Existing customer offers from UK bookmakers: a punter's read on what they actually pay

Updated October 2026

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The sign-up offer is the marketing department’s first move, and the smarter offer for a punter who plans to stay is almost always the second one. This page is about the offers that come after — the free bet credited on a Friday, the acca insurance that rescues a five-fold by one leg, the “odds boost” headline next to the margin the bookmaker keeps. The Commission’s 19 January 2026 promotion rules set a ceiling on how heavy the wagering can be and forbid the cross-product trick of tying a sports bet to a casino bonus. Below that ceiling sits a market where every brand competes on a small set of moves — extra places on the Grand National, profit boosts on accas, a money-back free bet if one leg falls short — and the same offer at two brands can cost a punter very different amounts of real money to clear.

This guide ranks ten Gambling Commission-licensed bookmakers on what their existing customer offers look like at the close of 2026 and weighs each against the catch (the wagering multiple, the minimum odds, the expiry, the cap on the refund). The headline price is read alongside the market margin, because a boosted payout is only as good as the margin the offer sits on. It is a reader’s guide, not a tipster’s: nothing here predicts outcomes, nothing here hands over a code, and the points on the legality of betting — verification at first deposit, the £150 financial vulnerability check, the offshore no-protection caveat — apply to every brand on the list. 30 October 2026 · register and licence claims cross-checked against the Gambling Commission’s public register.

Statute and ruleset: where existing customer offers sit in UK law

A bookmaker that takes a remote bet from a customer in Great Britain needs a Gambling Commission licence. Since the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014 that licence is required wherever the operator is based; a Curaçao or Malta registration is not a stand-in for a Commission licence at the point of consumption. The whole commercial market is licensed under the Gambling Act 2005 (England, Scotland and Wales; Northern Ireland sits outside the Act and is covered by older law), and operating without the licence the Act requires is an offence aimed at the operator under section 33.

What an offer has to obey: advertising is not licensed by the Commission. It is policed by the ASA through the CAP Code and, for broadcast, the BCAP Code, alongside the licence conditions and codes of practice (the LCCP). Two rules on the LCCP are doing most of the work for a punter comparing offers today.

The 10x wagering cap, since 19 January 2026. A bonus — the kind that is paid in cash and needs to be turned over before withdrawal — cannot carry a wagering requirement higher than ten times the bonus amount. The arithmetic is easy to feel: a £10 bonus at the old 50x needed £500 of qualifying bets; under the cap no more than £100. The cap covers bonuses. Whether it extends to a free bet whose stake is not paid back with the winnings has not been settled in the Commission’s published guidance, and this page treats that question on its terms in the section on free bets.

The mixed-product ban. An offer that requires a customer to gamble across two or more product types — betting and casino, betting and bingo, betting and lottery — is no longer permitted. A sportsbook that credits free slot funds in return for a sports bet is in the banned category. The same cash for a sports bet alone is fine.

Beyond those two rules: credit cards are banned for gambling in Great Britain since 14 April 2020, including credit-card-funded e-wallet top-ups, which is why every offer below qualifies through a debit card or an instant bank transfer. A whistle-to-whistle industry code keeps gambling advertising off TV from five minutes before a live sporting event to five minutes after it, before the 9pm watershed (horse racing and greyhound racing excepted). The Premier League’s voluntary withdrawal of front-of-shirt gambling sponsorship from 2026/27 is not law. None of those rules override each offer’s own terms: minimum odds, the expiry window, the cap on a free-bet refund, and whether the stake returns with the winnings. Those terms are the page’s real subject.

Player protection: limits, checks and where to get help

Every brand on this list takes part in GAMSTOP, the national multi-operator self-exclusion scheme that is a mandatory licence condition for online operators since 31 March 2020. Self-exclusion can be set for six months, one year, five years, or five years with auto-renewal, and after the minimum period the exclusion stays in place for a further seven years unless the customer asks GAMSTOP to remove it. It covers online sites and apps; a separate service runs for betting shops.

