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What types of PAGCOR licence and accreditation exist?

By Eric, Founder, RedClaw · Published 2026-10-05 · Last updated 2026-10-18

PAGCOR issues licences by activity rather than by company, and accredits business-to-business suppliers separately from the operators they supply. A single corporate group can therefore hold a venue licence, no online authorisation, and a supplier accreditation at the same time. Treating any one of those as evidence for the others is the error that makes most licence claims unreliable.

Licences here attach to activities, not to companies. That single structural fact explains most of the confusion in secondary coverage, because it means one company can be simultaneously licensed, unlicensed and accredited depending on which question you ask.

What categories does PAGCOR actually publish?

Three, as downloadable files. Venue operations, game content provision, and game aggregation. The last two are grouped under accreditation rather than licensing.

Counts are parsed from the PDFs at pagcor.ph. The accredited-affiliates file additionally flags entries that have yet to commence commercial operations, which is a status the register carries and most reproductions drop.

Why does the accreditation register flag non-operating entries?

Because accreditation and trading are different states. An entity can clear the accreditation process and not yet be live, and PAGCOR marks those cases with an asterisk in its own file.

That asterisk is the detail almost every reproduction loses. Our parser lifts it into a separate field rather than leaving it inside the company name string, because a name carrying a stray asterisk breaks any later matching and because the flag is genuinely meaningful. An accredited-but-not-trading supplier tells you the pipeline is filling. Merging it into a headline count of accredited suppliers overstates how much of the market is actually served, and the merged figure is what circulates.

How does a supplier accreditation differ from an operator licence?

Direction of the relationship. An accredited supplier sells to licensed operators. A licensed operator sells to players. Neither status implies the other.

The 31 March 2026 accreditation deadline makes this distinction consequential rather than academic. PAGCOR required business-to-business suppliers of online gaming services to be fully accredited by that date, treating unaccredited suppliers as unauthorised thereafter. Cross-referencing that against the advertising restrictions introduced across the same year gives a coherent picture of regulatory direction: the regulator has been closing off the supply chain and the promotional channel simultaneously, without revoking operator licences. A reader watching only for a ban would have recorded nothing happening. We think that reading is wrong, and the reasoning is set out in advertising rules.

Can one company hold several of these?

Yes, and several do. AB Leisure Exponent, Inc. appears both on the venue register and among accredited game content providers, which is exactly the situation that breaks single-register reasoning.

Seeing a familiar company name on one list therefore establishes nothing about its status on another. The check has to be run per register and per question, which is the method set out in how to verify a Philippine gaming licence yourself.

What is still missing from the public files?

A downloadable register of domestic online gaming licensees at the same location as the others. Its absence is the reason this section keeps saying what cannot be established rather than filling the gap.

We would rather publish a stated gap than a confident guess, because a licence tracker whose gaps are invisible is worse than one with none at all. Which registers do exist, and what each answers, is indexed in the PAGCOR licence section, and the file-level detail sits in which PAGCOR list covers online casinos.

How do the categories compare in size?

Venue licensing dwarfs supplier accreditation. 253 venue entries against 59 accredited suppliers is a little over four to one at the current revisions.

Hold on to that ratio, because it says something about market structure that neither file states directly. 253 licensed venue operators at 30 September 2026 are served by 45 accredited content providers and 14 aggregators at 14 October 2026, so roughly four licensed operators exist for every accredited supplier. Supply is concentrated and demand is fragmented. A regulator that then imposes an accreditation deadline on the supply side, as PAGCOR did on 31 March 2026, is applying pressure at the narrow end of that funnel, where a small number of decisions affect a large number of downstream businesses. We read the deadline as a structural lever rather than an administrative tidy-up, and the same reading applies to the advertising measures in advertising rules.

What should a reader take from all this?

That “licensed” is never a complete sentence in this market. Licensed for what, at which revision date, under which corporate name.

Every check on this site carries all three qualifiers for that reason. The procedure is in how to verify a Philippine gaming licence yourself, and worked examples are at 777PUB.

Which categories actually carry the revenue?

Licensed casinos and Electronic Games, in roughly equal measure. Between them they took 92.6 per cent of Philippine gaming revenue in the second quarter of 2026.

The last row is the structural oddity. Suppliers are the only category where accreditation is fully documented in a public file and revenue is not reported at all, while Electronic Games is the exact inverse: ₱36.25 billion of reported revenue and no downloadable register. So the categories PAGCOR documents best and the categories that carry the most money are close to complementary. Anyone treating the published registers as a map of the market is reading a map drawn to a different purpose. Revenue figures come from the quarterly filings in official PAGCOR data.

What did the March 2026 supplier deadline actually change?

It converted accreditation from a credential into a precondition. After 31 March 2026, a business-to-business supplier of online gaming services without accreditation is treated as unauthorised.

The practical effect runs downhill. An operator sourcing games from an unaccredited studio is exposed regardless of its own licence status, because the content in its lobby is content the regulator has not cleared. That makes the accredited-suppliers register useful to a reader in a way the operator registers are not: the studios are visible on any casino site, so a public check against the supplier list is possible even when the operator discloses nothing about itself. That method is set out in how to verify a Philippine gaming licence yourself.

Does a category tell you anything about size?

Only through the revenue filings, and only at segment level. The registers themselves carry no financial information at all.

That separation is worth holding in mind when reading any licence list. A register with 253 entries and a register with 14 entries are not describing a large market and a small one. They are describing how many entities hold a particular authorisation, which is a different quantity from how much money moves through it. Bingo Operations has hundreds of licensed venues and produced ₱3.57 billion in the second quarter of 2026. Electronic Games has no published register at all and produced ₱36.25 billion.

What happens to a category when the rules tighten?

Nothing visible in the register. The entries stay, and the constraints on what those entries may do change underneath them.

This is the part outside observers consistently miss, and we spend a lot of time explaining it to clients. Through 2026 the advertising window closed, the supplier accreditation deadline passed, wallet deep links were removed and responsible-gaming requirements were strengthened. Not one of those events removed a name from a register. An analyst tracking licence counts would have recorded a stable market. An operator’s cost base moved in three separate places over the same period. Licence registers are a poor instrument for detecting regulatory pressure, and they are the instrument almost everyone uses. What actually moved is set out in advertising rules.

Is there a category that covers affiliates?

No. The word “affiliates” in the accredited-affiliates register refers to business-to-business suppliers, not to marketing partners, and no PAGCOR register covers marketing affiliates at all.

Each count on this page carries the revision date of the file it came from, and every one of those files is stored at the version parsed. When PAGCOR reissues a register, the figures here change and the last-updated date changes with them.

Anyone who needs a category confirmed for a specific company should run the procedure directly against the source file rather than relying on this summary of it.

Do the categories tell you what the rules are?

No. A register records who holds what. What holders may actually do changes without any register moving, which is why the categories have to be read alongside the rule changes.

Through the year to February 2026 PAGCOR banned out-of-home advertising, prohibited broadcast advertising during the 17:30 to 20:30 window, tightened know-your-customer rules so identity checks precede a first deposit, and said publicly that a total television and radio ban is under consideration. Inside Asian Gaming and AGB both reported the position. Not one of those measures altered a single register entry.

That is the practical reason we never quote a category count as a description of market conditions. A client asking “is this market getting harder” is not asking how many licences exist. They are asking what a licensee may now do with one, and over the past year the answer changed four times while the registers stayed still. Anyone monitoring this market by tracking licence counts is watching the one indicator designed not to move.

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.