-even round trip
0threshold below which it stops
The practical consequence, stated plainly

If the levy is being passed on to you, the cheapest way to hold a betting balance is to move money across the account boundary as few times as possible: fewer, larger deposits rather than many small ones, and withdrawing when you actually want the money rather than as a habit. This is not advice to leave money with an operator, which carries its own and larger risk. It is a description of what the charge rewards.

Two caveats keep these figures honest. First, they exclude everything the wallets themselves charge for moving money, which is a separate layer with its own limits and fees; that belongs on our payments page and is not repeated here. Second, they assume the operator is a Zambian licensee. On an offshore account no levy is chargeable under this Act at all, and the whole table collapses to zero — along with every protection described in the previous section.

Where the levy sits among Zambia’s other betting charges

The levy did not arrive alone. It is the second of two charges introduced within months of each other, and they land on different things.

10 % excise on stakes

Introduced by the Customs and Excise (Amendment) Act No. 11 of 2025 and payable from September 2025, with the revenue authority’s public notice following on 15 October 2025. It falls on the amount staked and is paid by the operator, monthly, by the middle of the following month. It is the charge that broke the market’s patience.

5 % levy on movement

The subject of this page. Different base, different Act, different filing deadline, and it reaches money that was never staked at all.

15 % on winnings

A withholding charge on what a player wins, with a history and a rate change of its own. It is not part of this page’s subject and it has its own page.

Presumptive tax

An operator-side charge under section 64A of the Income Tax Act and the 2018 presumptive tax regulations, with returns and payment due on the fourteenth of the following month. It never touches a player account directly.

Stacking them mentally is how you get to a realistic picture of a licensed Zambian operator in 2026: excise on what customers stake, levy on money moving in and out, presumptive tax on the business itself, and withholding on what customers win. Whether that combination is sustainable is precisely what the market spent the last quarter of 2025 arguing about, some of it in court.

What happened to the market when the charges landed

This is the part of the story missing from almost every “best betting sites in Zambia” page, including several that still rank operators which were not trading normally when the page was written.

The 2025 sequenceFrom the excise notice to an empty league sponsorshipSep 202510 % excise onstakes becomespayable3 Oct 2025Constitutional Courtdismisses theinjunction bid14 Oct 2025Betway haltsservices, callingit unsustainableOct 2025betPawa pausescasino and jackpotsBetLion suspends22 Oct 2025ZPL ends theK10m Betwaysponsorship1 Jan 2026Betting levytakes effect

The sequence is worth reading closely. Two of the country’s largest licensed operators, betPawa and Betway, went to the Constitutional Court seeking to stop collection of the excise while a full constitutional challenge proceeded. On 3 October 2025 the court dismissed that application, holding that they had not made out grounds for a temporary suspension of the policy; collection continued and the substantive challenge went on. Within a fortnight Betway announced it was temporarily halting services in Zambia on the basis that operating under the charge was not financially sustainable. betPawa paused its casino and jackpot products while continuing to take sports bets. BetLion suspended activity altogether.

On 22 October 2025 the Zambian Premier League announced the end of its sponsorship by Betway, a deal worth ten million kwacha a year that had run since 2023, with the operator citing the financial pressure of the new charge. The league said it acknowledged the contribution and would look for new partners. That happened in a year when government had already suspended its own financial support to the football association over governance and performance concerns, leaving the sport leaning on international grants and private partners.

“

The decision to implement the 10 percent excise tax was not made to cripple the gaming and betting sector, but rather to address the growing social problems associated with betting and gambling addiction.Zambia’s finance minister, on the purpose of the charge

We take no position on whether the policy is right. We do think a page that ranks Zambian betting sites without mentioning that several of the largest ones stopped trading over these charges is not describing the market a reader is actually walking into. Statuses announced as temporary can and do reverse, and the position of each operator should be checked against its own current site rather than against any list, including ours.

How to check what your own operator is doing

You cannot audit an operator’s levy returns. You can find out, in about ten minutes and for the price of one small transaction, whether the charge is reaching you.

Establish which side of the definition your operator is on

Find the footer of the site you actually use and read what it says about a Zambian licence. A Zambian licence number puts the operator inside the levy. An offshore licence with no Zambian title puts it outside. Anything vague — “licensed and regulated” with no naming authority — tells you nothing and should be treated as the second case until proven otherwise.