Around the GAMSTOP layer sit three other protective rails every GB-licensed operator has to apply:

Identity verification before the first deposit. Since 7 May 2019 a remote operator must verify the customer’s name, address and date of birth before they can deposit or gamble at all — including with a free bet or bonus. Anonymous play at a licensed site is not an option. The verification is operational: there is no sense in which an offer is “secret” at a Commission-licensed brand, and there is no sense in which it is “anonymous” either.

The £150 financial vulnerability check. From 28 February 2025 a public-record check fires when a customer’s net deposits over a rolling 30 days clear £150 — looking at bankruptcy and county-court-judgment registers rather than at income or credit files. It is a lighter touch than the financial risk assessments that have been announced in a staged plan and have no published start date, but it still influences what an existing customer can do at higher spend, including what offers they can clear without a conversation with the operator.

Deposit limits (RTS 12). Operators must offer a deposit limit on a fixed time frame. The Commission’s first changes took effect on 31 October 2025, with a second phase postponed to 30 September 2026; whether that second phase is live at the time a punter reads this is something the operator’s safer-gambling page (and the customer’s own deposit-limit screen) will tell. Limits are the customer’s choice — there is no state-set ceiling — but they exist as a default the operator has to walk every customer through.

Where to get help if the offers start to look like the problem rather than the answer: GamCare runs the National Gambling Helpline; GambleAware is the information and signposting service; the NHS gambling clinics offer face-to-face treatment; Gamblers Anonymous runs peer-support meetings. The Commission’s complaints route is for licensed operators only, and a bookmaker that does not hold a Commission licence offers none of those rails.

What an existing customer offer is, and what each type costs

Four shapes dominate the existing-customer market in Great Britain; each has its own way of reading well in a headline and its own cost in real money once the terms open.

The free bet

A free bet is a token credited to a customer’s account for placing a real-money qualifying bet. The crucial condition is whether the stake comes back with the winnings: it usually does not. A £10 free bet at odds of 4/1 (5.00 decimal) settles a winning slip at £40 — the £10 stake is not returned. The cash value of that free bet, on a market where the bookmaker’s margin is the industry-norm 5%, works out to £10 × (5.00 − 1) ÷ 5.00 × 0.95, or roughly £7.60 in expected return to the punter. Lose the bet and the token is gone; that is the £2.40 the headline hides.

The Commission does not, in its published guidance, treat a stake-not-returned free bet as a “bonus” caught by the 10x cap. The brand-by-brand behaviour matters: every free bet carries its own expiry (seven days is common) and its own minimum odds, and the headline “£30 in free bets” can mean three tokens of £10, each on its own clock. A free bet whose stake is paid back with the winnings reads more like bonus cash — that version is rare and the terms are tighter than the headline.

The price boost and enhanced odds

A price boost rewrites a single price to a higher number — a striker to score first at 5/1 becomes 10/1, an each-way horse at 12/1 becomes 20/1. The boost is funded by the bookmaker, not by the margin of the underlying market; the punter reads it as a one-off increase in expected return. The cost is the same as any bet at the boosted price — the margin baked into the boosted price is higher than the margin of the same selection at the unboosted price, because the boost is unconditional free money on the operator’s side. The boundary case is a price boost whose stake returns with the winnings; that one behaves like a cash bonus, and the cap kicks in.

The accumulator insurance and the loyalty boost

Acca insurance refunds the stake (as a free bet, stake not returned) if exactly one leg of an accumulator loses. The minimum number of legs (four is typical), the minimum odds (1/2 short odds is standard), and the cap on the refund (£20 or £25 is typical) decide whether the insurance actually covers the punter’s kind of acca. A loyalty boost pays a percentage on top of accumulator winnings — 10% on a five-fold is a common headline — and is paid either as cash or as a free bet with the same stake-not-returned cost as the basic free bet.

