CA Kishore Harjani & CA Divya Jain – [2026] 187 taxmann.com 542 (Article)
Introduction
When you put money on an online rummy table, build a fantasy cricket team or a spin of the casino wheel, what exactly are you paying for — and how much of it should the tax man take?
That deceptively simple question grew into one of the biggest tax battles in India’s history, involving GST demands running into thousands of crores of rupees. On 27 May 2026, the Supreme Court finally provided a definitive answer. In a landmark verdict, the Court ruled that Goods and Services Tax (GST) at 28 per cent is leviable on the full-face value of every bet or stakes— the entire amount a player puts in — and not merely to the small commission or “platform fee” that gaming companies keep. The decision, in Directorate General of GST Intelligence v. Gameskraft Technologies Pvt. Ltd. (2026) 42 Centax 495 (S.C.), closes years of litigation and confusion, and reshapes the economics of a fast-growing digital industry.
A booming industry, suddenly under the tax scanner
Online gaming has become one of the fastest-growing parts of India’s digital economy. Cheap smartphones, affordable mobile data, easy digital payments and a young population have together turned India into one of the largest gaming markets in the world. By some industry estimates, the country is home to nearly a fifth of the world’s gamers and records more than 11 billion mobile-game downloads every year.
The money involved is large too. The Indian gaming market earned about ₹232 billion in 2024, with roughly three-quarters of that coming from games where players stake money.
It supports thousands of companies and employs lakhs of people in technology, design, marketing and customer support.
But this very success put the industry on a collision course with the tax authorities. The dispute was not really about whether online gaming should be taxed — everyone agreed it should be. The fight was over how much should be taxed: only the company’s cut, or every rupee a player stakes.
First, a simple distinction
The law distinguishes “online gaming” from “online money gaming.” Online gaming simply refers to playing a game over the internet. It becomes online money gaming when players put money (or anything of value, including virtual digital assets) at stake, in the hope of winning money or a reward in return regardless of whether winning depends on skill, luck, or both. It is this money-staking category that attracts GST at 28 per cent, and it is this category that the entire dispute was about.
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