Record the number before you deposit

Write down the exact amount you are sending from your wallet. Not the amount you intend to send — the amount the wallet confirmation says left your phone.

Compare it with the balance that appears

If K200 leaves your wallet and K190 lands in your account, something took 5 %. It may be the levy, it may be a wallet charge, and the two are different layers. If K200 leaves and K200 lands, the operator is absorbing the levy or is not liable for it.

Repeat the test on the way out

Withdraw a small amount and do the same comparison in reverse. The levy applies to both directions, so an operator passing it on will show a gap on both legs. One-sided gaps usually mean a wallet fee rather than the levy.

Keep the two receipts

The wallet confirmation and the account transaction record are the only evidence you will ever have if a figure is later disputed. Screenshots of a balance are not evidence of what moved; transaction records are.

Read the cashier text, not the marketing

Where a charge is disclosed at all, it is disclosed in the deposit and withdrawal screens or in the terms, never on the front page. If the terms describe a deduction in percentage terms without naming a statute, that is the operator’s commercial pricing and it can change without notice.

If the numbers do not reconcile

A gap you cannot explain is worth raising in writing rather than in a chat window, and it is worth raising early, while the transaction is recent and both records still exist. What a formal complaint can and cannot achieve in Zambia — and why the answer is different depending on which side of the licensing line your operator sits — is set out on our complaints page.

Questions people actually ask

Is the 5 % taken from my deposit automatically?

Not by law. The Act charges the betting company, not you. Whether it reaches your balance depends on the operator’s commercial choice, and the only reliable way to know is to compare the amount that leaves your wallet with the amount that arrives in your account.

Does the levy apply if I only deposit and never withdraw?

Yes, to the deposit. The base is all deposits and all withdrawals, taken separately, so each leg is chargeable on its own. There is no netting and no threshold.

Do offshore sites charge it?

Not under this Act. The charge binds a person licensed under the Betting Control Act or another written law to provide betting services in Zambia. An operator without a Zambian licence is outside that definition — and outside Zambian supervision with it.

Is this the same as the tax on my winnings?

No. Different Act, different base, different rate. The levy is on money moving in and out of an account; the withholding charge is on what you win. They are frequently conflated, including by sites that otherwise cite their sources. Ours is on a separate page.

Did the levy cause operators to leave the market?

The suspensions in October 2025 were announced in response to the 10 % excise on stakes, which arrived first, not to the levy, which took effect on 1 January 2026. The two are separate charges and it is worth keeping the sequence straight, because the market reaction is often attributed to the wrong one.

Can I avoid it by using a friend’s account or a foreign wallet?

Betting on an account that is not in your own name is the single most reliable way to lose a withdrawal permanently: verification is the point at which the name on the account is checked against the name on the payment method, and a mismatch is the standard ground for refusing payment. Whatever the levy costs, it costs less than the whole balance.

Does the levy apply in a betting shop?

No. Section 6 exempts brick and mortar betting companies from payment of the levy, and the Act defines brick and mortar betting as a bet placed in person at a physical premise. The charge is effectively an online one: the same bet costs differently depending on whether it goes across a counter or through an account.

Do my winnings get charged again if I keep betting with them?

Not as deposits. Winnings credited from previous bets placed with funds already in the account are excluded from the definition. Money circulating inside the account is not chargeable; money crossing into or out of it is.

Where can I read the Act myself?

The full text is published by the Zambia Legal Information Institute and the Act as gazetted is on the National Assembly’s site. Both are linked at the bottom of this page. It is short enough to read in one sitting.

This page describes a statute and its practical effects. It is general information, not legal or tax advice, and it cannot account for your particular circumstances. Rates, thresholds and operator practices change; the figures here were checked on 31 August 2026 and the primary sources are linked below so you can confirm them yourself. 18+.

Official sources

Everything factual on this page traces to one of the addresses below. Where published sources disagree — and on the chapter number of the Betting Control Act they do — we have said so in the text rather than picking one quietly.

These links leave our site. We control neither their content nor their availability; if one stops responding, tell us and we will pull it.