MINCETUR Peru: licence requirements, technical standards and enforcement under Ley 31557 The DGJCMT, the 12 percent IJD and the local-presence rule that defines the Peruvian regime

Peru sits inside the Latin American regulated cluster alongside Brazil and Colombia, but the three regimes are built on three different doctrinal foundations. Colombia, the regional pioneer through Coljuegos, runs a concession-contract model with seventeen contracted operators as of mid-2025. Brazil, regulated from January 2025 under Law 14,790/2023 and supervised by the SPA inside the Ministry of Finance, runs a federal-permit model with a flat BRL 30 million fee per brand. Peru runs a local-presence operating-licence model: any legal entity, Peruvian or foreign, may apply, but the entity itself must be incorporated in Peru or hold a duly registered Peruvian branch. The contrast matters for entry planning, for tax structuring and for the ongoing supervisory contact point.

The Peruvian remote market reached commercial scale quickly. Playtech and other industry observers estimated remote sports-betting GGR at more than USD 345 million for 2025; broader industry tracking placed total online GGR comfortably above USD 350 million. The five leading licensed brands accounted for roughly 73 percent of recorded site traffic in 2025, a concentration ratio consistent with Colombia’s licensed sector and noticeably higher than the early Brazilian distribution. Local operators (Apuesta Total, Inkabet, Te Apuesto) compete with international heavyweights (Betsson, Bet365, 1xBet, Stake) under the same authorisation regime.

For an international operator the question is not whether Peru is large enough to model. It is whether the local-presence rule, the SBS-administered AML programme, the new ISC layer and the DGJCMT’s sanctioning posture justify the operational lift. The answer for any operator already running in Colombia or Brazil is almost always yes. The Andean cluster, completed by Chile’s pending framework and the ongoing Argentine provincial roll-out, is the LATAM growth story for the second half of the decade, and Peru is its second-largest licensed market.

Ley 31557 was promulgated on 13 August 2022 and published the next day in the Diario Oficial El Peruano. The original text contained two structural gaps that the legislative cycle then addressed. First, the taxpayer definition reached only Peruvian legal entities and Peruvian branches of foreign entities, leaving the de facto largest segment of the addressable supply (foreign-incorporated platforms serving Peruvian residents from outside the country) outside the tax perimeter. Ley 31806, enacted on 28 June 2023, closed that gap and brought foreign operators of remote-gambling platforms expressly within the IJD perimeter as taxpayers regardless of incorporation jurisdiction. Second, the activity definitions were tightened to remove ambiguities that had complicated the drafting of the implementing regulation.

DS 005-2023-MINCETUR is the operational text. It was approved by the Consejo de Ministros and published on 13 October 2023; under its own article on entry into force, both the regulation and the framework law itself became operative 120 days later, on 9 February 2024. The text is organised in seven titles (authorisation, operator obligations, supervision, sanctioning, technical standards, dispute resolution, transitional provisions) and 57 articles, with four technical-standard annexes: NT-I (technological platforms for remote gaming), NT-II (technological platforms for remote sports betting), NT-III (operational audit of the platforms) and NT-IV (the economic data that the platform must transmit in real time to MINCETUR’s data centre). The technical standards are themselves issued and revised at ministerial-resolution level (RM 244-2023-MINCETUR and successors).

The institutional regulator inside MINCETUR is the Dirección General de Juegos de Casino y Máquinas Tragamonedas (DGJCMT), a directorate within the Vice-Ministry of Tourism. The DGJCMT’s perimeter under Ley 31557 mirrors its perimeter under Ley 27153: it authorises operators, supervises operations, conducts inspections, imposes administrative sanctions and may order precautionary measures including the blocking of IP addresses, URLs, web pages and applications used for unauthorised supply. The Director General signs the operational resolutions; the formal authorising act for each platform takes the form of a resolución directoral published through the MINCETUR consultation portal.