The cashback and the profit boost

Cashback returns a percentage of net losses over a period (a weekend, a horse-racing meeting) as cash or as a free bet. A profit boost — Spreadex’s acca boost from 5% to 100%, Copybet’s Acca Booster up to 100%, William Hill’s Football Acca Boost from 3% on a double to 200% on 20 legs — pays a percentage on top of winnings. Both read best in the headline and absorb the cost either as a margin write-down on the boosted bets or as a stake-not-returned condition on the bonus.

The arithmetic that matters on the page: required turnover ÷ stake per bet = number of bets needed. Only bets at or above the offer’s minimum odds count. The expected cost is required turnover × margin of the market, and never larger than the turnover the offer is taken from. Every “free” offer above has a market margin sitting inside it, and the headline is the smallest number the punter reads.

How the ten rank on existing customer offers

The ten below each carry a Commission remote licence, each take part in GAMSTOP, and each sets their own existing-customer slate inside the LCCP ceiling. They are ordered by how their offer slate shapes up at the close of 2026 for an existing customer who plans to keep betting — the second offer onwards, not the welcome. The reader’s read on what to claim is bottom of each block.

BetTom — a fifty-fifty refund as the hook

BetTom splits a sports welcome offer into two equal halves, each capped at £50: 50% back as a free bet on sports, 50% back as free slot funds on casino. The sports half lives inside the LCCP and pays the qualifying bet back as a free bet whose stake is not returned; the casino half is on the other side of the mixed-product ban and that side of the offer is no longer available — the cross-product construction of the bonus is exactly what the January 2026 rule was written to stop. Existing-customer offers at the brand run on free bets and acca boosts in the usual pattern. For a punter who already bets at BetTom, the question is whether the cross-product headline is the one a new and existing offer can still use.

Read. The brand’s offer slate is small; the structural oddity — a sports and casino bonus pair — now sits inside the ban.

Coral — a deep existing-customer slate and a £20-qualifier

Coral’s welcome offer is well known: a £20 qualifying bet at minimum odds of 2.0 (1/1) returns £40 in free bets, credited within seven days and expiring seven days after that. The deposits and the qualifying bet must run through a debit card or instant bank transfer; the listing of payment methods on Coral’s own homepage covers Apple Pay, Visa, Visa Electron, Mastercard, Revolut Pay, Google Pay, TrueLayer, Earthport and Trustly. The qualifying path is ordinary for the market.

The existing-customer slate is the wider one: a free daily Reward Shaker, an Odds Booster across hundreds of markets, and free-to-play games such as Football Super Series with a £10,000 jackpot. Acca insurance sits underneath at the standard minimum-stake and minimum-odds settings. For a punter who bets daily, the Reward Shaker is the offer that compounds — small credits every day on the days a bet is placed — and the free-to-play games are the offer that costs the punter nothing because no qualifying bet is needed to enter.

Read. Coral’s edge is volume: a punter who logs in every day captures more free bets at Coral than at brands that pay their existing customers monthly. The qualifying deposit must be a debit card or instant bank transfer, not an e-wallet — that single rule is the difference between qualifying and missing the offer.

Dabble — a £10-for-£10 free bet with seven-day cost

Dabble’s welcome offer is the simplest construction on the page: a £10 first deposit returns £10 in free bets at minimum odds, with a seven-day free bet expiry and the stake not returned. The brand runs a small existing-customer slate — price boosts, social-feed acca tips — but the headline shape is set by the welcome. The seven-day expiry is the cost of the offer if it is missed: a free bet unconverted is a free bet lost, and the £10 expected value on a 5% market is closer to £7.60 if every bet lands.

Read. Dabble is the kind of offer to claim on a day when the punter’s picks are confident, not on a Saturday with a long list. The seven-day expiry is the test.

