Existing Customer Betting Offers in Great Britain

Updated October 2026

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Every punter chasing a free bet, a price boost or an acca refund eventually meets the same arithmetic. A bookmaker markets an offer, the small print lays down a wagering requirement and a minimum price, and somewhere between those two numbers the offer either earns its keep or quietly vanishes. The picture in Great Britain changed on 19 January 2026, when the Gambling Commission brought new promotion rules into force: wagering requirements on bonuses are capped at ten times, and mixed-product promotions are out. This page reads what that change does to existing customer betting offers in 2026, what each of ten licensed bookmakers actually pays out, and where the conditions leave a reader standing.

A snapshot of the data sits below the lead: the figures and licence details below were verified against the operator’s own pages on 26 October 2026, and against the Gambling Commission’s public register for licence numbers. Prices and odds age faster than licence entries do, so any number carrying a stake and a return should be read as the price on the day the operator’s page was last opened, not a permanent feature of the offer.

What the Commission changed on 19 January 2026

Two rules are doing the heavy lifting on this page, and both come from the Commission’s social responsibility code and remote technical standards rather than from a new statute. The first is a ceiling on bonus wagering. A bonus — the extra balance a bookmaker credits above what a customer deposited — can no longer carry a wagering requirement above ten times its amount. The second is a ban on mixed-product promotions: an offer that conditions a sportsbook bonus on activity in casino, bingo or lottery is no longer permitted. “Bet £10 on football to unlock free spins” is the canonical example the trade press has used; under the new rules, it cannot be marketed as a single package.

The cap is a hard limit, not a target. A £10 bonus used to be cleared through £500 of qualifying bets at a 50x multiple; that structure is now off the table, because no bonus may require more than £100 of qualifying bets at its own amount. Free bets whose stake is not returned with the winnings — the standard mechanic on British sportsbooks — sit in a slightly different category. The Commission’s published position on whether the wagering cap reaches free bets that carry no rollover condition is not established, so this page treats those free bets as outside the cap while flagging the gap. A reader who reads an offer as identical to a deposit bonus on the strength of the word “bonus” alone may be reading past the rule.

What the cap does not do is change the mechanics of clearing a bonus. Turnover is still turnover, minimum price still gates which bets count, and expiry still runs from credit. A £20 bonus at 10x is £200 of qualifying bets before the bonus balance is withdrawable; at the same stake size and a 5x rollover it is £100. The headline number the marketing copy uses is rarely the headline number the small print names, and the cap has not changed that habit. It has only raised the floor on how much a bonus can be made to demand.

The mixed-product ban is the other side of the same change. A bookmaker that wants to gate a casino reward behind sports turnover, or to gate a sportsbook reward behind slot play, has to run two separate offers with their own mechanics — a structure that pushes operators towards in-product loyalty rather than cross-product funnels. That is a quieter change than the cap, and the marketing copy still tends to treat them as one, but for a customer it means that an offer reading like a bundle is, from 19 January 2026, either one offer or two, never both at once.

A general note on the law behind the rule. The Gambling Commission licenses the British commercial market under the Gambling Act 2005, which covers Great Britain — England, Scotland and Wales — and not Northern Ireland, where the older Betting, Gaming, Lotteries and Amusements (Northern Ireland) Order 1985 applies. Since the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014, any operator whose remote facilities are used in Great Britain needs a Commission licence wherever it is incorporated, which is why a Gibraltar- or Malta-incorporated bookmaker runs a British licence alongside its home one. The framework is point-of-consumption, and the licence the operator runs and the address it trades from are separate matters. A Curaçao or Malta licence by itself is not a substitute. A brand’s domain proves nothing either way: licensed operators use .com as well as .co.uk, and the public register is the only test of whether the licence exists.

Responsible gambling under the same framework

A page on existing customer offers has to give the safer-gambling frame first, because the licence condition is the spine of everything else on it. Three protections sit in front of every offer reviewed below, and the punters most likely to read this page — the ones who already hold an account and want to squeeze the last value out of an existing relationship — are exactly the ones the framework is designed to reach.

