Gambling addiction help in Germany

Verified helplines

Helplines and online chat

The Infotelefon Glücksspielsucht on 0800 1 37 27 00 is run by the Bundesinstitut für Öffentliche Gesundheit (BIÖG, formerly the BZgA). Calls are free from German numbers and you do not have to give your name. It is open Monday to Thursday 10:00-22:00 and Friday to Sunday 10:00-18:00, so it is not a night line - if you are in the middle of an urge at 3am, the written services below are the ones that will be open.

BIÖG also runs check-dein-spiel.de, which is free and anonymous. It has a three-question risk check and a longer self-test, email counselling, a search tool for counselling centres near you, and two guided online programmes: Check Out for people who gamble, and Time Out for relatives.

Self-exclusion

OASIS is Germany's nationwide, cross-product player exclusion system, operated by the Regierungspräsidium Darmstadt in Hesse on behalf of all federal states. Under the 2021 State Treaty on Gambling, operators have to query it before letting anyone play: online casino and poker sites, sports betting online and in betting shops, Spielbanken, Spielhallen, virtual slot machine operators, lotteries drawn more than twice a week, and horse-race bookmakers. One registration therefore covers all of them.

The statutory baseline for a self-exclusion is one year, but you can ask for a shorter individual minimum when you apply - it just cannot go below three months. Register online or on a paper form sent to the Regierungspräsidium Darmstadt, or at a venue.

An OASIS entry does not lapse on its own. Once the minimum period has run, it ends only if you send a written application to have it lifted, which is a deliberate piece of friction: a bad night cannot undo it. An exclusion imposed by an operator or requested by a third party (a Fremdsperre) is open-ended, and the earliest you can apply to have it removed is after one year.

Blocking gambling payments and sites

Germany limits deposits at the level of the player, not the site. Under section 6c of the 2021 State Treaty, you may deposit no more than €1,000 per calendar month in total across every German-licensed online operator; compliance runs through the Limitdatei of the LUGAS supervision system. Three details matter in practice:

• You can set your own limit anywhere from €1 upwards, and a reduction takes effect immediately. An increase only applies after a seven-day wait.
• Failed deposit attempts count towards the limit.
• You can only be active with one operator at a time. LUGAS keeps an activity file, so you cannot have two sites open at once.

Raising the cap above €1,000 is not a checkbox: the operator has to see income documents and bank statements rather than a self-declaration, and confirm there are no signs of addictive play. The route runs to €10,000 a month, and anything between 10,000 and €30,000 is available to no more than 1% of an operator's active customers.

The controls that actually work across all licensed operators here are OASIS and the LUGAS limit, not a card-level block - if your own bank offers a gambling block, ask them to switch it on, but do not rely on it existing. For unlicensed sites, which query neither OASIS nor LUGAS, use device-level blocking software, and check any site against the GGL's whitelist of permitted operators before you assume it is regulated.

Free treatment and counselling

Gambling addiction is treated as an illness in the German system, and the official health portal gesund.bund.de states plainly that health insurance funds, local authority administrations or pension insurance organisations cover the cost of treatment. You do not pay for it out of pocket.

There are around 1,400 addiction advice centres (Suchtberatungsstellen) in Germany, of which about 300 specialise in gambling. That is the normal starting point, and the counselling-centre finder on check-dein-spiel.de will locate the nearest one. From there the routes are:

• Outpatient care through a counselling centre - the standard option if your work and housing are stable.
• Inpatient treatment in a clinic, used when outpatient conditions are not met or another dependency is involved.
• Self-help groups, used alongside either of the above to hold the change in place.

Individual and group sessions typically work through understanding the addiction, rebuilding self-control, sorting out money, and relapse prevention. If debt is the immediate crisis rather than the gambling itself, the counselling centre will point you to a Schuldnerberatung; our guide to handling gambling debt covers what to do first.

Support for family and friends

Relatives can call 0800 1 37 27 00 in their own right - the line is not only for people who gamble. BIÖG runs Time Out, a guided online programme built specifically for relatives, and Suchtberatungsstellen counsel family members whether or not the person gambling has come in.

A third party can also apply to have someone entered in OASIS. That entry is open-ended and can only be challenged after a year, so it is a serious step rather than an argument-ender; the more common sequence is to get your own counselling first. How to help someone with a gambling problem goes through what to say and what to stop paying for.

Gambling law and the regulator

Since 2023 the regulator is the Gemeinsame Glücksspielbehörde der Länder (GGL), based in Halle (Saale), which licenses operators and enforces the 2021 State Treaty on Gambling in force since 1 July 2021. The minimum age for gambling is 18.

The practical test of whether a site is legal in Germany is the GGL's whitelist of permitted operators. A site that is not on it is not bound by the €1,000 deposit limit, does not check OASIS, and is not supervised by anyone you can complain to. Our country-by-country guide to self-exclusion compares OASIS with the schemes in neighbouring countries, and the helplines directory lists lines outside Germany.