Data, records and curiosities
Prohibitions fall into three families — religious, revolutionary and commercial — and the map moves. The UAE went from an outright ban to a licensed national lottery inside a year.
Lottery prohibition is less common than people assume, less stable than people assume, and rarely motivated by what people assume.
This article names only positions we could verify against a working source. It also names, explicitly, the countries where we could not — because the alternative is repeating an unsourced list that half the internet has already copied from itself.
| Country | Status | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Saudi Arabia | No lottery. Gambling and lottery illegal; penalties include fines, imprisonment and asset confiscation, and gambling sites are blocked. | Sharia; no single statute is named in the sources we could reach |
| Pakistan | No lottery. Gambling illegal under the Prevention of Gambling Act 1977 (derived from the British Public Gambling Act 1867), with provincial versions from 1978. A narrow exception exists for provincially regulated "tourist complexes" open to foreign visitors only. | Statute plus maisir prohibition under the Penal Code |
| Cuba | No state lottery. Prohibited since the 1959 Revolution — though bolita, an informal numbers game keyed to the results of the Florida Lottery, continues to be played widely. | Post-revolutionary prohibition |
That is a much shorter list than most "countries where the lottery is banned" articles carry, and the reason is that most of the rest of those lists are not verifiable.
This is where the interesting cases are, and where most reporting goes wrong.
China does not ban lotteries; it monopolises them. The Welfare Lottery (established 1987) and the Sports Lottery (established 1994) are legal and enormous. All other gambling has been prohibited since 1949, and any private or unofficial lottery is illegal gambling. The Chinese government does not legally classify its two state lotteries as gambling at all (Gambling in China).
India is a state-by-state patchwork. Government lottery is legal in a reported 13 states, with Kerala State Lotteries — established in 1967 and the first in India — the best-known operator, alongside Punjab, Nagaland, Goa and Sikkim. Before 1967 private lotteries were permitted, then banned in favour of state lotteries. Bihar has an explicit ban on all lotteries (Lotteries by country). The "13 states" count traces to an industry source rather than a government one, and the state-level position genuinely changes from session to session — treat any list, including this sentence, as needing a check against the specific state before relying on it. See Kerala Lottery.
Cambodia bars its own citizens from the casinos, which are open to foreigners only — but Cambodians may play through government-sanctioned gaming including five separate privately run national lotteries, under the Law on the Management of Commercial Gambling promulgated in 2020 (Gambling in Cambodia).
The United States has five states with no lottery at all: Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada and Utah. The reasons are entirely different from one another — religious objection in Alabama, a constitutional prohibition on all gambling in Utah, and in Nevada sustained opposition from the casino industry, which does not want the competition (Lotteries in the United States, Las Vegas Review-Journal). Alaska and Hawaii are non-contiguous and face none of the cross-border sales pressure that pushed the mainland states to adopt.
All five still have none as of 2026. Alabama's legislature has repeatedly failed to pass enabling legislation, and Nevada's proposals have run into resort-industry opposition each session.
Four regularly appear on prohibition lists and should not:
The clearest evidence that this map moves is the United Arab Emirates.
Gambling was prohibited. Then the federal General Commercial Gaming Regulatory Authority (GCGRA) was established, and in late July 2024 it awarded a licence to The Game LLC to operate a national lottery. Tickets went on sale in November 2024 and the first live draw was held on 14 December 2024, with tickets at Dh50 and a jackpot of Dh100 million (Khaleej Times).
The UAE Lottery and its Lucky Day game are now the only regulated lottery operation in the country, and in December 2024 the authorities ordered unlicensed operators to shut down. See The UAE Lottery odds.
A country that any article written in 2023 would have listed under "lotteries are banned" now has a licensed national game. That is why this page carries a verification date.
Reading the verified cases together, bans cluster into three motives — and only one of them is about gambling being harmful.
1. Religious. Gambling — maisir — is prohibited under Islamic law, with the Qur'anic basis at 2:219 and 5:90–91 (Maisir). This is the deepest and most stable category, which makes the UAE's 2024 licence genuinely notable rather than routine.
2. Revolutionary or ideological. Cuba's prohibition follows the 1959 Revolution, and China's blanket ban on non-state gambling dates from 1949. Note what both did next: China built two of the largest lotteries on earth under state control. The objection was to private profit from gambling, not to the activity.
3. Commercial. Nevada is the purest example anywhere: no religious or moral argument, simply an existing gambling industry that does not want a state-run competitor. It is a reminder that lottery policy is usually revenue policy — the theme of where the money goes.
Historically there is a fourth, now mostly spent: anti-corruption. The United States banned lotteries federally in the 1890s after the Louisiana State Lottery Company bribed its way to a monopoly, and legal lotteries largely vanished for most of a century (Louisiana State Lottery Company). The story is in lotteries through history.
This site does not publish unsourced status claims, and lottery-ban listicles are among the worst offenders in the genre. The following are widely asserted, and we could not confirm any of them against a working primary or authoritative source:
If you need any of these for a decision rather than for interest, go to the jurisdiction's own regulator. Everything above is general information rather than legal advice, and the UAE example shows how quickly it dates.
The prohibition list is shrinking. States that once banned lotteries on moral grounds have generally rediscovered them as revenue, and the pattern in China, Cambodia and now the UAE is the same: not "gambling is permitted", but "gambling is permitted by us, under licence, with the proceeds directed where we choose". Prohibition tends to end not with liberalisation but with the state taking the monopoly.
Whether the resulting product is good value is a separate question, and it has nothing to do with legality — see the payout ratio league table, return to player by game and the expected value calculator.
Last verified: 2026-08-29