Are prediction markets legal in Germany?

If you live in Germany and have watched prediction markets grow abroad, the obvious question is whether you can legally use one at home. The honest answer is that German law does not have a box labelled "prediction market." Instead, these platforms fall between two much older frameworks — gambling law and financial regulation — and which one applies depends heavily on how a market is built. This post walks through the landscape so you can understand the rules rather than guess at them.

Nothing here is legal advice. Rules change, and your own situation may differ. If real money and legal certainty matter to you, talk to a qualified German lawyer.

The gambling lens: GlüStV and the GGL

Germany's core gambling rulebook is the State Treaty on Gambling 2021 (the Glücksspielstaatsvertrag, or GlüStV 2021), which took effect on 1 July 2021 and created a single national licensing route for online sports betting, online poker, and virtual slot machines. Since 2023, the online market has been supervised by one central regulator: the Joint Gambling Authority of the Federal States (Gemeinsame Glücksspielbehörde der Länder, or GGL), based in Halle.

The GGL is active and increasingly assertive. Its 2025 activity report describes an enforcement approach that targets not only unlicensed operators but also the payment providers, affiliates, and platforms that help them reach German players. Licensed operators, meanwhile, work under some of the strictest player-protection rules in Europe: a €1,000 monthly deposit limit that applies across all licensed sites, a €1-per-spin cap on online slots, a mandatory five-second delay between spins, and outright bans on live casino games and progressive jackpots.

The key point for prediction markets is this: if a platform lets you stake money on an uncertain outcome and the result depends largely on chance, German authorities can treat it as a game of chance requiring a licence. No mainstream prediction market currently holds a German gambling licence, which is one reason the large international venues do not openly serve German customers.

The financial lens: when a market looks like a derivative

There is a second way to read a "yes/no" contract that pays out based on a future event: as a financial derivative. A contract whose value depends on whether something happens — an election result, an inflation figure, an interest-rate decision — resembles a binary option in structure. In the EU, binary options sold to retail investors have been heavily restricted since ESMA's intervention, and Germany's financial regulator, BaFin, has applied those limits domestically.

So a prediction market could, in principle, be regulated as a financial instrument rather than as gambling. That would bring it under MiFID II and BaFin supervision instead of the GGL. In practice, no widely used consumer prediction market has taken this route in Germany either, so the theoretical distinction does not yet translate into a clear licensed product for German residents. This tension — gambling rule or financial rule — is the same one playing out across the continent, as we covered in are prediction markets legal in Europe.

What this means for the big international platforms

The largest crypto-based prediction market, Polymarket, has generally restricted access from the EU and does not offer a licensed German product. That is not a quirk of one company; it reflects the fact that no clear licensing path currently fits the model. We go deeper into the access question in can Europeans use Polymarket. Trying to route around geographic restrictions with a VPN does not change your legal status, may breach a platform's terms, and can put deposits at risk — so it is not a workaround we recommend.

Where that leaves someone in Germany

The practical situation in 2026 is that a German resident has no straightforward, locally licensed way to trade real money on a general-purpose prediction market. You can follow the odds, read the markets as a forecasting signal, and learn how pricing works — but staking real euros on an unlicensed platform carries legal and financial uncertainty that is easy to underestimate.

That is exactly why learning the mechanics without money on the line is valuable. Understanding how a market turns a crowd of opinions into a single probability — why a contract trading at 63 cents implies a 63% chance — is a skill you can build regardless of what any regulator eventually decides. If you would rather practise entirely within the EU, our overview of European alternatives to Polymarket is a good next read.

Practise the skill without the legal grey zone

Outcomer lets you trade prediction markets with virtual money, so you can learn how probabilities, prices, and payouts fit together without depositing a cent or wading into unsettled German gambling law. It is a low-stakes way to get fluent in a tool that is only becoming more relevant. If you are new to the idea, start with trading with virtual money and build your intuition first.