Sky Bet — three tokens and a 5p qualifier

Sky Bet’s welcome offer credits three £10 free bets after a deposit of at least £5 and a first single or each-way bet of at least 5p at odds of 1/1 or greater. The 5p qualifier is the lowest on the market and exists so the qualifying bet does not have to be a meaningful stake — the offer can be cleared at a stake a punter is willing to lose in full. The three-token credit is the structure: each token carries its own seven-day expiry from the moment it is credited, not from the moment the first one was used.

The existing-customer slate at Sky Bet is large: Sky Bet Extra, free-to-play games, price boosts, acca boosts, and the request-a-bet channel for events that aren’t on the existing book. For a punter who bets during the football season the daily free-to-play games are the steady earn; for an acca punter the existing-customer profit boost on multiples is the headline. The minimum-odds qualifier on a Sky Bet free bet is the same 1/2 short-odds norm that runs through the rest of the market.

Read. Three tokens instead of one is the structural edge; the 5p qualifier is the friendly qualifier; the seven-day token-by-token expiry is the cost if any single token is left at the bottom of a slip.

Kalooki Sportsbook — instant withdrawals and a £20-qualifier welcome

Kalooki Sportsbook’s offer slate is built around speed: 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 brand is operated by Kalooki Sportsbook Limited (company number 12938274) under Commission account 57730 and sits in GAMSTOP. Existing-customer offers extend the daily-boost mechanic and the extra-place mechanic on major horse-racing meetings — the extra-place terms vary by race and are written into the race page rather than the help-centre.

The welcome offer — same headline as Coral and Unibet, a £20 bet at minimum odds of 2.0 returning free bets — is unusual only in being paid out the same day for most customers, which the instant-withdrawal mechanic makes possible. For a punter who treats withdrawals as part of the offer, the speed of payout is itself part of the value: a free bet won and withdrawn the same day is a free bet that hasn’t sat in the account for a week.

Read. The brand’s edge is Best Odds Guaranteed and the speed of withdrawal. The free-bet value is the same as any other £40-in-free-bets welcome, but the cash lands faster.

Sporting Index — a qualifying bet that opens fixed-odds and spread buckets

Sporting Index runs a fixed-odds and a spread-betting book in one account. The qualifying bet is a single fixed-odds bet of £10 at minimum odds of 1/2, and it unlocks three £10 fixed-odds free bets, three £5 Total Goals spread bets, three £5 Winning Favourites spread bets and a £1 Race Index spread bet. The qualifying bet cannot be placed in play and cannot be cashed out early — that exclusion is the cost of the welcome and the reason a punted-on-the-day selection is a better qualifier than a long-odds in-play punt.

The combined £10 + £5 + £5 + £1 = £21 in bonus bets on a single £10 qualifier is the structural edge over a £20-qualifier welcome; the catch is that spread bets work differently from fixed-odds bets and the £5 stake on Total Goals or Winning Favourites settles on a points range. A punter who has never placed a spread bet needs the help-centre glossary before using the spread-side tokens.

Read. The welcome is the generous one; the existing-customer slate is thinner and runs in the same fixed-odds price-boost pattern as the rest of the market. Spread-bet the spread tokens for size the punter is willing to lose.

Copybet — acca booster up to 100% cash and a daily profit boost

Copybet’s existing-customer slate is built around the Acca Booster, paying up to 100% cash on accas of at least three selections, and up to 15% on the Daily Profit Boost. The “cash” reading on the Acca Booster matters — a cash bonus is a bonus to which the 10x wagering cap applies, and the headline is paid on top of acca winnings rather than as a free bet. A punter comparing “up to 100%” with a 100% acca boost at a competitor wants to read the two terms as if they were different offers, because the cash version is paid in cash and the free-bet version is not.

The Daily Profit Boost is the smaller but steadier earn — 15% on the day’s named acca. A punter who bets accas on Premier League weekends captures more profit boost at Copybet than at brands that pay acca boosts only on major meetings.

