Is online gambling legal in Sierra Leone?

Legal overview

Sierra Leone has no dedicated law on online gambling and no authority that issues licences for online casinos. Lotteries have a long-standing legal basis: a 1974 survey by the Law Library of Congress records that Act No. 51 of 1962, amended by an NRC decree of 1967, allows the Minister of Finance to license a lottery, and the national lottery is run by the Sierra Leone State Lottery Company. Sports betting shops operate widely, and the tax side of the sector has been tightened through the annual Finance Acts rather than through a gambling statute.

In January 2025 the National Revenue Authority met betting companies to enforce the provisions of the Finance Acts of 2024 and 2025. Operators were reminded of their obligations for PAYE, withholding tax, GST and excise tax on gaming and betting, and were required to connect their systems to the NRA so that their activity can be audited. Officials warned that non-compliant companies face the penalties set out in the Finance Act 2025. As early as 2017, the State Lottery Company, the privatisation commission and the Anti-Corruption Commission publicly called for a regulatory policy for betting, which shows how thin the legal framework is.

For online casino games, the law is silent: no statute reviewed licenses them, and none expressly prohibits residents from playing on foreign sites. Offshore casinos that accept players from Sierra Leone are therefore unlicensed locally but not specifically outlawed, which places them in a grey market. Players have no Sierra Leonean regulator to turn to if an offshore site withholds winnings, and no official self-exclusion scheme or gambling helpline was found.

Verification status: this overview is based on secondary sources and has not yet been checked against the official law text or the regulator. Confirm the details with the national authority before relying on them.