Is Rainbet legal in New Zealand?

The short answer is that Rainbet is not licensed here, that this is a problem for Rainbet rather than for you, and that the position changed more in 2026 than in the previous twenty years combined. The long answer is worth reading, because New Zealand has just built a regulatory regime from scratch and almost everything written about offshore casinos before May 2026 is now out of date.

Everything below is taken from the statutes themselves — the Online Casino Gambling Act 2026, the Gambling Act 2003 as amended, and the Racing Industry Act 2020 — rather than from other gambling sites. Where a section is named, you can look it up.

What Rainbet is licensed for

Rainbet is operated by RBGAMING N.V. under a licence issued by the Anjouan Gaming Board, the regulator of the Autonomous Island of Anjouan in the Union of the Comoros. It is a real licence and it is not a fake one; Anjouan is a recognised, if permissive, offshore licensing jurisdiction.

What it is not is a New Zealand authorisation. It creates no obligations enforceable here, gives no New Zealand body oversight of the platform, and provides no route for a New Zealand customer to escalate a dispute to anyone with power over the operator. A licence tells you which government the operator answers to. In this case, that government is roughly 13,000 kilometres away and has no relationship with yours.

The old position, and why it was strange

Before May 2026, New Zealand’s treatment of online casino gambling was one of the odder arrangements in the developed world.

The Gambling Act 2003 prohibited remote interactive gambling outright — section 9(2)(b) — and defined it as gambling at a distance through a communication device. On its face that covers online casino play. But the definition then excluded, among other things, gambling by a person in New Zealand conducted by a gambling operator located outside New Zealand. The prohibition therefore bit on anyone running an online casino from New Zealand, and not at all on an offshore one.

The result was a market of pure absence. New Zealanders could play at any offshore casino they liked, entirely lawfully, with no local operator permitted to compete for their business, no regulator supervising the sites they used, no harm-minimisation requirements, no age verification standard, no complaints process and no levy funding treatment. The only real restriction was section 16 of the Gambling Act, which made it an offence to publish an overseas gambling advertisement in New Zealand — a rule about marketing rather than about play, carrying a fine of up to $10,000 and, as an infringement offence under Schedule 6, a fee of $5,000.

That is the arrangement the Online Casino Gambling Act 2026 was written to end.

What the Online Casino Gambling Act 2026 does

The Act is Public Act 2026 No 14. It received the Royal assent on 28 April 2026 and came into force on 1 May 2026, with two later commencements: sections 66 and 67 on 1 December 2026, and the tax provisions in sections 81 to 86 on 1 January 2027.

Section 3 sets out five purposes, and the first two are the structural ones: to establish a licensing regime for online casino gambling, and to prohibit the conduct and advertisement of unlicensed online casino gambling. The other three are harm prevention, consumer protection, and ensuring that the money benefits the community.

The two prohibitions

Section 9 — a person may conduct online casino gambling in a way that lets someone in New Zealand take part only if they hold a licence and comply with it.

Section 10 — a person may publish, or arrange to publish, an advertisement relating to online casino gambling in a way that brings it to the attention of someone in New Zealand only if they do so under a licence.

Section 4 then does the work that makes those provisions bite on offshore businesses. The prohibitions in sections 9(1) and 10(1) apply to a person regardless of whether the person is in or outside New Zealand. For advertising, subsection (4) adds the limiting condition that catches it: the rules apply to an overseas publisher, but only to the extent the advertisement is published so as to reach people in New Zealand.

Neither section says anything about the person placing the bet.

The licensing regime

Access to the market runs through three stages, all administered by the Secretary for Internal Affairs. The Secretary invites expressions of interest by public notice; accepted applicants go into a competitive process that determines both who may apply and what the licence costs; successful bidders pay that amount and apply.

The caps are firm. No more than 15 licences may be held at any time, and no person may have significant influence over more than three — with influence defined as holding 20% or more of the voting power or the securities. A licence runs for up to three years from grant unless a shorter period is specified, is renewable on six months’ notice, and is not transferable. No licence may be granted for gambling that competes with a protected New Zealand lottery.

Licensed operators carry duties that are worth listing precisely because Rainbet carries none of them: reasonable steps to ensure players are at least 18 (section 38); reasonable steps to minimise harm (section 39); display of a registration icon on the platform and on visual advertising, so a New Zealand player can see at a glance whether a site is licensed (section 41); a prohibition on offering credit (section 42); a published complaints process with responses inside 40 working days and a complaints register (sections 45 and 46); and entry on a public register of operators and licences (section 74).

Enforcement: civil, fast, and expensive

The enforcement architecture is the part offshore operators should read twice.

Breaching section 9 or section 10 is a civil liability act under section 50, as is failing to comply with a take-down notice or with an information request. The Secretary can issue formal warnings and publicise them, accept enforceable undertakings, and — the sharp instrument — issue a take-down notice under section 56.

A take-down notice can go to any unlicensed person the Secretary considers is conducting online casino gambling or publishing advertising for it, and can require any measures the Secretary considers necessary or desirable to stop the platform or the advertisement reaching people in New Zealand. Section 57 requires the notice to specify a compliance deadline within two days of issue. Section 59 sends non-compliance to the High Court.