Read. Copybet is the brand for the acca punter who wants the boost paid as cash. The Daily Profit Boost is the existing-customer offer that runs without a major meeting.

QuinnBet — free bets on any market, with restricted bet-types

QuinnBet’s free bets are usable on any market at minimum odds of 1/2 (1.5) and maximum odds of 50/1, with seven-day expiry. Straight accumulators are allowed; Trixies, Patents and Yankees are not. The exclusion of full-cover bets (Trixies, Patents, Yankees, Lucky 15s and their larger cousins) is the cost: a punter whose natural bet is a Lucky 15 cannot use a QuinnBet free bet on it.

The existing-customer slate at QuinnBet is the standard price-boost and acca-boost set, with a free-bet-based loyalty programme for customers who hit a stake threshold. For a punter who bets singles and accas, QuinnBet’s minimum-odds rule is one of the broadest in the market.

Read. QuinnBet is the brand for the singles-and-accas punter. Full-cover bettors should look elsewhere for their free-bet plays.

10bet — a 100% up-to-£50 bonus and daily free bets

10bet advertises a 100% up to £50 betting bonus alongside daily free bets and free spins. The “free spins” reference is the cross-product construction that the 19 January 2026 rule banned in a sportsbook context — what the brand lists today is the existing-customer-only free-bet and price-boost slate. The 100% up-to-£50 headline reads as a deposit-matched bonus, which sits inside the 10x wagering cap: the maximum turnover on a £50 bonus under the cap is £500, and the cost of clearing depends on the market margin (5% market × £500 turnover = £25 of expected cost to the punter, against a £50 bonus).

The existing-customer slate at 10bet is the daily-free-bet variety: a free-bet credit to qualifying customers every day, and price boosts on major events. For a punter who deposits and bets daily, the daily free bet is the structural edge — it is a free bet every day rather than a welcome offer once.

Read. The 100% headline is the standard sportsbook construction under the new cap. The daily free bet is the offer that runs through the year, not just on day one.

Smarkets — exchange roots, sportsbook-as-SBK, £20-qualifier

Smarkets is a betting exchange; the sportsbook runs as SBK. The SBK welcome offer is a £20 first deposit and a £20 first bet at minimum odds of 3.0 unlocking £60 in free bets within 48 hours. The 3.0 (2/1) minimum is the heaviest on the list — a punter using the welcome has to find a 2/1-or-bigger selection, and the qualifier is not for short-odds accas.

The exchange and the sportsbook share an account: Cash Out, Bet Builder and live horse-racing streams are listed on the SBK app. Existing-customer offers at SBK are the exchange-rooted price-boosts and the sportsbook profit boosts, with acca insurance on the football weekends. For a punter who lays bets as well as backs them, the same wallet working on both sides is the structural edge.

Read. Smarkets is the brand for the bettor who has used an exchange before. The 3.0 minimum is the cost of the welcome; the exchange is the long-run edge.

The money test: required turnover on a £50 bonus at 10x

A welcome offer paying a £50 bonus carries a 10x wagering requirement under the Commission’s 19 January 2026 rules. The arithmetic belongs to the punter.

Required turnover = bonus × wagering factor = £50 × 10 = £500 of qualifying bets. Number of qualifying bets = required turnover ÷ stake per bet. At a stake of £10 per bet, that is 50 bets. Only bets at the offer’s minimum odds count; the headline “minimum odds of 1.5” reads as a quarter of acca legs and the same on singles. Expected cost = required turnover × margin of the qualifying market. On a 1X2 football market the bookmaker’s margin is around 5%; £500 × 5% = £25 of expected cost. Net headline value to a punter clearing the bonus, in round terms, is £50 − £25 = £25.

