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Which PAGCOR list actually covers online casinos?

By Eric, Founder, RedClaw · Published 2026-09-07 · Last updated 2026-09-08

Not the one almost everybody quotes. The file titled List of Licensees for Gaming Venue Operations covers land-based premises, carries 258 entries at its 31 August 2026 revision, and prints a warning in its own margin saying the listed entities are not licensed to operate offshore. Checking a gambling website against it proves nothing either way.

A reader wants one thing from a licence register. Type in the casino name. Get a yes or a no. Neither half of that works here, and the reasons are structural rather than accidental. The register is organised by corporate entity, and the register most people reach for describes a different activity altogether.

What does the venue register actually cover?

Land-based premises. Bingo halls, arcades and casino floors operating inside the Philippines, licensed by activity and location rather than by website.

PAGCOR prints the scope in the left margin of every page: the listed entities are licensees or operators for domestic land-based gaming venues, and they are not licensed to operate offshore. Anyone citing the document as proof that a gambling site is licensed has cited past a warning printed on the page they are citing.

Our parse of the 31 July 2026 revision returns 258 distinct operators, from 128 Gaming Corp. at position 1 through YYK Enterprises Incorporated at printed position 259. That is 258 rows against a top number of 259. One short. Not a parsing artefact: PAGCOR’s own sequence skips a position. Anyone reconciling a headline count against the printed list will find the same gap, and it should be known before assuming a parser dropped something. The extraction steps are documented in the methodology.

Why does searching for a brand name usually fail?

Because the register lists the licensed company, and the licensed company is rarely the name on the website. Consumer brands and corporate entities diverge in this market as a matter of routine.

On the operator side this is a routine obstacle rather than a mystery. Philippine media platforms and payment partners require evidence of licensing before they will transact, and they require it in the licensee’s own corporate name matching the contracting party. So the entity is always discoverable to a counterparty, and frequently invisible to a member of the public reading the website. We resolve it by working from the terms and conditions or the footer disclosure back to the register. That method inherits whatever inaccuracy the operator’s own disclosure carries, which is the real ceiling on any public licence check.

What does the accredited-affiliates register cover instead?

Suppliers. Game studios and aggregators that provide content to licensed operators, listed with their approved game categories rather than with any consumer-facing brand they might power.

Its 20 August 2026 revision holds 54 entries across two sections: 32 game content providers and 22 game aggregators. The word “affiliates” in the title causes predictable confusion. It refers to accredited suppliers rather than marketing partners, so a marketing affiliate does not appear on it and does not need to.

Does absence from a register prove anything?

Very little on its own. Absence is consistent with no licence, with a licence held under an undisclosed corporate name, and with a licence recorded in a register that is not published as a downloadable file.

That third possibility deserves more attention than it gets. PAGCOR publishes the venue register and the accredited-affiliates register as public PDFs, and publishes its quarterly industry and player-exclusion series the same way. It does not publish an equivalent downloadable register of domestic online gaming licensees at the same location. So the register that would answer the question most readers are actually asking is the one least available as a file, and any site presenting a definitive online-casino licence status is drawing on something other than a published PAGCOR list. We say so rather than filling the gap with an assumption. Our current position, including which files we have and which we are still chasing, sits in official PAGCOR data.

What is the honest answer for a reader?

Treat a licence claim as unverified until you can match a corporate entity to a register entry, and treat the venue register as irrelevant to any website.

Where an operator prints a licence number and a corporate name, both can be checked. Where it prints neither, the absence of disclosure is itself the finding. The wider question of which registers exist is covered in the PAGCOR licence section, and what a licence permits an operator to do once held is covered in advertising rules.

What are the current file revisions?

Four downloadable registers holding 350 entries between them. Three were revised within the last three weeks of writing. The fourth was last revised in October 2024 and is discussed below.

None of these four is linked from PAGCOR’s licensees and foundations page, which is where a reader would look. We retrieved that page on 7 September 2026 and it carries fifty-one PDF links, none of them a register. All four are reachable only by direct path: the venue register, the affiliates register and the internet gaming register, each returning HTTP 200 on that date.

We publish those four because they exist as files. The register a reader actually wants does not, and pretending otherwise is the shortcut this site declines to take. A worked example of the same check applied to a specific brand is at 777PUB.

But there is a list called Internet Gaming Licensees — does that not answer it?

No, for three separate reasons, and a reader who finds that file deserves all three rather than a flat contradiction.

