The law

Online gambling law in Alberta, from the Criminal Code to the list

Alberta's online casinos sit at the bottom of a stack of rules four layers deep, from a federal statute written long before the internet to a list of fifty-one sites updated as operators come and go. Read in order, the stack is simpler than it looks, and each layer answers a question a player is likely to ask.

The federal layer: who may run a game at all

Gambling in Canada starts in the "Criminal Code", which forbids most forms of it and then makes exceptions, and the exception that matters here is section 207. It allows a province to "conduct and manage" a lottery scheme (the Code's broad term, which covers casino games), and since 1985 it has reserved to the province alone any scheme "operated on or through a computer", which is the legal door through which every online casino in Canada has had to pass.

The words "conduct and manage" carry the whole system, because a province cannot simply license private casinos as some countries do: it has to remain the one conducting and managing the game, which is why every Canadian model, Alberta's included, puts a "public body" at the centre and the "private operators" around it (under contracts rather than under licences in the European sense).

The provincial statute: the iGaming Alberta Act

The second layer is the "iGaming Alberta Act", introduced as Bill 48 on March 26, 2025 by Dale Nally, as Minister of Service Alberta and Red Tape Reduction. It passed third reading on May 8, received Royal Assent the same month, and its key sections came into force by "order in council" on June 4, 2025 (our page on the Act itself goes through it section by section, in plain words).

What the Act does, at its simplest, is create the Alberta iGaming Corporation, a Crown corporation that conducts and manages online gambling on the province's behalf, and amend the "Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis Act" so that AGLC can register and supervise the private companies that run the sites. The corporation satisfies the Criminal Code; the companies do the work, under its contracts and AGLC's rules.

The rules: AGLC's standards

The third layer is where most of the detail lives. AGLC published its "Standards and Requirements for Internet Gaming" on January 13, 2026, and updated them on March 17 and June 18, 2026, the second update moving the advertising rules out of a regulation schedule (Schedule 1.1) and into the standards themselves.

These standards are what a player meets in practice, although few players ever read them (and few have any reason to). They decide that the minimum age is eighteen, that limits must be offered at sign-up, that player funds sit in a "trust account" in Canada, that cryptocurrency is excluded, and that bets on elections are forbidden (a rule added by a bulletin in March 2026).

The list: the layer you can check

The fourth layer is, in our view, the most useful to a player and the easiest to overlook. AiGC publishes the "list of registered sites", and a site appears on it only when AGLC has registered the operator, AiGC has signed its agreement and notified the launch; when we read it on November 12, 2026, it held fifty-one sites run by thirty-one named companies.

Everything else in the stack is invisible from the outside, while the list is public, which is why every card we publish prints the row of its site (the method is on how to check a site). If a site you meet is not on the list, it is not authorized in Alberta, whatever its footer says about a licence from somewhere else!

What the stack means for a player

The player is barely mentioned in the Criminal Code, which is aimed at whoever runs or promotes a game (the operator, the advertiser, the keeper of a gaming house), and the practical consequences of the provincial model fall almost entirely on the operators. What the model gives the player is a set of protections that exist only on registered sites: limits, "segregated funds", the province's self-exclusion and a complaint route that ends at AiGC.

Two rules fall on the player directly, and both, as we explain elsewhere, are easy to break by accident. The first is the age, eighteen in Alberta (a year younger than in most provinces), and the second is location, since a registered site may only take bets from a person physically in the province (both are explained on eighteen, and inside Alberta).

Where to go next

The pages in this section take each piece in turn: who does what between AGLC and AiGC, what an advert may say, tax on winnings, complaints and the seventy-two hours, sites that are not on the list, Play Alberta and the other provinces.

We have written them from the province's own documents, read on the dates shown, and from the trade press where the documents are silent (in which case the page says so). Rules change, and the Alberta ones are young; if a page and the province's site disagree, the province is right, and we would be grateful to hear about it.

By the Alberta Casinos Online editorial team · Last updated: November 13, 2026 · Online since 2026