Prize competition rules and regulators in the Netherlands
Prize competition rules in the Netherlands rest on one gaming statute, one code for promotional games of chance and one consumer authority. The Kansspelautoriteit supervises games where chance decides the winner, and it holds organisers to the Gedragscode promotionele kansspelen, the national code that spells out participation conditions, winner notification and what must be published before the game opens. A promoter who meets every requirement of that code runs a promotional game without applying for a licence; a promoter who departs from the code breaches the Wet op de kansspelen itself. Skill contests sit outside the gaming statute, yet the Autoriteit Consument & Markt still supervises them as commercial practices, and promising prizes without awarding them is always prohibited. The sections below set out who regulates what, which conditions bind an organiser and what follows from a breach.
Last confirmed against the sources on 8 October 2026.
The Kansspelautoriteit supervises games of chance, including promotional ones
The Kansspelautoriteit is the Dutch gaming authority, the regulator charged with enforcing the Wet op de kansspelen. Its remit reaches promotional games of chance, the draws and instant wins a company attaches to ordinary marketing. Where a prize is awarded and luck, not judgement, decides who wins, the game falls under this supervision regardless of how small the campaign is or how briefly it runs.
The authority does more than issue permits for large operations. It maintains and enforces the code of conduct for promotional games of chance, and it publishes on its own site what an organiser owes participants before a draw opens. Its enforcement reaches organisers who never applied for anything, precisely because the promotional route replaces the permit rather than the law.
For a participant, the practical meaning is straightforward. A brand running a prize draw in the Netherlands answers to a named regulator with published rules, and a participant who suspects the draw was unfair, undisclosed or manipulated has somewhere to take the complaint that is not the brand itself.
- A supermarket attaches a scratch element to a receipt, and the Kansspelautoriteit's code governs how the draw must be run.
- An online shop promises a prize draw among newsletter subscribers, which counts as a promotional game of chance under Dutch supervision.
- A radio campaign awards prizes by random selection, so the gaming statute and its code of conduct apply to the campaign.
The Gedragscode promotionele kansspelen sets the conditions for every promotional draw
The Gedragscode promotionele kansspelen is the code of conduct for promotional games of chance. The Kansspelautoriteit's own wording is blunt: at the moment an organiser no longer complies with the code, that organiser breaches the Wet op de kansspelen. The code is the practical rulebook, and the statute gives it teeth.
The code exists so that small promotional draws do not need an individual permit. In exchange for that exemption, an organiser accepts fixed conditions covering who participates, how winners are chosen, how winners are informed and what participants see before they enter. Departing from any of those conditions in a live campaign is not a style choice; it is the exact point at which the authority's quoted sentence starts to apply.
Reading the code before launching a draw is therefore the whole job of compliance for a promotional campaign. The conditions are published, they are written for exactly this use, and the regulator judges an organiser against them rather than against vague notions of fairness.
- A brand states the participation period and the winning conditions on the entry page before the draw opens.
- An organiser informs winners personally and publishes how the winner was determined once the draw has closed.
- A campaign that drops the required participation conditions from its entry page departs from the code and breaches the gaming statute.
A compliant promotional game needs no licence application
The Kansspelautoriteit states on its own page that an organiser does not need to apply for a permit for a promotional game of chance, provided the organiser meets the requirements of the Gedragscode promotionele kansspelen. The exemption is conditional. It exists for the campaign that follows the code, not for the campaign that borrows the format and skips the obligations.
The distinction matters because organisers often assume that a small prize draw is beneath the regulator's notice. The regulator's position is the opposite: the small, code-compliant promotional draw is precisely the case the exemption was written for. What removes the permit requirement is compliance, and what removes the exemption is non-compliance, at which point the permit question and the breach question arrive together.
An organiser planning a draw should therefore treat the code as the checklist and the exemption as the reward. Meeting every requirement means no application, no fee process and no waiting period; missing one means the campaign is unlawful from that moment, whatever its size.
- A café runs a compliant holiday draw among customers and never files any licence application with the gaming authority.