The defining architectural feature of the Peruvian regime is the local-presence requirement. Article 4 of Ley 31557, as clarified by Ley 31806 and operationalised through DS 005-2023-MINCETUR, requires the authorisation holder to be a legal entity constituted in Peru or a duly registered Peruvian branch (sucursal) of a foreign company. A non-resident company cannot hold the authorisation directly; the Peruvian entity or branch is the licensee, files the supervisory returns, posts the guarantee and is the point of contact for the DGJCMT, SUNAT and the SBS.

The rule contrasts sharply with Brazil’s federal-permit model (where the SPA permit is held by the corporate group, with brand-level registration) and with Colombia’s concession-contract model (where Coljuegos contracts directly with the operating company without a Colombian-incorporation gate). The Peruvian rule has two practical consequences. First, it gives the DGJCMT a clear administrative counterparty for every supervisory action and every sanctioning procedure. Second, it forces operators to engage a Peruvian corporate, tax and labour footprint as part of market entry rather than as an optional layer.

Entry cost has two large lines: the one-time authorisation fee of S/ 2,970,000 per platform (tripled by Ley 31806 in May 2023, payable in full for the six-year authorisation term) and the financial guarantee. Article 19 of DS 005-2023-MINCETUR sets the guarantee amount at 200 UIT for the authorisation of a technological platform, with an additional 5 UIT per linked sports-betting room (sala) authorised under the same operator. The guarantee must take one of three forms (bank deposit, bank guarantee letter or surety bond) and must be issued by an entity supervised by the SBS; guarantees issued by foreign institutions are not accepted. At the 2026 UIT of S/ 5,500, the 200-UIT guarantee equates to S/ 1,100,000 (approximately USD 285,000 at prevailing exchange rates).

The application file requires corporate documentation of the Peruvian entity or branch, beneficial-ownership disclosure, technical-architecture documentation of the platform, a description of the responsible-gaming programme, the PLAFT manual aligned to the SBS framework, evidence of financial solvency (a positive equity balance is a hard requirement under Article 16), and the contract or technical specification of the connection to MINCETUR’s data centre. The transitional regime ran from 10 February to 10 March 2024: operators that were already serving Peruvian residents pre-regime were required to file an authorisation request in that window or cease operation.

The Reglamento permits the platform servers themselves to be located inside or outside Peru. This is a deliberate concession to operational reality: most international operators run their platforms from regional data centres in Brazil, Mexico or the United States, and the Peruvian regime does not insist on physical localisation of the production environment. What it does insist on is the data feed. NT-IV requires every authorised platform to maintain a continuous, real-time transmission of defined economic data to MINCETUR’s data centre. The fields include bet-level transaction data, settlement data, payout data and account-balance movements; the format is specified at field level; the frequency is functionally real time.

RNG certification, game-fairness testing and platform security must be conducted by laboratories recognised under the Peruvian framework. The Reglamento permits operators to rely on certifications issued by internationally recognised testing laboratories (GLI, BMM, eCogra, iTech Labs and similar), subject to local registration of the testing organisation and validation of the certification scope against NT-I and NT-II. Pre-launch certification of each platform is a prerequisite for the issuance of the operating authorisation, and recurring re-certification follows the cycle defined in NT-III. Material changes to the platform (new game integrations, RNG-component replacement, payment-rail changes) require notification and, depending on materiality, re-certification.

Identity verification before account funding or play is required. Verification runs against the DNI for Peruvian nationals or the carné de extranjería / equivalent identity document for foreign residents; anonymous play is not permitted. Article 7 of Ley 31557 and the corresponding articles of DS 005-2023-MINCETUR exclude defined categories from authorised play, including minors under 18, persons declared judicially incapacitated, persons who have self-excluded and (under the sector-specific extension of conflict-of-interest rules) directors and officials of the authorisation-granting regulator. Operators must verify the DNI against the prohibited-person dataset before each session.

Self-exclusion is operated at platform level rather than through a single national register equivalent to Spain’s RGIAJ or the UK’s GAMSTOP. Each authorised operator must offer a self-exclusion mechanism, must accept self-exclusion requests through the platform interface, must apply the exclusion across the operator’s authorised platforms in Peru, and must inform MINCETUR through the data feed. The Reglamento additionally requires platform-level player tools: deposit limits, time-on-site reminders and account-activity reporting available to the player on demand. A cross-operator national register has been the subject of regulatory consultation but is not in force as of mid-2026.

