Romania is moving to settle a long-running fight over gambling advertising rules after the Senate cleared a bundle of proposals at the end of 2025, teeing up what lawmakers and legal observers expect to be an early-2026 push for tighter limits on where and when operators can promote betting and gaming.
Under the plan outlined by Romanian media and industry reporting, the review period begins in January 2026, with the Chamber of Deputies, the decisional chamber in this process, expected to restart debates once the next parliamentary session opens in February.
Street ads, time windows, and broader consumer-law alignment
The measures being discussed span several fronts, but the headline items are familiar to anyone tracking Romania’s recent policy direction: less gambling marketing in public view, and tighter rules on when promotions can reach audiences.
Recently, lawmakers are also weighing restrictions that would curb street-level and other public-facing advertising, alongside stricter time-based limits for online and broadcast campaigns intended to reduce exposure during hours when younger users are most active.
Undoubtedly, the Senate’s year-end vote does not finalise any of this. Instead, it sends competing drafts onward to the Chamber of Deputies and the relevant committees, where negotiations are expected to shape the final legislative approach.
ONJN is under scrutiny, but still positioning itself as the central authority
ONJN remains Romania’s primary gambling regulator in law and practice, despite political pressure. And in early January, ONJN president Vlad-Cristian Soare published a 2026 programme that tries to do two things at once: show a tougher enforcement posture and argue for a cleaner, modernised legislative framework.
Soare has characterised 2025 as an “uncomfortable” year for the regulator, but he has argued it still delivered measurable gains in enforcement and transparency. In its year-end accounting, ONJN said it seized more than 200 gaming machines, blocked or blacklisted more than 200 illegal gambling websites, and filed 48 criminal complaints linked to financial crime and unlicensed activity.
Now, ONJN will be looking ahead to straightening things out at the start of 2026.
New tools in 2026: self-exclusion and a QR-based registry check
In his programme, Soare flagged two rollouts targeted for Q1 2026: a unified national self-exclusion system designed to work across both retail and online gambling, and a geolocation-based QR framework built into ONJN’s central register.
In the open-letter programme, Soare summed up the QR objective in plain language:
“Any citizen can now verify where gaming machines are located, who owns them and whether they are legal,” he wrote.
Separate reporting tied to the parliamentary reform package points to a wider push to harmonise self-exclusion across channels by the first half of 2026, broadly aligning with the regulator’s implementation timetable.
The political destination: a rewritten framework, not just new ad rules
Even as the advertising debate reboots, both lawmakers and the regulator are pushing that the endgame is wider than marketing restrictions.
Soare has publicly backed a more comprehensive rewrite of Romania’s gambling legislation, urging policymakers to move toward “a coherent and efficient legislative framework” to replace what he called “a morally outdated” gambling law.
Legal industry watchers are also treating early 2026 as a hinge point. Cosmina Simion, managing partner at WH Simion & Partners, described the Senate’s movement on public and street advertising as part of a broader consolidation effort, saying:
“Romania is entering a phase of regulatory consolidation in the gambling sector, including in relation to advertising rules.”
She added that the direction for 2026 should be “a stable and transparent regulatory environment” that promotes responsible gambling, supports a sustainable licensed market, and limits illegal growth.
The immediate timeline is now more defined. The review process begins in January 2026 off the back of the Senate’s year-end authorisations, with the expectation that the Chamber of Deputies will restart debates when the next parliamentary session opens in February, and that committee work will shape whatever final package emerges.
With ONJN’s statement, it is clear that those tracks have turned advertising into the opening battleground of a wider reform cycle, one now mixing player-protection messaging with questions over enforcement capacity, regulatory trust, and whether Romania is heading for incremental adjustments or a full rewrite of its gambling framework.
Source: SBC News