Tax on betting winnings in Zambia: 15 %, not 20 %, and only on the profit

Two numbers, one of them dead

Almost every English-language page about Zambian betting quotes a tax on winnings. They do not agree with each other, and the disagreement is not a matter of interpretation. One set of pages is quoting a rate that stopped being current three years ago.

This is worth more than a footnote, because it tells you something about the sources you are reading. A guide that still prints 20 % has not checked the figure since it was written, and a guide that has not checked its tax figure has probably not checked the rest either. The rate is the cheapest thing on any of these pages to verify, and it is the first thing to go stale.

Which number is right, and how the other one survived

The 20 % figure was not invented by careless writers. It was the correct answer for most of the last decade, and it was defended publicly by the revenue authority itself.

In October 2021 the revenue authority issued a statement responding to what it called misleading claims about gaming and betting taxes. Its position was that the tax was not new: it had existed since January 2014, the last amendment had been made in September 2020 by the then finance minister in the budget presentation, and the rate was 20 per cent. The authority also made a point that matters more than the rate, and which we come back to below: the tax is paid on free money won, not on the total investment, meaning not on the bet placed.

That statement is now widely quoted as though it were current. It was accurate when it was made. The rate was subsequently reduced to 15 per cent in the 2023 round of withholding-tax reforms, which also zero-rated several other categories, and international tax guides published from 2024 onwards record 15 per cent for winnings from gaming, lotteries and betting. The 2026 budget revisions then confirmed government’s intention to keep it there.

We should be equally clear about our own position. The revenue authority’s website is the right place to confirm any of this, and we link it below — but it blocks automated access, so we cannot machine-check it and neither can most of the tools that build these guides. Our figure rests on the parliamentary budget documentation and on published tax guides, and if you can reach a current authority page that says something different, we would rather hear about it than be quoted for another three years.

Where the charge comes from in law

Two instruments do the work, and they sit in ordinary tax law rather than in gambling law.

It is worth noticing what is not in that list. None of these instruments is a gambling statute. The Betting Control Act licenses bookmakers and premises; the Income Tax Act taxes the money. That separation is why the tax position can be perfectly clear at the same time as the licensing position is a mess, which is roughly where Zambia currently sits. The licensing half of the picture is set out on our licensing page.

What your operator pays, and why it reaches your odds

The withholding charge on your winnings is the smaller half of the picture. The larger half sits on the operator, and it arrives in your account as prices rather than as deductions.

Zambian gaming and betting businesses sit on a presumptive tax footing. The regime came in from 1 January 2019 and businesses already registered for income tax or turnover tax were required to migrate onto it. An operator must notify the Commissioner-General within thirty days of establishing the business, and returns and payment fall due on the fourteenth day of the month following each tax period. Excess payments are refundable under the ordinary rules of the Income Tax Act.

The record-keeping obligations are more revealing than the rate. Records must be kept in English, within the Republic, for six years, and the revenue authority’s own guidance lists what it expects to see: records of initial deposits, records of cash payouts, machine customer wins, machine and table reports on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, an inventory of machines and tables, and a cash book. That is the paperwork of a physical estate as much as an online one, and it is a reminder that this regime was designed around a sector that looked different from the one that exists now.

It also explains something about the shape of the local market. Charges that fall on licensed operators, and not on unlicensed ones reaching the same customers from outside, do not merely raise revenue — they widen the pricing gap between the two. That is not an argument for or against the policy. It is the reason the odds on an offshore account often look better than the odds on a locally licensed one, and it is worth knowing that the difference is structural rather than generous.

The K4,000 argument, and why it went nowhere

In late 2021 there was a public row about whether small winnings should be taxed at all. It is worth understanding because the claim still circulates.

The argument, made by an opposition party leader, ran like this. Parliament had directed for the 2021 financial year that revenue of up to four thousand kwacha should not be subject to any direct tax, a measure aimed at increasing disposable income. Withholding tax on gaming winnings was a direct tax. Therefore, on this reading, it should not bite until cumulative or single winnings in a month exceeded four thousand kwacha, and levying it below that figure was contrary to what Parliament had directed.