It is offshore, not domestic. The file’s own sub-heading reads Offshore Gaming Licensing Department, and Executive Order No. 74 defines Internet Gaming Licensees as business-to-consumer licensees “catering exclusively to offshore-based/foreign players”. A site serving players in the Philippines is outside its scope by definition, so a brand’s absence from it carries no information about domestic authorisation either way.

It describes a licence class that no longer exists. Section 2(4) of the same order required all POGOs and IGLs holding licences to “completely cease operations, including the winding up of their affairs, on 31 December 2024 or earlier”. The file’s printed footer reads “REVISED AS OCTOBER 7, 2024”, which places the snapshot before the order rather than after it. We retrieved the file on 24 August 2026 and again on 7 September 2026; both copies are byte-identical, so it has not been revised in the twenty-three months since.

And it cannot be searched. The two pages carry no text characters at all — each is a single scanned image — so no text extractor, and no search engine relying on one, can read a name out of it. We transcribed the thirty-eight entries by reading the images, and the transcription with its method sits in official PAGCOR data.

Taken together: the only PAGCOR register whose title contains the words “internet gaming” covers the wrong player base, at the wrong date, in a format nothing can read. It is not the missing domestic register, and treating it as one is a mistake worth making explicit because the filename invites it.

How much of the market is in the undocumented segment?

Four-tenths of it. Electronic Games generated ₱36.25 billion in the second quarter of 2026, which is 41.1 per cent of all Philippine gaming revenue.

The asymmetry between those columns explains a great deal about the coverage of this market. Roughly ₱48.9 billion of quarterly revenue sits in segments with a published licensee file, and ₱36.2 billion sits in a segment without one. So the single largest documentation gap in Philippine gaming regulation covers over 40 per cent of the money. Every consumer-facing site that publishes a definitive online licence verdict is filling that gap with something, and the something is never named. Our position is that naming the gap is more useful than filling it. Segment figures come from the quarterly filings reproduced in official PAGCOR data.

What can you do with the registers that do exist?

Check suppliers and venue operators, which is narrower than most readers want but is not nothing.

Supplier accreditation in particular is checkable and consequential. PAGCOR required business-to-business suppliers of online gaming services to be accredited by 31 March 2026, and treats unaccredited suppliers as unauthorised after that date. An operator running games from a studio absent from the accredited list is running content its regulator has not cleared, and that is a real finding available from a public file. The 20 August 2026 revision carries 32 content providers and 22 aggregators, with a flag on entries yet to begin commercial operations. What each category authorises is set out in what types of PAGCOR licence and accreditation exist.

Does the venue register tell you anything about online play?

One thing, and only by exclusion. It tells you a company is licensed for premises, which is a different authorisation from anything a website needs.

That is worth stating in the negative because the positive claim is so commonly made. Presence establishes land-based corporate licensing. Absence establishes nothing whatsoever. Neither result transfers to a domain name, a brand, or an app.

Why does this confusion persist?

Because the wrong file is easy to find and the right one does not exist. A search for a PAGCOR licensee list returns the venue register within seconds, and it looks authoritative because it is authoritative — for a different question.

The margin notice on that file is doing everything it can. It states plainly that the listed entities are licensees for domestic land-based gaming venues and are not licensed to operate offshore. Anyone reproducing the file has read past a warning printed on the page they are reproducing, which suggests the reproduction is automated rather than considered.

The counts above are re-checked monthly against freshly retrieved files, and the archive keeps every revision we have read so that a change is visible rather than silently replaced.

Readers who need a definitive position on a particular operator will not get one from any public file, and should treat any site that offers one as having a source it has chosen not to name.

Does the regulator itself acknowledge the gap?

Indirectly, and the acknowledgement is easier to see in its hearing testimony than in its file listing.

At the Senate Committee on Games and Amusement session on 11 February 2026, PAGCOR set out participation figures for the online sector — roughly 10 million active players against 32 million registered accounts, per chairman Alejandro Tengco, reported by Inside Asian Gaming and AGB. The regulator can speak in detail about a sector whose licensee register it does not publish as a downloadable file, which is the gap this page is about.

Put the two together and the asymmetry sharpens. PAGCOR publishes a downloadable register for 258 land-based venue operators, a segment that produced ₱45.4 billion in the second quarter of 2026, and no downloadable register for the online segment that produced ₱36.2 billion and serves an estimated 10 million active players. Detailed participation data exists and reaches the Senate. A file a member of the public could check does not. That is a disclosure choice rather than a data-availability problem, and it is worth naming as one.

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.