That is the band a £50 bonus sits in at a 5% market margin. At a 7% margin — closer to a typical in-play margin — the same bonus costs £500 × 7% = £35 to clear and the net value shrinks to £15. The headline price of an offer is read alongside the margin of the market the offer sits on; a £50 bonus on a 5% singles market is materially more generous than the same bonus on a 7% in-play or acca market. Two offers can read identical in the marketing and cost a punter two different amounts of expected money to clear, and the only way to tell the difference is to read the offer’s minimum-odds rule against the typical margin of the market that rule allows.

The conclusion claims what the arithmetic gives: a £50 bonus at 10x on a 5% market costs roughly £25 in expected betting losses to clear, and a £50 bonus at 10x on a 7% market costs roughly £35. The qualification — that only bets at the offer’s minimum odds count, that the bonus is fixed at the headline amount and that the punter keeps betting after the wagering is done — sits in the offer’s own terms and varies by brand.

Verdict: which offers suit which punter

The offer most worth claiming is the one the punter’s staking pattern can clear without spending the value on margin.

A daily punter captures the most free-bet value at brands paying daily free bets or daily reward shakers — Coral’s Reward Shaker and 10bet’s daily free bet slot into this pattern, and the £10 welcome at Coral or Unibet is a one-off bonus on top of a year-round daily-free-bet slate. A weekend acca punter captures the most existing-customer value at brands running acca insurance or acca profit boosts — Copybet’s up-to-100% cash acca booster, William Hill’s Football Acca Boost from 3% to 200%, BoyleSports’ Acca Insurance with the £20 refund cap, Spreadex’s Acca Boosts from 5% to 100%. A horse-racing punter captures the steady earn at brands paying Best Odds Guaranteed on UK and Irish racing — Kalooki Sportsbook, Unibet, bet365 — and the extra-place terms on major meetings are the largest single offer a racing punter will see in a year. A spread-betting punter captures the welcome value at Sporting Index’s qualifying fixed-odds bet, where the spread-bet tokens are the structural edge.

The two offers to handle carefully are the highest-money welcome offers with the highest minimum-odds qualifiers — SBK’s £20 bet at 3.0 and the cross-product BetTom construction — and the lowest-money daily free-bets whose seven-day expiry catches the punter who forgets to claim. A punter whose betting log holds one longshot a week is a worse fit for the heavy qualifier and a better fit for the daily free bet.

The LCCP ceiling — the 10x cap, the cross-product ban — keeps the heavy wagering off the table. The market underneath the ceiling is still set by margin: an offer that “boosts” a price still keeps the margin of the market the boost sits on, and a free bet still costs the expected margin of the market the free bet is used on. The punter’s read on an offer is a margin read before it is a headline read.

Offshore and the gambling licence: what licensed covers that offshore does not

Every brand on this list holds a Gambling Commission remote licence. A brand that holds a Curaçao, Malta, Gibraltar or Anjouan licence and takes bets from a customer in Great Britain does not, and accepting a bet in Great Britain without a Commission licence is the offence the Act was written to stop.

The difference for a punter comparing offers:

A Commission-licensed brand sits inside GAMSTOP, applies the 10x bonus cap, runs the £150 financial vulnerability check, offers the Commission’s approved dispute-resolution route, holds customer funds in a ring-fenced account that the Commission supervises, and applies the LCCP’s customer-protection duties on every customer including high spenders. A credit-card deposit is impossible (since 14 April 2020), a debit-card or instant-bank-transfer deposit can be the only path on welcome offers, and the operator must verify the customer’s name, address and date of birth before the first deposit. The customer pays no tax on winnings; the operator’s General Betting Duty is its own tax, currently 15% gross profits on the main betting categories until 1 April 2027, with a new 25% remote rate within it from that date.