Identity checks happen before a customer can deposit. A licence holder has verified a customer’s name, address and date of birth before money moves, including where the first stake is a free bet. The verification has been mandatory since 7 May 2019, and it makes anonymous play impossible at a GB-licensed brand. That fact is not a marketing line: it means the deposit box on a licensed site does not open for an account whose name cannot be matched to a record, and a VPN into a British IP address from an unverified account fails at the same step.

GAMSTOP is the national self-exclusion scheme. Every brand reviewed on this page is a member, because membership is a condition of holding a remote licence, and it has been since 31 March 2020. A customer who has self-excluded through GAMSTOP cannot open a new account at a member operator for the period chosen: six months, one year, five years, or five years with auto-renewal. After the minimum period the exclusion runs for a further seven years unless the customer asks GAMSTOP to remove it. The scheme covers online sites and apps; betting shops run a separate service. An excluded customer who gets past GAMSTOP and reaches a bookmaker’s marketing is being failed by the operator, not by the rules.

Deposit limits are the customer’s toolset. Licensed operators offer a gross deposit limit on a fixed time frame, and the Commission’s remote technical standards have moved this area in two phases: an early phase applied from 31 October 2025, and a second phase was scheduled for 30 September 2026. Whether the second phase is now live is not established from the public record, so this page describes the rule qualitatively and points the reader at their own account page for the current controls. There is no state-set ceiling on deposits in betting: limits are the customer’s choice. Betting and casino are separate permits with separate rules, so a casino limit is never a betting limit, and a tiered limit stays tiered.

The financial vulnerability check applies once deposits minus withdrawals exceed £150 in a rolling 30 days. It is a public-record check — bankruptcy registers, county court judgments — not a credit reference check and not an income check. The Commission has separately announced a staged plan for fuller financial risk assessments, with a Commission statement of 7 July 2026 but no confirmed start date, so the language used here is “announced, staged, no start date”. Help exists outside the operator: GamCare runs the National Gambling Helpline, GambleAware funds treatment and research, the NHS runs gambling clinics, and Gamblers Anonymous runs peer-support meetings.

What an offer really costs: the small print that moves the headline

Three terms decide whether an existing customer offer is worth taking. They are the minimum price, the wagering requirement, and the expiry. None of them appears in the headline, and the order they appear in the small print tends to be the order the bookmaker would prefer the punter to skim past.

Minimum price is the shortest price at which a bet still counts towards the requirement. A £10 free bet that has to be placed at evens (2.0) is a different bet from a £10 free bet usable at any price: on a long shot at 10.0 the second is worth roughly the stake times the difference between the price and one, because the stake does not return with the winnings on a free bet, and on a price just above 1.01 the first rules out the long tail entirely. QuinnBet’s free bet, for example, is usable on any market at 1/2 (1.5) or greater, with a 50/1 maximum, and that floor alone decides which markets a free bet can be put to work on.

Wagering requirement is the multiple of the bonus that has to be turned over before the bonus balance is withdrawable. Under the new rules no bonus can carry more than 10x. A £20 bonus at 5x is £100 of qualifying bets, of which only bets at or above the minimum price count. The number of bets that has to be placed follows from the size of each stake: £100 of turnover at a £5 stake per bet is twenty bets; at a £20 stake per bet it is five. A punter who raises the stake size to shorten the count raises the volatility on each individual bet, which the marketing copy does not advertise.

Expiry runs from the moment the free bet is credited. Coral’s £40 in free bets expires seven days after issue; Sky Bet’s three £10 free bet tokens expire on the same clock. A free bet that has not been used by the deadline is forfeit, and the small print usually writes that forfeiture without a grace period. The mechanical effect is that a free bet usable only on a small set of markets — BoyleSports’ acca insurance, for instance, requires bets placed and settled on the same day — has to be planned around the calendar, not just the betting slip.

Three further mechanics sit underneath these three. The stake of a free bet is not paid back with the winnings: a £10 free bet at 4.0 returns £30 in profit, not £40 in total. Acca insurance refunds a losing stake as a free bet, not in cash, when one leg of an accumulator lets the bet down; the free bet refund then expires on its own clock. A “risk-free” bet refunded as a free bet is not a refund in money — it is a free bet, and the same stake-not-returned rule applies on the next bet. None of these are subtle points once the small print is read; they are the reason the small print exists.