Then the money. Under sections 61 and 62 the Secretary may apply to the High Court for a pecuniary penalty. For information failures the cap is $10,000. For everything else — including conducting or advertising unlicensed online casino gambling — it is $300,000 for an individual and $5 million for any other person. The standard of proof is civil.

What the Act does not contain is equally worth knowing. There is no ISP-blocking power — no register of prohibited domains, no requirement on New Zealand internet providers to filter anything. There is no payment-blocking provision either. New Zealand chose take-downs and penalties over the DNS-filtering approach used in Poland, Italy and Norway.

Where all of this leaves the player

Now to the question you came for, stated as precisely as the statutes allow.

Playing at Rainbet from New Zealand is not an offence. Three separate things have to be true for that conclusion, and all three are:

1. The new Act does not reach you. Its prohibitions are on conducting (section 9) and advertising (section 10). Its enforcement is civil and directed at persons who carry out a civil liability act — which is defined by reference to breaches of the Act’s operator-facing duties. Its only criminal offence, section 66, is participating in online casino gambling on behalf of someone in New Zealand under 18, knowing or reckless as to their age, punishable by a fine of up to $10,000 from 1 December 2026.

2. The old Act no longer reaches you either. On 1 May 2026, section 88 of the new Act amended the Gambling Act 2003 in two matching places. Section 9(1)(ba) now lists online casino gambling among the categories that are not prohibited under that Act. And the definition of remote interactive gambling was amended to exclude online casino gambling outright, with the offshore carve-out narrowed to gambling “that is not online casino gambling”. Online casino play has been lifted out of the Gambling Act’s prohibitions and put under the new regime instead.

3. The betting side is covered too. Section 74AAA of the Racing Industry Act 2020 says no person other than TAB NZ may offer racing or sports betting to a person in New Zealand, and applies that regardless of where the operator sits. But section 19(4) of the Gambling Act 2003, inserted in June 2025, says in terms that an individual may not be convicted of participating in illegal gambling for placing a bet with an offshore betting operator in contravention of section 74AAA. Parliament considered whether to penalise the punter and decided against it, explicitly.

So there is no fine, no forfeiture and no conviction risk attached to your play. The obligations, the penalties and the take-down notices all sit on the other side of the table.

What you actually give up

Not being liable is not the same as being protected, and this is where an honest guide earns its keep.

No complaints path. The complaints process in sections 45 and 46, and the Secretary’s own complaints jurisdiction in sections 68 to 70, apply to licensed operators. Bring the Department of Internal Affairs a dispute with an unlicensed offshore casino and there is nothing for it to adjudicate. Your practical remedy is the operator’s support desk, then the Anjouan Gaming Board.

No exclusion that reaches the site. New Zealand’s existing multi-venue exclusion covers land-based venues. The new Act provides for a register of people excluded from online casino gambling, to be established by regulations under section 75(3) — but only licensed operators will be obliged to check it. An offshore site will not. If self-exclusion is part of how you manage your gambling, an unlicensed casino is a hole in it, and that is the single most important sentence on this page.

No harm-minimisation floor. Deposit limits, reality checks, loss limits and the duty in section 39 to take reasonable steps to minimise harm are licence obligations. Whatever tools Rainbet offers, it offers voluntarily and can change at will.

No age-verification standard. Section 38 requires licensed operators to take all reasonable steps to confirm players are at least 18. Email-only signup is not that.

No supervised funds handling. No requirement about how player balances are held, no segregation rule, no route to recover a balance if the operator stops serving this market.

Set against that, two genuine protections do survive offshore. The Originals are provably fair, so you can cryptographically verify after the fact that a result was not manipulated — a check that does not depend on any regulator. And third-party games run certified RNGs tested by the same laboratories that serve licensed markets, because the studios need those certifications for their regulated business. Neither helps if the operator simply refuses to pay you.

The date on the calendar

1 December 2026 is the date to have in mind. From then, unlicensed operators are expected to be out of the New Zealand market. The Department of Internal Affairs has been explicit that full operation of the licensed regime is a 2027 matter, and the transition is being phased — but the direction is settled.

There is no regulatory event that will lock you out of your account, and nothing here suggests a balance is at imminent risk. What it does mean is that an offshore casino’s continued access to New Zealand players is now something the government has decided to end, using tools with two-day deadlines and seven-figure penalties. Treat that as a reason to keep your balance small and withdraw regularly, which is sound practice with any offshore operator regardless.

Whether Rainbet applies for one of the 15 licences is unknown, and no honest guide would predict it. If it did, the picture on this page would change completely — and you would be able to check for yourself on the public register kept under section 74.

The bottom line

Rainbet is a real platform with a real, if permissive, offshore licence. It is not licensed in New Zealand and, from December 2026, is not supposed to be serving this market. Playing there is lawful for you and unprotected for you, in equal measure. That combination is the whole answer, and anyone who tells you it is simply “legal” or simply “illegal” has flattened it in one direction or the other.

If you go ahead, do it knowing that every safeguard in the new Act was written for licensed sites and none of it applies to this one. If that trade is one you accept, you can sign up at Rainbet.

18+ only. Gambling costs money; only play with what you can afford to lose. No New Zealand exclusion scheme covers an offshore site. Free, confidential support is available from the Gambling Helpline on 0800 654 655, 24 hours a day, or by texting 8006. See responsible gambling.

Last updated: 2 September 2026