The political environment in the Philippines has apparently become tougher. In July 2025, some lawmakers proposed stricter measures against online gambling in the Philippines. Senator Erwin Tulfo even declared that he wanted to completely stop this activity in the country. However, the official response from PAGCOR was not so tough.
Pressure Is Building, but PAGCOR Has Not Changed Course
The official statement from the regulator was that it would comply if Congress passed a law and the President signed it. Otherwise, PAGCOR would continue to focus on the fight against online illegal gaming.
PAGCOR has since doubled down on regulation, rather than prohibition. In September 2025, Chairman Alejandro Tengco stated that the imposition of a total ban would only force gamblers into the arms of illicit operators, while the state would lose out in the process.
Electronic games, according to PAGCOR, raked in PHP154.51 billion in gross gaming revenue in 2024, an increase from the PHP58.16 billion generated in the same period the previous year. That was almost half of the total industry’s GGR. In the first half of 2025, the sector generated an additional PHP114.83 billion, pushing PAGCOR’s total revenues to PHP59 billion.
The Squeeze Has Already Started
The regulatory squeeze is already being felt in payments. In August 2025, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas ordered supervised institutions to remove links that provided users with in-app gambling access via mobile payment services. Although the measure didn’t ban the payment systems for online gambling, it closed one of the easiest gateways into the market pending the formulation of the standards.
Advertising is facing similar challenges. In a Senate hearing on February 11, 2026, PAGCOR announced that they were considering a full ban on online gambling ads on TV and the radio. The debate didn’t come out of nowhere. PAGCOR and the Ad Standards Council have already begun to tighten the rules on advertisements, especially on billboards and TV exposure.
Summary
The current course appears to be one of containment rather than collapse. The state is making it more difficult to access illegal gambling. However, it is also trying to keep the legal market within the system. This might not resonate with all the critics, but this approach is closer to how regulators tend to act when the industry is too big to ignore.