Reading a turnover requirement in numbers

The arithmetic is straightforward once the inputs are named. Take a £20 bonus credited after a £20 deposit at a 5x wagering multiple: the bonus base is £20, the wagering factor is 5, and the required turnover is £100. At a £5 stake per bet and a minimum price of evens (2.0), that is twenty qualifying bets before the bonus balance is withdrawable.

Plug in different numbers and the count moves. A £40 bonus at 5x is £200 of turnover — forty qualifying bets at £5, ten at £20. Coral’s £40 in free bets after a £20 bet is a different calculation, because a free bet is not a deposit bonus: the free bet itself is the stake, the stake is not returned, and there is no further rollover unless the offer’s small print adds one. Where the small print does add one — Sky Bet’s free bet tokens, for instance, can carry settlement conditions that gate withdrawal — the qualifying bets count against the bonus balance, not against the original deposit.

The number that quietly matters is the size of each qualifying bet relative to the bonus. The smaller the stake, the more bets the punter has to place, and the longer the bonus takes to clear. The larger the stake, the faster the turnover runs, and the more each bet has to win to keep the bankroll steady. Neither extreme is free, and the trade-off is the punter’s, not the offer’s.

The free-bet value calculation

A free bet whose stake is not returned has a calculable value, and the calculation is what tells a punter whether to take it at all. Value = free-bet amount × (odds − 1) ÷ odds × payout share of the market. The payout share is the inverse of the margin: a market with a 5% margin has a 95% payout share, which means a £10 free bet at 4.0 is worth roughly £10 × 3 ÷ 4 × 0.95 = £7.13 on average. The arithmetic is an average over many bets at that price, not a guarantee of what any single free bet returns.

This is the number that punctures the marketing copy. A “£40 free bet” headline at a market with a 7% margin is worth around £37.20 on average; the same headline at a market with a 12% margin is worth around £35.20. The headline is fixed; the value moves with the market the free bet is used on, and a punter who reads the headline alone is reading past the price. The same free bet at a long shot at 10.0 is worth more than the same free bet at 1.5, but the variance on the long shot is much higher, and the average only pays out over many bets at that price.

Expected cost of clearing a bonus

A bonus that requires turnover costs the punter the margin on that turnover, on average. Required turnover is £100 at a 5% margin and the cost is £5, all else equal; at a 10% margin the cost is £10. The expected loss is the statistical average of what clearing the offer costs a punter who places the qualifying bets at the market the offer is taken on. Where the offer forces a particular market — acca insurance that has to count the qualifying stake on football — the margin on that market is what to read, not the headline.

This is the second puncture. A bonus that reads “£20” has cleared through £100 of qualifying bets at the bonus multiple, and £100 of qualifying bets at a 5% market margin has cost the punter £5 of expected value. The £20 bonus is not £20 of value: it is £20 of value minus £5 of expected loss, on average, and the difference is the bookmaker’s expected take from the offer. A punter who reads the bonus as £20 of value is reading the marketing copy, not the small print.

The ten bookmakers reviewed here

The brands below are the ten featured operators on this page. Each holds a Gambling Commission remote licence for Great Britain, each is named on the public register, and each has been verified against its own operator pages and the Commission’s register on 26 October 2026. They are not ranked by licence status — every GB-licensed remote operator holds the same kind of licence for the same categories — and they are not ranked by offer value, because the offers described below are not the same offer restated ten ways. They are presented in the order research has set for this site, and the verdict on each is the page’s own.

The categories on the register for every brand above are remote general betting standard (real events); Ladbrokes additionally holds a remote betting intermediary licence for its exchange. Several brands run under a single group licence holder, and that is allowed: Ladbrokes and Coral share LC International Limited as their remote licence holder, Paddy Power and Betfair share Flutter’s UK operation, and the same is true across the major groups. The licence is the legal permission to take bets remotely from a customer in Great Britain; the brand is the marketing wrapper, and the two are not the same.