- A webshop copies the code's participation conditions into its campaign page and proceeds without a permit, as the authority allows.
- An organiser unsure whether its format meets the code checks the authority's published requirements before the campaign launches.
Skill contests sit outside the gaming statute but inside consumer law
The Wet op de kansspelen covers games where chance decides. A contest where skill, knowledge or judgement decides the winner is a different object, and the gaming statute does not govern it the way it governs a draw. A quiz with genuinely answerable questions, a photo judged on merit or a recipe competition sits on the skill side of that line.
Outside the gaming statute does not mean outside the law. The Autoriteit Consument & Markt supervises contests as commercial practices, and it names one abuse explicitly: organising a competition or promising prizes without actually awarding them. That prohibition applies to a skill contest exactly as it applies to a draw, and the ACM lists it among the misleading practices that are always prohibited, in every market and at every scale.
The line between chance and skill is therefore the first question for any organiser. Where chance decides, the code and the gaming statute govern; where skill decides, consumer law governs and the ACM's list of prohibited practices applies to the whole campaign.
- A newspaper runs a quiz whose winners are the entrants with the most correct answers, a contest of skill.
- A photography contest judged on merit by named judges falls outside the gaming statute and under consumer supervision.
- A fake contest that collects entries and never awards a prize is always prohibited under the consumer authority's list.
Enforcement reaches organisers who break the code or mislead participants
Two enforcement routes exist, and they attach to different failures. An organiser offering a promotional game of chance who departs from the Gedragscode promotionele kansspelen breaches the Wet op de kansspelen itself, in the Kansspelautoriteit's own words, and the gaming authority enforces that breach as a gaming matter.
Separately, the Autoriteit Consument & Markt enforces consumer law against misleading practices. Its published list of practices that are always prohibited includes organising a competition or promising prizes without really giving the prizes away. A campaign that hides conditions, invents winners or never hands over the advertised prize answers to the consumer authority regardless of whether chance or skill decided it.
The two routes overlap in the worst cases: a draw that ignores the code and never awards the prize breaches the gaming statute and commits a misleading practice at once. For participants, the lesson is that contest rules in the Netherlands are enforced by two named authorities, and neither requires a complaint from inside the industry.
- A campaign that quietly changes the winning conditions mid-draw departs from the code and answers to the gaming authority.
- A promoter that collects entrants' details through a draw it never intends to award faces the consumer authority's prohibited-practices list.
- An organiser that skips winner notification breaches the code and breaches the gaming statute in the same act.
What the law and the rules say
Two legal layers shape a Dutch prize competition. The first is the Wet op de kansspelen, the gaming statute that covers every game in which a prize is won and chance decides the outcome. The second is the Gedragscode promotionele kansspelen, the code of conduct drawn up for promotional games of chance, the kind a brand attaches to a product launch, a store opening or an online campaign. The Kansspelautoriteit states on its own pages that an organiser offering a promotional game of chance breaches the Wet op de kansspelen at the moment it fails to comply with that code. Compliance with the code is therefore not a courtesy; the statute points to it, and the regulator enforces the statute. Alongside both layers runs general consumer law, supervised by the Autoriteit Consument & Markt, which applies to contests of every kind, including skill contests.
What this guide does not cover
This page is a reference on Dutch contest law and its supervisors, and it deliberately stops at that line. It does not give legal advice for a specific campaign, and an organiser with a live dispute should seek counsel rather than a web page. It never tells a participant how to circumvent an organiser's published voting or entry limits, and it does not discuss tools that inflate entries or mask their origin; those sit outside lawful participation and outside this site's subject. It does not review individual campaigns or name compliant and non-compliant organisers beyond what the regulators' own pages state. It also does not cover prize draws run by licensed gaming operators under their own permits, taxation of prizes, or the rules of contests in other countries. Where the page cites a regulator, it cites the regulator's published wording, not an interpretation of it.
