1. Home
2. PAGCOR licences: what the regulator actually publishes

PAGCOR licences: what the regulator actually publishes

By Eric, Founder, RedClaw · Published 2026-08-24 · Last updated 2026-08-24

PAGCOR does not publish one master list of licensed operators. It publishes several separate registers, each covering a different activity, and the file people quote most often covers land-based venues rather than online casinos. Quoting it as proof that a gambling website is licensed is the most common error in English-language coverage of this market. This section separates the registers and says what each one actually establishes.

Three documents do most of the work in Philippine gaming compliance, and they are not interchangeable. Confusing them is the single most common error in English-language coverage of this market. It is also the error that makes a licence check worthless.

Which PAGCOR registers exist, and what does each cover?

PAGCOR maintains separate registers by activity type. Three are published as public PDFs and are the basis for everything on this site.

Counts above are parsed directly from the PDFs at pagcor.ph. Our parsing method, including the two extraction problems those files present, is documented in the methodology.

The venue register is longer than most secondary sources report. Our parse returns 258 distinct operators, running from 128 Gaming Corp. through YYK Enterprises Incorporated, with the highest printed sequence number reaching 259. That gap is not a parsing error. PAGCOR’s own numbering skips at least one position, which should be known before anyone reconciles a count against the printed list.

Why is the venue list the wrong document for checking an online casino?

Because it licenses premises, not websites. A company can hold a venue licence for a bingo hall in Pasay and have no authorisation whatsoever for an online product.

The PDF says so itself. PAGCOR prints a caution notice in the left margin of every page stating that the listed entities are licensees or operators for domestic land-based gaming venues, and that they are not licensed to operate offshore. Anyone quoting the file as proof that a casino site is licensed has quoted past the warning printed on the document they are quoting.

There is a second trap in the same file. PAGCOR adds a note that the list does not certify that each licensee offers all approved game categories. So even for land-based operations, presence on the register establishes that a company holds a licence, not what that licence permits it to do. Two different questions, one document, and the document only answers the first.

Which register does cover online operators, and how to read it, is set out in which PAGCOR list covers online casinos.

What changed in Philippine gaming regulation during 2026?

Four things, none of them a ban, all of them narrowing what operators may do.

The Senate Committee on Games and Amusement reopened hearings on the domestic online gaming sector after calls to extend the POGO shutdown to locally licensed online products. PAGCOR responded by tightening rules rather than waiting for legislation. Advertising during the 17:30 to 20:30 window is already prohibited, and the regulator has said a full television and radio ban is under consideration. Separately, the central bank ordered electronic wallet providers to remove direct links to licensed eGames operators, a measure PAGCOR has been lobbying to reverse. B2B suppliers faced an accreditation deadline of 31 March 2026, after which unaccredited suppliers are treated as unauthorised.

The advertising restrictions matter more to operator economics than the licensing questions do, and they get a fraction of the attention. Removing prime-time television removes the cheapest reach in the market. Removing the wallet deep-link adds a step to every deposit journey, and steps cost conversion. We buy media for operators, so this is not a prediction. It is the arithmetic our own campaign reports have been showing since the wallet order took effect. The rules themselves, and what each one forbids in practice, are collected under advertising rules.

How often does this site re-check the registers?

Monthly. Each PDF is re-downloaded, re-parsed, and compared against the stored copy from the previous cycle.

That comparison is itself the point. A licence register only tells you something interesting when you can see what moved. Additions, removals and renamed entities are the signal; the static list is just the snapshot. Our archived copies and the diff method behind them sit in official PAGCOR data, alongside the regulator’s quarterly industry figures.

How do you check a specific brand against these registers?

Search the register PDF for the corporate entity, not the brand name. Consumer-facing casino brands are rarely the licensed company, so a text search for the brand usually returns nothing even when a licence exists.

This one point defeats most licence checks before they start. A site trading as one name is very often operated by a company registered under another, and PAGCOR lists the company. Absence of a brand string from a register is therefore weak evidence. It might mean no licence. It might mean the licence sits under a corporate name nobody publishes.

We have to resolve this for real campaigns, because Philippine media platforms ask for the licence before they will run gaming creative, and the licence must be shown in the licensee’s own corporate name. The practical route is to work backwards. Take the entity named in the site’s terms and conditions or its footer, take the registration number if one is printed, and match that against the register. Brand-first searching fails. Entity-first searching works about as often as the operator’s own disclosures are accurate, which is the real limit on this whole exercise and one no parser can fix.

