Malta occupies the top tier of European gambling licensing. A licence from the Malta Gaming Authority (MGA) is treated by banks, payment processors, game suppliers and stock exchanges as evidence of serious regulation, and its price is correspondingly serious. The most common mistake in connection with a Maltese licence is to read it as a permit to be acquired rather than what it actually is: a full tax and compliance structure whose every number is officially published and must be budgeted in advance. This page describes the Maltese regime using only facts drawn from the MGA's own pages and guidance documents: the licence families, the complete fee schedule, the application process, and the condition that a Georgian client should examine first — who is allowed to apply at all.
One further framing note: a Maltese licence creates no access to the Georgian market and does not remove the Georgian permit, tax and reporting layer that applies to the person behind the structure. The final section of this page deals with that Georgian layer separately, under the articles that govern it. Reading the licence through both lenses is worth far more than any promise of a "fast European licence".
The legal basis and the two licence families
The regime rests on the Gaming Act, Chapter 583, supported by a package of subsidiary legislation running from S.L. 583.03 to S.L. 583.12: licence fees (Gaming Licence Fees, S.L. 583.03), the authorisations regulations (S.L. 583.05), player protection (S.L. 583.08), gaming tax (S.L. 583.10) and the rest. The regulator — the Malta Gaming Authority — maintains public registers of licensees, enforcement actions and Recognition Notices, which is the first objective tool for verifying any licence you are shown.
Licensing divides into two families. A B2C Gaming Service Licence is needed when a Maltese or EU/EEA entity wishes to offer a gaming service from Malta, to a Maltese person or through a Maltese legal entity; it is applied for by channel — Remote Gaming Services (online), land-based casinos, commercial bingo halls, controlled gaming premises, and the national lottery licence. The B2B family — the critical gaming supply licence — is, in the MGA's own words, a Business to Business licence to provide or carry out a critical gaming supply from Malta, with two application routes: Game Providers and Back Office, or Back Office only — the latter covering control systems, meaning software that generates, captures and processes essential regulatory records. To this are added Recognition Notices, the mechanism by which other EEA licences are recognised for Malta-facing supply, with a public register of their own.
Within either licence, one authorisation covers four game types: Type 1 — casino, live casino, house poker, lotteries and virtual sports; Type 2 — fixed-odds betting, including live betting; Type 3 — pool betting, betting exchanges and player-to-player formats such as poker and bingo, plus commission-based models; Type 4 — controlled skill games. A group licence is available where the parent holds more than 90% of the group entities.
And now the condition that is decisive for Georgian structures. In the MGA's own wording, any company incorporated in the EU/EEA is eligible to apply. A Georgian parent cannot apply to the MGA directly: the route runs through a European subsidiary, which then becomes the licensee. That structural step itself requires a deliberate choice of member state, and it is the subject of our separate page on an EU member-state company for gambling operations.