The terms that follow are taken from each operator’s own pages on 26 October 2026, and from the App Store listings for their UK apps where the app carries a different version of the offer. Prices and odds age faster than licence entries do, and any specific price on a specific market should be checked on the operator’s own page before a stake is placed. The minimum price, the wagering multiple and the expiry are the three numbers that decide whether an offer earns its keep, and they are stated below as each operator’s own terms state them.

BetUK

BetUK runs under LeoVegas Gaming PLC, a remote general betting standard licence (real events) on Commission account 39198. The sports welcome offer for new customers is four £10 free bets after a deposit of £10 or more and a sports bet within seven days of registering — two of the free bets are football accumulators of four or more selections, two are multiples of two or more, and all four expire seven days from credit, with opt-in required. The structure is restrictive on which markets each free bet can be used on, which is the kind of constraint that decides whether an offer works for a given punter: a bettor who backs singles only is leaving two of the four free bets unusable in their normal form.

The licence holder is a Malta-based group with multiple GB-facing brands, and the site lists its safer-gambling controls on a dedicated page. Verdict: the welcome structure is split across two acca free bets and two multiple free bets, which rewards a punter who already bets accumulators and leaves the singles-only customer with two of the four free bets unusable in their normal form. The seven-day expiry is tight against the acca cards, because acca cards need legs and legs need fixtures.

Copybet

Copybet runs on Commission account 53774, held by Copybet UK Limited, and the site’s existing customer offer is the Acca Booster — a cash bonus of up to 100% on accumulators of three or more selections — plus a daily profit boost of up to 15%. Both features are recurring, which is what makes them existing-customer offers in the first place: a one-shot welcome is not what this page is about, and the Acca Booster is the kind of mechanic a punter returns to weekly. The two boosts stack against each other in that they require different bet shapes, and the punter who uses both has to read each set of terms in turn.

Verdict: Copybet is the existing-customer option on this list whose offer is genuinely recurring, and the up-to wording on the boost percentages is the small print’s way of saying the percentage depends on the number of legs or the size of the stake. Read the tier table before staking.

Ladbrokes

Ladbrokes is held by LC International Limited on Commission account 54743, with both a remote general betting standard licence (real events) and a remote betting intermediary licence for its exchange. The site carries odds boosts on horse and greyhound bets, Best Odds Guaranteed on UK and Irish racing, in-play betting and Acca Boosts — a feature set that has been the Ladbrokes shop window for years and that carries over to its app and site. BOG is the feature that pays out at the starting price if the starting price is higher than the price taken, and it is one of the few mechanics that genuinely rewards a punter for taking an early price on a race.

Verdict: the existing-customer features here are the kind that pay back over months, not weeks, and the BOG-and-boost combination is what differentiates Ladbrokes from a brand running a single welcome offer. The acca boost works on football multiples; the odds boosts are event-specific; the in-play markets are deep. A punter who already bets on horse racing will see more here than a punter who doesn’t.

Bet600

Bet600 holds Commission account 44731, under Tyche Tech Limited, on a remote general betting standard licence (real events). The app’s welcome offer requires five qualifying single bets of £10 or more at evens (2.0) or greater within seven days of registration, after which one £10 free bet is credited. That is a high entry bar against the rest of this list — most welcome offers require a single qualifying bet — and the bar is the offer’s main feature. A punter who places five bets in the first week is already active on the site; the free bet reads more like a retention bonus than a sign-up sweetener, which is the direction the Commission’s promotion rules are pushing the market.

The structure is the kind of mechanic the small print writes in five lines and the marketing copy writes in one. Verdict: the bar is set high against comparable offers, and the punter who places five singles in their first week is the punter this offer was designed for. Anyone betting less frequently is being asked to bet more than the offer pays back.

Bet Ahoy

Bet Ahoy runs on Commission account 100094, held by Bet Ahoy Ltd, on a remote general betting standard licence (real events). The welcome offer is “Bet £10 & Get £10 in Free Bets”, split into a £5 sports bet and a £5 acca — the smallest headline on this list and one of the tightest in its split between singles and multiples. A punter who backs singles loses half the headline value against the small print, which is the kind of detail the marketing copy skips.