The revenue authority did not accept that reading. Its published response set out that gaming and betting taxes had existed since January 2014, that the charge sat under section 64A of the Income Tax Act and the 2018 presumptive tax regulations, and that the rate then applying was 20 per cent of free money won. It treated the taxation of gaming and betting as an established regime rather than a new measure caught by a general budget direction.

What the percentage is actually taken from

This is the part that people get wrong in the expensive direction, and the revenue authority went out of its way to say it plainly.

Strip the rate out of that sentence and what remains is the rule that still applies. The base is the money you are up, not the money that comes back. Stake two hundred kwacha at odds of 3.0 and six hundred returns; the winnings are four hundred, because two hundred of that six hundred was already yours. Fifteen per cent applies to the four hundred, not to the six hundred, and certainly not to the two hundred you risked.

That last column is the honest counterweight to the good news in the first. Taxing profit rather than turnover sounds generous until you notice there is no loss relief attached to it. A punter who is down over a year can still have paid withholding tax during it, and nothing in the arrangement gives that back.

The carve-out for casino floors

One exclusion sits inside the rate itself and is almost never mentioned.

Published tax guides record the 15 per cent on winnings from gaming, lotteries and betting as excluding brick and mortar casinos. Winnings taken at a physical casino table are treated differently from winnings credited to a betting account, in much the same way that the separate 2026 levy exempts physical betting shops from a charge that falls on online accounts.

We flag this rather than build on it. The carve-out comes from professional tax commentary rather than from a statutory text we have been able to read in full, and the boundary between a casino product offered online and a casino floor is exactly the kind of line that gets redrawn. If you are playing casino games through an app, treat yourself as inside the ordinary rule until something official tells you otherwise.

Who withholds it, and what happens on an offshore account

A withholding tax only functions if somebody withholds. In a market where much of the betting happens with companies outside the jurisdiction, that is not a formality.

An operator licensed in Zambia is inside the Zambian tax system, and the withholding obligation is part of what a licence brings with it. An operator with no Zambian licence, taking bets from Zambian customers across a border, is not administering Zambian withholding tax on your behalf. Nothing is being held back and nothing is being accounted for. Your account balance is the whole of what you won.

This is the point at which our own commercial position deserves stating again. Two of the three operators we link to are offshore as far as Zambia is concerned, and we are paid when you open an account. The absence of withholding on those accounts is a genuine cash-flow difference in your favour and we are not going to pretend otherwise. It is also, like every other advantage of betting outside the local system, the same fact as being outside the local system.

1. If your operator is a Zambian licensee, expect to see a deduction on winning payouts, and expect it to be 15 % of the profit rather than of the payout.
2. If your operator is offshore, expect no deduction at all, and do not read that as the tax question being closed.
3. If your operator is a Zambian licensee and you see no deduction, that is worth asking about in writing — not because you want to be taxed, but because it tells you something about how the account is being administered.
4. If you see a deduction larger than 15 % of the profit, check whether what you are looking at is tax at all. The 2026 betting levy is a different charge with a different base, and the two are routinely confused.

Worked examples on real bets

All figures assume a Zambian licensee applying the current rate to the profit. Round numbers are used for clarity, not because operators round.

The final column is the one to internalise. Because the stake is excluded from the base, the headline rate of 15 % never actually costs you 15 % of what comes back. It costs more as the odds lengthen and less as they shorten, converging on 15 % only for bets so long that the stake is a rounding error. On short-priced bets the effective bite is half the headline rate or less.

Two things these figures deliberately leave out. They ignore whatever the mobile wallet charges to move money, which is a separate layer covered on our payments page. And they ignore the betting levy, which is charged on a different base entirely and is dealt with next.

How this sits next to the 2026 betting levy

These are two separate charges and conflating them is the most common error in Zambian betting content. The distinction takes one table.

The practical upshot is that a Zambian punter on a licensed account can be paying something in a month when they won nothing at all. That is not a quirk of enforcement; it is what a charge on movement does. The full mechanics, the exemptions and the arithmetic of the levy are on its own page and are not repeated here.

What to keep, and what to check on your statement

Nobody sends you a tax certificate for a football bet. The record you will have is the one you made yourself at the time.

Questions people actually ask