Common questions
The Kansspelautoriteit, the Dutch gaming authority, covers prize competitions where chance decides the winner, including promotional games of chance attached to ordinary marketing. It enforces the Wet op de kansspelen and judges a promotional draw against the Gedragscode promotionele kansspelen, the code of conduct the statute itself points to. Where skill or judgement decides instead, the contest leaves the gaming authority's remit and falls to the Autoriteit Consument & Markt, which supervises contests as commercial practices. In practice a reader should ask one question about any Dutch campaign: did luck or judgement pick the winner? Luck means the gaming authority; judgement means the consumer authority. Both publish their requirements openly, and both reach organisers who never sought a permit, because the promotional exemption depends on compliance rather than on registration.
The central statute is the Wet op de kansspelen, which governs games where a prize is won and chance decides the outcome. For promotional games of chance, the games brands attach to products and campaigns, the statute defers to the Gedragscode promotionele kansspelen, and the Kansspelautoriteit states plainly that an organiser who fails to comply with the code breaches the Wet op de kansspelen. Contests decided by skill sit outside that gaming framework, but they remain commercial practices, and consumer law applies to them in full. The Autoriteit Consument & Markt publishes a list of practices that are always prohibited, and organising a competition or promising prizes without actually awarding them appears on that list. The legal picture is therefore two-layered: the gaming statute with its code for draws, and consumer law for everything a contest promises.
Not for a promotional game of chance that follows the code. The Kansspelautoriteit states on its own page that no permit application is needed for a promotional game of chance, provided the organiser meets the requirements of the Gedragscode Promotionele Kansspelen. The exemption is tied to compliance, not to the size of the prize or the length of the campaign, so a small draw earns it just as a large one does. The reverse also holds: the moment an organiser departs from the code, the breach is of the Wet op de kansspelen itself, and the permit question returns together with the enforcement question. An organiser planning a campaign should read the code as a checklist before launch, because the conditions it sets, from participation terms to winner notification, are what stand between a lawful promotional draw and an unlawful one.
The Gedragscode promotionele kansspelen fixes the conditions a promotional draw must meet, and the Kansspelautoriteit enforces them through the Wet op de kansspelen. In practice the organiser states who participates, what the participation period is, how the winner is determined and how winners are informed, and participants see those conditions before the game opens. The code's purpose is disclosure before entry: a participant who hands over details or attention should know the winning conditions and the end of the campaign in advance. After the draw closes, the organiser follows through, informing winners and awarding what was promised. Failure at any of these points is not a nuance; the authority's own wording says that non-compliance with the code is a breach of the statute. For skill contests the same duties of honesty apply through consumer law, supervised by the Autoriteit Consument & Markt.
Yes, and the difference decides which regulator a campaign answers to. The Wet op de kansspelen covers games of chance, so a prize draw, a scratch element or any random selection falls under the Kansspelautoriteit and its Gedragscode promotionele kansspelen. A contest where skill, knowledge or judgement decides, such as a quiz with genuinely answerable questions or a work judged on merit, sits outside the gaming statute and needs no gaming permit. That does not remove it from supervision: the Autoriteit Consument & Markt treats contests as commercial practices, and its list of always-prohibited practices includes organising a competition or promising prizes without really awarding them. The boundary question, luck or judgement, is therefore the first thing an organiser settles. A campaign that blurs the line, advertising judgement while randomness picks the winner, risks falling under both regimes at once.
The breach is named in the law itself. The Kansspelautoriteit states that an organiser offering a promotional game of chance who does not comply with the Gedragscode promotionele kansspelen breaches the Wet op de kansspelen, so the breach is not a contractual matter between brand and participant but a statutory one the gaming authority enforces. Separately, the Autoriteit Consument & Markt enforces consumer law, and its list of practices that are always prohibited includes running a competition or promising prizes and then failing to give them away. A campaign that both ignores the code and withholds the prizes answers to both authorities. Consequences reach beyond the campaign itself: the organiser's published conditions become evidence of what it promised, and its departure from them is measurable. For participants, the practical route is to compare the published conditions against what actually happened.