An offshore brand takes the bet without any of those rails. There is no GAMSTOP coverage, no Commission complaints route, no approved dispute-resolution service, no Commission-supervised customer-funds ring fence, no 10x cap and no £150 vulnerability check. A punt is settled under the operator’s house terms and the operator’s choice of jurisdiction; if funds are withheld the dispute sits in the operator’s home court, not in a UK one. The Commission can issue cease-and-desist notices, refer the operator to search engines, work with registrars, hosts and payment providers, and is being given court-order DNS blocking powers — but enforcement is disruption, not a block. The honest framing is the loss of protection, never that an offshore site is “legal to use”.

The shape a punter reads in the offer is the same shape in either case — a £20 free bet credited on a £10 qualifier with seven-day expiry reads the same on either side of the border. The cost of accepting the offshore version is the protections surrendered at the same moment. The same offer at two brands is not the same offer when one brand holds a GB licence and the other does not.

What to read in the offer’s small print

Six lines decide whether an offer is worth the headline.

The minimum odds. A free bet at minimum odds of 1/2 (1.5 decimal) covers most markets; a free bet at minimum odds of 4/5 (1.8) is narrower and a free bet at minimum odds of 3.0 (SBK’s welcome) is the heaviest on the market. A higher minimum odds means the free bet cannot be used on the obvious short-odds favourite and the punter has to find a longer-odds qualifier, which is more swing in the result.

The expiry window. A free bet that expires in seven days is a tight clock; three tokens each on a seven-day clock is tighter still; an expiry on the welcome offer measured in days rather than weeks is the single most common reason a free-bet offer is missed.

The stake-returns rule. Most free bets do not return the stake with the winnings; an offer that does is closer to bonus cash and the 10x cap applies; an offer that returns the stake is rare and the terms are tighter than the headline.

The wagering multiple. The 10x cap, in force since 19 January 2026, is the ceiling on a bonus; the smaller the multiple the better the offer’s net value at the same headline.

The cap on a refund. Acca insurance refunds up to £20 or £25 as a free bet; a higher cap covers a longer-leg acca. The cap is the difference between an offer that pays a real-money refund and one that pays a small-token credit.

The market-exclusion list. A free bet usable on any market is more flexible than a free bet usable only on football accas or only on horse racing. The exclusion list rules out the longer-leg accas and the bigger-field racing pools at exactly the markets a punter would use a free bet on.

A punter who reads those six lines on every welcome offer and every existing-customer offer captures more value from the same offers than a punter who reads the headline alone.

Tax and what the punter pays

The player pays no tax on betting winnings in Great Britain. General Betting Duty is the operator’s tax: 15% of gross profits on most betting categories, with a new 25% rate applying to remote betting from 1 April 2027 within the duty (remote bets on UK horse racing, bets on self-service betting terminals in licensed premises, pool betting and in-person betting stay at 15%). Spread betting carries separate rates — 3% on financial, 10% on other. Whether the operator passes the duty on through odds is not established; the punter does not pay duty, and the duty sits inside the bookmaker’s margin either way. A professional gambler — a trader who bets for a living — is a question for HMRC or a tax adviser and not for this page.

The Commission’s statutory levy is a separate charge, paid by operators, that funds research, prevention and treatment. It is not the punter’s bill.

A note on advertised offers

A welcome offer is paid in free bets whose stake is not returned, in bonus cash subject to the 10x cap, or in some combination. An existing-customer offer is the same set of mechanisms running through the year. The figure a punter should keep at the front of the comparison is the offer’s expected value in real money after the qualifying stake, the wagering multiple, the minimum odds and the expiry have run their course. The headline reads at the offer’s best case; the £25-on-a-£50-bonus at-10x-on-5%-margin band is the offer’s centre, the £15 at 7% margin is the offer’s floor, and a missed free bet is the offer’s zero.

The LCCP ceiling sets a tight cap on how heavy a bonus can be. Underneath the cap the market is not static, and the existing-customer slate at any one brand can change faster than a punter’s betting log. The offers on this page are valid as of 30 October 2026 and may have been revised by the time an account-holder returns; the offer’s own terms page is the test on the day the offer is claimed.