Verdict: the split between a £5 single and a £5 acca is the offer’s main constraint, and the punter whose betting slips are singles-only needs to know that half of the headline value is on a bet shape they don’t use. The endpoint of the offer is to put a new account on the sportsbook and the acca builder at the same time; whether that fits a given punter depends on whether they bet multiples at all.

Betway

Betway holds Commission account 39372, under Betway Limited, on a remote general betting standard licence (real events). The welcome offer is £40 in free bet tokens (4 × £10) credited on settlement of a first bet of at least £10 at minimum odds of 2.0, with a seven-day expiry and debit card deposits only. The debit-card restriction is the offer’s quiet constraint: an e-wallet deposit does not qualify the customer for the welcome, and that fact is in the small print rather than the headline.

Verdict: £40 in free bets at a 10x-equivalent turnover cap is competitive against this list, and the debit-card restriction means the punter has to deposit the qualifying £10 on a debit card rather than an e-wallet. The seven-day expiry on four tokens is the kind of clock that punishes the punter who only bets on weekends.

Fitzwilliam Sports

Fitzwilliam Sports runs on Commission account 48760, held by SBKI Limited, and is licensed for remote general betting on real events. The site describes itself as a Dublin bookmaker with capped membership, and the welcome offer is a “High Stakes Welcome” subject to compliance criteria. The capped-membership structure is what sets it apart on this list — Fitzwilliam Sports runs an invitation model rather than the open-door model of the rest of the brands here, and the welcome offer is gated behind that. Verdict: the offer is aimed at the higher-stake end of the market and the compliance criteria in its terms are the gate; a punter who wants a £10 free bet on a first £10 bet has come to the wrong bookmaker.

The brand is the outlier on this list in being invitation-led, and that fact is the main thing a reader should know before opening the account page.

BetGoodwin

BetGoodwin holds Commission account 2927, under Goodwin Racing Limited, with a remote licence for real-event betting. The welcome offer is “Bet £10 & Get £15 in Free Bets”, split into a £5 sports bet, a £5 acca and a £5 Sub-Cover bet — a three-way split that allocates the headline value across three bet shapes and that requires the punter to use all three. The Sub-Cover bet is Goodwin’s distinct mechanic, and the welcome is the only place it appears on this list.

Verdict: the £5-on-three-shapes structure asks the punter to bet in three different ways to clear the welcome, and a punter who only bets singles is leaving £10 of the headline on the table. The Sub-Cover bet is the part of the offer that does not exist at the other brands on this list, and that is its selling point if the reader already understands what it does.

LiveScore Bet

LiveScore Bet runs on Commission account 56859, held by LiveScore Betting and Gaming (Gibraltar) Limited, and holds a remote licence for general betting. The site’s payment methods are debit cards (Visa and Mastercard), Apple Pay, PayPal, Pay by Bank through Open Banking and Revolut Pay — a payment set that runs the British standard plus the Revolut option, and that does not include credit cards, which have been banned for gambling in Great Britain since 14 April 2020. The payment set matters for existing customers in that withdrawals have to land on a payment method the operator will accept, and an account opened with an unsupported method can stall at withdrawal.

Verdict: the payment set is the page’s main takeaway on LiveScore Bet, and a punter with a Revolut account or an Open Banking-enabled bank has a smoother deposit and withdrawal path than a punter relying on a card. The site’s existing customer mechanics are the standard set: in-play, acca boosts, price boosts; the welcome offer sits in the same shape as the rest of this list.

Kalooki Sportsbook

Kalooki Sportsbook holds Commission account 57730, under Kalooki Sportsbook Limited, on a remote licence for general betting on real events. The site advertises instant withdrawals by bank transfer within minutes, Best Odds Guaranteed on UK and Irish horse racing, in-play betting, daily boosts and extra place races — the standard British feature set with a withdrawal mechanic that is faster than the market average. The company behind the brand is Kalooki Sports Book Ltd, registered in England as company number 12938274, and the brand is a GAMSTOP member, which is a condition of holding a remote licence and is therefore true of every brand on this list.