The Reglamento and successor MINCETUR resolutions impose a set of advertising obligations on operators and on third parties promoting authorised platforms. Commercial communications must include the standard warning “El juego a distancia y las apuestas deportivas a distancia en exceso pueden causar ludopatía” (excessive remote gaming and sports betting can cause gambling addiction), visibly displayed. Targeting of minors is prohibited; portrayal of gambling as risk-free or as a means of generating income is prohibited; testimonial-format advertising is subject to the standard transparency rules under Peruvian consumer law. Influencer promotion is treated as advertising for regulatory purposes: under the INDECOPI guide on influencer advertising, sponsored content must be labelled and must carry the standard responsible-gambling warning. INDECOPI sanctioned television personality Alejandra Baigorria in April 2025 for promoting an online slots platform without the responsible-gambling warning, a case that crystallised the supervisory standard for the influencer channel.

Resolución SBS N° 03622-2025 (the “Norma para la prevención del lavado de activos y del financiamiento del terrorismo aplicable a las personas jurídicas que explotan plataformas tecnológicas de juegos a distancia y/o de apuestas deportivas a distancia”) sets the sector standard. Operators must implement a Sistema de Prevención del Lavado de Activos y del Financiamiento del Terrorismo (SPLAFT) covering risk policies, customer due diligence, enhanced due diligence for high-risk customers (politically exposed persons, large-volume players), transaction monitoring, suspicious-transaction reporting (ROS) to UIF-Perú and record-keeping. The compliance officer (Oficial de Cumplimiento) is the central figure: appointed by the operator, formally registered with the SBS, responsible for the design and operation of the SPLAFT and for the relationship with UIF-Perú. The resolution gave operators 120 days from publication to implement the standard, taking the full obligation into effect from February 2026.

The reporting threshold for operations to be reported to UIF-Perú under the operator’s monitoring obligations begins at USD 2,500 in single transactions or aggregated activity, with enhanced scrutiny for movements involving former political figures and other PEP categories. The MINCETUR’s DGJCMT verifies operator compliance with the SBS framework alongside the SBS itself, with the power to sanction non-compliance through the Ley 31557 sanctioning regime independently of any SBS administrative action.

Player accounts must be held in the player’s name and may not be operated in the name of third parties. The Reglamento does not prescribe an exhaustive list of authorised payment rails; in practice authorised operators use the dominant Peruvian retail-payment options, including bank-transfer, debit and credit cards (subject to issuer policies), and the major Peruvian instant-payment wallets Yape (Banco de Crédito) and Plin (interbank). Cryptocurrency-denominated wagering is not expressly authorised and operators are expected to treat crypto on-ramps and off-ramps under the enhanced-due-diligence regime; the SBS guidance on virtual-asset risk applies. The PLAFT framework requires source-of-funds checks for high-value deposits and an audit trail linking deposits, betting activity and withdrawals back to the verified player identity.

The IJD entered into force on 1 April 2024, two months after the regulatory framework went live, following the publication of the SUNAT operational resolution defining the declaration form and payment cycle. The taxable base is the platform’s net monthly income, calculated as gross monthly income less refunds and prizes paid, with a flat 2 percent maintenance allowance deducted from net income before the 12 percent rate is applied. The structure mirrors the GGR-tax models used in Colombia and several European regimes, but the explicit 2 percent maintenance allowance is a Peruvian particularity. Foreign legal entities operating platforms accessible to Peruvian-resident players are within the taxpayer perimeter regardless of incorporation, following the Ley 31806 fix to the original Ley 31557 text.