Industry and operator overview

The licensed betting market in Great Britain runs under the Gambling Act 2005. Since the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014 a bookmaker taking remote bets from customers in Great Britain needs a Gambling Commission licence, regardless of where it is based. There is no state monopoly and no statutory cap on licences. The licensed categories are remote general betting standard (real events), remote general betting standard (virtual events), remote general betting limited, remote pool betting and remote betting intermediary — the licence for exchanges. Spread betting on financial markets is a separate regulatory perimeter, supervised by the Financial Conduct Authority; spread betting on sports is licensed under the Commission’s General Betting Duty regime.

The retail and online markets run side by side: the 2014 Act brought online into the same perimeter as the betting shop, and the two channels share the LCCP and the 10x cap. Spreadex is one of the few operator-licence combinations that runs spread betting (FCA) and fixed-odds betting (Commission) under different supervisors in the same brand.

The licensed remote operators sit on a public register searchable by business name, trading name, domain or account number. The register is the test of whether a brand holds a licence and the field of every licence category, including any non-GB-licensed brand the register does not list. The Commission’s site provides the search; a punter’s check is to confirm that the brand’s exact domain is on the register, not a similar one. A licensed operator may use .com as well as .co.uk, and the domain proves nothing about the licence on its own.

The ten compared

Every row above is a single brand’s own terms; the bookmaker’s own terms page is the test on the day an offer is claimed. The comparative judgement — which offer suits which punter — sits in the verdict section.

Frequently asked questions about existing customer offers at UK bookmakers

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

The Commission’s 19 January 2026 promotion rules cap wagering requirements on bonuses at 10x the bonus amount: a £50 bonus needs no more than £500 of qualifying bets. The cap covers bonuses; whether it extends to a stake-not-returned free bet with no wagering condition is not settled in the Commission’s published guidance. Mixed-product promotions are banned.

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

A sign-up offer pays the customer’s free bet or bonus after a qualifying bet at minimum odds. The minimum odds is the floor on the qualifying bet’s price — at minimum odds of 1/2 (1.5) most accas qualify; at minimum odds of 3.0 only longer-odds selections qualify. The wagering requirement is the multiple the bonus needs to be turned over before it can be withdrawn, capped at 10x since 19 January 2026.

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

A free bet whose stake is paid back with the winnings reads closer to bonus cash and the 10x wagering cap applies. The standard free-bet construction on the market — credited to the customer’s account for use on a real-money selection — pays only the winnings: a £10 free bet at odds of 5.00 decimal (4/1) settles a winning slip at £40, not £50. The stake-not-returned construction is the more generous-looking headline and is the more common one.

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

No. Mixed-product promotions — offers that require gambling across two or more product types such as betting and casino, betting and bingo, or betting and lottery — are banned under the Commission’s 19 January 2026 rules. A sportsbook that credits free slot funds in return for a sports bet is in the banned category. Free spins linked to a sportsbook welcome offer sit on the same side of the line.

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

The Commission’s public register, searchable by business name, trading name, domain or account number, is the test of whether a brand holds a GB licence. The punter’s check is to confirm that the brand’s exact domain is on the register against a licensee holding a remote betting licence — not a similar domain. A licensed operator may use .com as well as .co.uk, and the domain proves nothing about the licence on its own. The account number is on the register against the licence holder’s name; the licence number is the same field prefixed with the remote-licence suffix (for example 064959-R-339314-003).

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

The punter pays no tax on betting winnings in Great Britain. General Betting Duty is the operator’s tax on gross profits, currently 15% on the main betting categories; from 1 April 2027 a new 25% remote rate applies within the duty (remote bets on UK horse racing, in-person bets, pool bets and SSBT bets stay at 15%). Spread betting carries separate rates (3% financial, 10% other). The duty sits inside the bookmaker’s margin; whether the operator passes it on through odds is not established, and the punter does not pay duty.

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