A licensed Ghanaian operator pays winnings in full today. There is no withholding on a player’s winnings, and a bookmaker that deducts one is applying a rule that no longer exists.
The trap is that the same sentence was false until recently, and a page that says this market has always paid winnings in full is wrong about every year most readers can remember. A ten per cent withholding on gross winnings ran from 2023 and was repealed on 2 April 2025 under Act 1129. Gross, not net: the deduction applied to the amount won rather than to the profit after the stake, which made it heavier than the headline rate suggests on any bet that mostly returned its own stake.
A second charge ended the same day and it is a different thing that people mix up with the first. The transfer levy on mobile money was introduced in 2022, cut at the start of 2023 and repealed outright on 2 April 2025, with the revenue authority telling charging entities to stop deducting immediately and refund anything taken afterwards. One was a tax on winning, the other was a tax on moving money, and both are gone.
What remains is a tax on the operator rather than on the player. A levy on gross gaming revenue is an obligation of the bookmaker and does not reduce what reaches a customer’s wallet, so it should not appear in any calculation a punter does.
One bookmaker on this register still states a withholding rate in its own published terms. That copy is stale, it does not describe the current position, and it is a good demonstration of why a figure should be read against the law rather than against whichever page carries it.