Verdict: the withdrawal speed is what separates Kalooki from the rest of the list, and for a punter who values fast access to winnings over a high headline welcome offer, that is the feature that matters. The BOG and extra place races are the horse-racing features a customer would expect from any British bookmaker; the daily boosts are the standard.

What is not on this page, and why

Three omissions are worth naming, because each one is the kind of thing a reader might expect to find and each one would change the page if it were included.

First, no voucher or bonus code. The Commission’s own rules on advertising and the trade’s own codes of practice both treat bonus codes as a marketing mechanic, and the page is about what an offer is worth, not how it is claimed. Codes change faster than the small print does, and printing one is a way of dating it. A punter who has the code already knows how to use it; a punter who doesn’t has the operator’s own page to find it on.

Second, no prediction. The page describes how a bet works and what an offer costs; it does not name a winner, a “sure” bet or a system that wins. Nobody can know an outcome, and a reader who acts on a prediction loses real money on the page’s word. The page’s job is to make the small print legible, not to replace it.

Third, no endorsement. The ten brands are the ten featured operators, and they are not in rank order of offer value or licence status. A reader choosing between them is choosing between ten different feature sets, and the verdict on each is the page’s own judgement of where it fits. The reader’s choice depends on what they already bet on.

How to check a bookmaker’s licence

The Commission’s public register is the only test of whether a brand holds a licence. It can be searched by business name, trading name, domain or account number, and the licence categories are listed on the entry. A licence entry showing remote general betting standard (real events) means the operator can take fixed-odds bets on real sporting events from a customer in Great Britain; a separate entry for remote betting intermediary means the operator runs a betting exchange. A brand’s domain proves nothing: licensed operators use .com as well as .co.uk, and an unlicensed brand can take any domain it can register.

Three signals to watch for. A brand whose domain is registered in a jurisdiction without a point-of-consumption regime — Curaçao, certain Caribbean states — and which does not appear on the Commission’s register is operating outside the British framework, and a customer of that brand has no British consumer protection, no GAMSTOP coverage, no Commission complaints route and no approved dispute-resolution body. A brand whose marketing copy names a licence number that does not appear on the register is misrepresenting its status, and the register entry is the only fact that counts. A brand that uses a UK-incorporated company name but trades from an address in a different jurisdiction is not necessarily unlicensed, but the licence is the licence holder’s, not the trading address’s, and the register entry is the only place to confirm.

The Commission’s enforcement is disruption, not blocking. Cease-and-desist notices, search-engine referrals, work with registrars, hosts and payment providers — those are the tools. Court-order DNS blocking powers have been given or are about to be given; the wording here is not “in operation” but “given or about to be given”. A punter who reaches an unlicensed site from a British IP address has reached it because the operator is in the gaps, not because it is licensed.

How the market treats existing customer offers

The phrase “existing customer offers” covers a wider set than the welcome offers reviewed above. Three categories sit underneath the headline.

Recurring boosts and price enhancements are the steady offer. Acca boosts, profit boosts, daily specials, weekend enhanced odds, BOG on horse racing — each bookmaker runs its own combination. The cost is the margin on the boosted market, which the bookmaker sets higher than the unboosted equivalent. A punter using a regular profit boost is paying the boost margin, not the standard market margin, and the difference is what the offer is worth in expected terms.

Loyalty programmes and free-to-play games are the second category. Coral’s free daily Reward Shaker, the Football Super Series free-to-play game with a £10,000 jackpot, similar mechanics at other brands — these are paid for by the margin on the markets they advertise, and they are free to enter. A punter who plays the free-to-play game and ignores the advertising markets is taking the offer at its most efficient; a punter who plays the game and then bets on the advertised markets is paying the margin twice, once on the bet and once on the offer’s expected value.

One-off promotions tied to events or seasons are the third. Cheltenham free bet offers for existing customers, the Grand National equivalent, the Premier League run-in, the Champions League knockouts — these are the offers the search terms on this page most closely match, because they are the offers an existing customer sees in their account page during a major meeting. The mechanics are the same as the welcome offer — minimum price, wagering requirement, expiry — and the small print is the place to read them.