What does a licence not tell you?

Whether the operator pays out. A licence records that a regulator accepted an application and continues to accept the fees.

Payment behaviour, dispute handling and account closures sit outside the register entirely. PAGCOR does publish a complaints route, and the existence of that route is itself informative: a regulator that expects disputes builds a channel for them. But no public register grades an operator on how it resolves them.

How big is each licensed segment?

Land-based casinos and Electronic Games are close to the same size, and together they are roughly nine-tenths of the market. PAGCOR’s own directly operated venues are a rounding error.

The third column is the finding, and it is uncomfortable. Electronic Games generated ₱36.25 billion in a single quarter, 41.1 per cent of all Philippine gaming revenue, and it is the one segment with no downloadable licensee register at the location where the others are published. The segment PAGCOR documents most thoroughly is the one worth ₱45.4 billion; the segment worth ₱36.2 billion has no equivalent public file. Anyone building a licence check for online operators is therefore working against the least documented four-tenths of the market, which is exactly why so much published coverage quietly substitutes the venue register and hopes nobody notices. Segment figures are parsed from the quarterly filings and reproduced in official PAGCOR data.

What does PAGCOR regulate besides operators?

Suppliers, and employment. The accredited-affiliates register covers business-to-business game providers and aggregators, and PAGCOR separately maintains a gaming employment licence regime.

Supplier accreditation became consequential during 2026. PAGCOR required business-to-business suppliers of online gaming services to be fully accredited by 31 March 2026, treating unaccredited suppliers as unauthorised after that date. The register carries 54 entries at its 12 August 2026 revision, split 32 content providers to 22 aggregators, and flags entries that have yet to commence commercial operations.

Set the supplier deadline beside the advertising measures and a shape emerges that neither document describes on its own. Across a single year the regulator tightened who may supply the market, when operators may advertise to it, and how players may fund accounts inside it. No licence was revoked. A reader watching only for a ban would record nothing happening at all, while an operator’s cost base moved in three places at once. Our reading of that sequence is set out in advertising rules.

What this section does not do

No ratings. No rankings. No “top ten” ordering, because PAGCOR does not rank its licensees and inventing an order would be our opinion wearing the regulator’s clothes.

We also do not tell you whether a given operator is safe. A licence is a fact about paperwork. Those are separate claims and this site only makes the first one. Where the underlying quarterly figures come from, and what the regulator now forbids operators from doing with a licence, are covered in the sections listed above.

What should a first-time reader do next?

Start with the register that answers the question actually being asked, rather than with the register that appears first in search results.

For a website, no downloadable register answers it, and the honest procedure ends in a documented gap. For a land-based venue or a game supplier, a public file answers it directly. Knowing which of those two situations you are in before starting saves the entire exercise, and it is the distinction most published coverage of this market never makes.

Every figure in this section carries the revision date printed on the source file, and every source file is archived at the version we parsed. When a register is reissued, these pages change and their last-updated dates change with them. Where something could not be established from a published document, the gap is stated rather than filled, which is the standard set out in the methodology.

Readers arriving with a specific operator in mind should start from the verification procedure rather than from any summary table on this page. The procedure is short, repeatable, and stated in full at how to verify a Philippine gaming licence yourself, including the point at which it stops being able to answer.

How many people does this actually affect?

Around 10 million active players, not the 32 million figure that circulates. The larger number counts registered accounts, and players routinely hold several.

The correction came from PAGCOR chairman Alejandro Tengco during the Senate Committee on Games and Amusement hearing on 11 February 2026, after Senator Sherwin Gatchalian repeated the 32 million claim. “The 32 million are only registered [accounts], but the active players are around 10 million,” Tengco said, as reported by Inside Asian Gaming. AGB reported the same hearing that day.

The gap between 32 million and 10 million is doing real work in the policy debate, and both numbers are defensible, which is what makes it dangerous. Registered accounts is a figure an operator reports and a regulator can audit. Active players requires deduplication across operators and is therefore an estimate. A campaigner arguing for prohibition reaches for the larger one; a regulator defending its licensees reaches for the smaller. Neither is fabricating. Anyone reading coverage of this market should check which of the two a given article uses before comparing it against anything else, because the pair get quoted side by side as though they measured the same quantity.

Disclosure. LegitPH is written by Eric, founder of RedClaw, a performance-marketing agency whose clients include iGaming operators. We publish no ratings and take no payment for placement in any list on this site. How we source and check every figure is set out in our methodology.