The ISC layer was added by Decreto Legislativo N° 1644 in September 2024. The headline rate is 1 percent of the bet amount, applied at the moment the bet is placed by a Peruvian-resident player. The implementation rate was set transitionally at 0.3 percent under Decreto Supremo N° 008-2025-EF (published 19 January 2025) and stepped up to the headline 1 percent on 1 July 2025. Foreign legal entities operating the platforms act as ISC collection agents, withholding the tax at bet placement and remitting to SUNAT under the prescribed cycle. The combined IJD+ISC burden, depending on the win margin assumed for the platform, produces an effective tax line in the high teens of GGR for a typical sports-betting operator and slightly below for a high-margin casino operator. The combined burden sits meaningfully below Colombia’s 31 percent effective burden (15 percent exploitation right plus 16 percent national consumption tax under Decreto 0240 of March 2026) and below Brazil’s 12 percent federal GGR rate scheduled to rise to 13 percent in March 2026, 14 percent in January 2027 and 15 percent in January 2028 under LCP 224/2025.

The Reglamento operationalises the sanctioning scale set out in Ley 31557 in three tiers. Light infringements (faltas leves) attract an admonition or a fine between 1 and 50 UIT. Serious infringements (faltas graves) attract a fine between 50 and 150 UIT. Very serious infringements (faltas muy graves) attract a fine between 150 and 200 UIT plus cancellation of the authorisation or operational disqualification of the platform. At the 2026 UIT of S/ 5,500, the headline very-serious-tier fine sits at S/ 1,100,000 (approximately USD 285,000) per infringement. The DGJCMT may impose additional precautionary measures including the seizure of equipment and the blocking of the digital perimeter through which the unauthorised supply reaches Peruvian-resident players.

The transitional regime gave pre-existing operators until 10 March 2024 to file an authorisation request. Operators that continued to serve Peruvian-resident players after the cut-off without filing or after a denied application fell within the post-regime sanctioning perimeter. MINCETUR publicly committed to 100 percent fiscalisation of the activity in 2025, with the DGJCMT extending its remit from the longer-standing physical-casino oversight into the new remote-supply line. Concrete actions through 2024 and 2025 included the closure of physical premises offering unauthorised remote-betting access, the seizure of operating equipment and the issuance of platform-blocking orders coordinated with the telecommunications regulator OSIPTEL and with internet-access providers.

The licensed-operator sanctioning line has run alongside the unlicensed line but at lower individual amounts. The INDECOPI sanction on Alejandra Baigorria in April 2025 for advertising-rule breach (lack of the standard responsible-gambling warning in an influencer promotion) was the most-cited consumer-protection enforcement of the cycle; MINCETUR-led sanctions against authorised operators have so far focused on data-feed integrity, NT-IV compliance and PLAFT readiness ahead of the February 2026 SBS implementation deadline. Public registry of sanctions for the remote-gambling perimeter is in early formation; the institutional comparison point is the OSIPTEL public sanctions registry which has operated for a longer period and indicates the level of transparency the DGJCMT is moving toward.

The Peruvian regime has a moderate entry cost: a one-time S/ 2,970,000 authorisation fee (approximately USD 770,000) per platform for the six-year term, plus a 200-UIT guarantee equivalent to roughly USD 285,000 — combined still well below Brazil’s BRL 30 million (~USD 5.5 million) per brand, and on a longer six-year rather than five-year term. It is the heaviest of the three on the local-presence requirement: every authorised operator must hold a Peruvian legal entity or a registered branch, and the operating, tax and AML supervisory relationships all run through that entity. The tax stack sits in the middle, comparable to Colombia on GGR terms once the IJD and ISC are combined and meaningfully lighter than the Brazilian blended load. Player-protection architecture is more decentralised than Colombia’s national approach, with self-exclusion operated at platform level rather than through a single national register, but the SBS PLAFT regime is more developed than in either Colombia or Brazil and reaches the operator earlier in its compliance maturity.

An operator already running under Colombia’s Coljuegos contract will find the Peruvian operating-licence model conceptually familiar. An operator running under the Brazilian SPA permit will find the Peruvian local-presence requirement more demanding than the Brazilian SPE rule and will need to plan a Peruvian corporate, tax and labour footprint rather than a single-purpose holding vehicle. The cross-jurisdiction jurisdictions comparison tool sets the dimensions side by side at field level.