The headline shape of the market

Two patterns are doing the work in 2026 that were not doing the same work a year ago. The first is the move from headline bonuses towards free bet packages. The Commission has not banned deposit bonuses, but the wagering cap has changed the economics: a £20 deposit bonus at 10x is £200 of qualifying bets, and a £20 free bet with no rollover is a stake the punter can place without touching the deposit balance. The second is the move from cross-product bundles to in-product loyalty. The mixed-product promotion ban has split what were single offers into two parallel offers, and the parallel offers are usually thinner than the bundle was.

A punter comparing offers in 2026 is comparing thinner offers than a year ago, and that is the rule’s quiet effect. The headline numbers are roughly the same size; the conditions are stricter. A reader who reads the headline and ignores the small print is reading past the rule that the rule was designed to make harder to ignore.

Tax on winnings

Betting winnings are not taxed on the customer in Great Britain. General Betting Duty is the operator’s tax on gross profits, currently 15% across the board, and from 1 April 2027 a new remote betting rate of 25% applies within it, with remote bets on UK horse racing, self-service betting terminal bets, pool betting and in-person betting staying at 15%. The 25% rate does not yet apply: until 1 April 2027 the remote rate stays at 15%. Whether operators pass duty on through odds is not established, and this page does not write that the customer is charged duty. A professional gambler should ask HMRC or an adviser; for a recreational punter the answer is that the duty is in the margin, and the margin is in the odds.

Financial spread betting has its own rates — 3% on financial, 10% on other — and is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, not the Gambling Commission. The two regimes are separate, and a punter moving from one to the other is moving across regulators as well as products.

Frequently asked questions

What is the maximum wagering requirement on a betting bonus in Great Britain?

No bonus at a Gambling Commission-licensed remote operator may carry a wagering requirement above ten times the bonus amount. A £20 bonus at 10x is £200 of qualifying bets before the bonus balance is withdrawable, and no operator can market a higher multiple. Whether the cap also reaches free bets with no wagering condition is not established, and the page treats free bets as outside the cap.

What do minimum odds and the wagering requirement mean in a sign-up offer?

Minimum odds are the shortest price at which a bet still counts towards the wagering requirement, and the wagering requirement is the multiple of the bonus that has to be turned over before the bonus is withdrawable. A £20 bonus at 5x with a minimum price of evens (2.0) is twenty qualifying bets at £5 each, all at evens or longer, before the £20 is withdrawable.

Why is the stake of a free bet not paid back with the winnings?

A free bet is the bookmaker’s stake, not the customer’s, so the stake is not returned with the winnings. A £10 free bet at 4.0 returns £30 in profit, not £40 in total. The mechanic is the same at every British sportsbook, and it is the reason a free bet is worth less than its headline number on average — the calculation runs free-bet amount × (odds − 1) ÷ odds × payout share.

Can a bet on sport be tied to a casino bonus under the Commission’s promotion rules?

No, since 19 January 2026. Mixed-product promotions — an offer that conditions a sportsbook bonus on casino play, or a casino bonus on sportsbook play — are banned. An offer that reads like a bundle is either one offer or two parallel offers, and the two parallel offers have their own mechanics.

How can it be checked that a bookmaker holds a Gambling Commission licence?

The Commission’s public register can be searched by business name, trading name, domain or account number. A brand’s marketing copy may name a licence number, but the register entry is the only test of whether the licence exists and what categories it covers. A brand whose marketing copy names a number that does not appear on the register is misrepresenting its status.

Are betting winnings taxed in Great Britain, and who pays General Betting Duty?

Betting winnings are not taxed on the customer in Great Britain. General Betting Duty is the operator’s tax on gross profits, currently 15% across the board, with a 25% remote betting rate scheduled to apply from 1 April 2027. A punter who bets on a UK-licensed bookmaker pays no tax on winnings; a professional gambler should ask HMRC or an adviser for the position that applies to them.

Content created by the «AI Betting» team