Existing customer offers at GB bookmakers — the real value, the real terms

Updated October 2026

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Available in US

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The headline number on a free bet or a “boosted odds” tile is the smallest piece of the picture. The shape of an offer — what it costs in qualifying bets, in minimum odds, in days on the clock, and in the wagering that takes the bonus off “locked” — is what decides the value of it. This page reads ten Gambling Commission-licensed bookmakers through that lens, on the morning the Commission counted them on its public register, and lands on the ones whose offers for existing customers cost the least in plain pounds to clear.

A note on timing: data was checked against the Gambling Commission’s public register and against each operator’s own terms on 27 October 2026. Several offers here change weekly — boosted prices, acca insurances, loyalty tokens — so any number on this page is a snapshot, not a standing rule, and the operator’s own terms page is the only place those are confirmed at the point of betting.

Safer gambling in Great Britain before the offers

The wagering cap and the mixed-product ban that govern the rest of this page come from the same regulator that runs the safer-gambling system. The two pieces sit together, and reading the offers without the safety frame leaves a reader thinking the £s are the only real ground in this market. They are not.

The minimum age for any account at a GB-licensed bookmaker is 18. Before a customer can deposit or place a bet, the operator checks name, address and date of birth — and that check has to clear even when the first stake is a free bet or a bonus token, not cash. It is part of the licence conditions, not a perk the operator can opt out of, and it is one of the reasons no licensed site runs anonymous play. The identity check is the price of entry to the rest of the protections below.

The national self-exclusion scheme is GAMSTOP. Every GB-licensed online bookmaker is a member, and signing up blocks new accounts and the use of existing ones across the lot — for six months, one year, five years, or five years with auto-renewal. After the minimum period, the exclusion stays in place for a further seven years unless the customer asks GAMSTOP to remove it. The scheme covers online sites and apps; betting shops run their own separate self-exclusion through a different service. A customer who wants to step back does not have to pick one brand — they can close the door on every licensed site with a single registration.

Credit cards have been banned for gambling in Great Britain since 14 April 2020, including credit-card-funded payments through an e-wallet. Debit cards, bank transfers and most e-wallets are unaffected. The ban matters less as a payment-method story and more as a borrowing story: it closes off one of the quietest paths by which a customer’s stake is paid with someone else’s. For anyone weighing the offers on this page, it is also a reminder that every bookmaker on it runs on cash, not credit, and that fact alone narrows the discussion of what an offer can reasonably be.

Two checks sit further down the funnel. A “financial vulnerability check” applies once net deposits pass £150 across any rolling 30 days — that is a public-record search (bankruptcy, county court judgments) and not a credit check or an income check. A wider plan for “financial risk assessments” — sometimes called affordability checks — was published by the Commission on 7 July 2026 as a staged programme with no start date; operators and trade bodies have written and spoken about it in the months since. The honest framing on this page is: light-touch vulnerability check is live, deeper affordability check is announced, not in force. Limits themselves are the customer’s: there is no state-set ceiling on deposit or loss at a licensed bookmaker, and the operator’s job is to offer the tools and act on the signals, not to set a personal cap.

The help lines have not moved. GamCare runs the National Gambling Helpline. GambleAware funds treatment and education. The NHS runs gambling clinics in England, with regional referral routes. Gamblers Anonymous runs meetings in most British cities. For the reader weighing an offer on this page against the time it will take, those are the names worth keeping on hand.

Bonuses and free bets: how the marketing words actually pay out

An “offer” in the British online betting market is one of four things, and they pay out in different ways. Conflating them is the quickest way to misread the price.

A cash bonus is real money the operator credits to a withdrawable balance. The catch, when there is one, is a wagering requirement — the bonus has to be turned over a fixed multiple of times, on bets at or above a stated minimum odds, before any winnings (or in some cases the bonus itself) can be withdrawn. The Commission’s promotion rules, in force since 19 January 2026, cap that multiple at 10x. A £10 bonus at 50x used to mean £500 of qualifying bets; under the cap, no more than £100. The cap applies to wagering requirements; it does not speak to whether the bonus is paid back when a qualifying bet wins, and it does not name a maximum money value for the bonus itself. Several bookmakers already ran offers inside the cap before it became the rule; several have tightened offers since.

A free bet is a token, not money. Its stake is normally not paid back when the bet wins — bet £10 of free bet credit at 3/1 and the return is £40 (the £30 of profit plus nothing on the stake), not £50. That single rule is the difference between a free bet and a cash bonus, and the difference is what the marketing never quite says. Where a bookmaker does refund the free-bet stake on a win, the offer is genuinely richer; where it does not, the operator’s terms say so, and the rule is treated as normal in this market.

A “risk-free” bet is almost always a free bet by another name. The marketing word says the stake is safe; the operator’s terms refund a losing stake as a free bet, not as cash, so the punter who loses the qualifying bet walks away with the same kind of token any other free-bet offer would have handed him. They are not the same as cash-back promos, which return money to a withdrawable balance, and the distinction is one a reader should not have to learn from a refund landing as a token.

A price boost, an acca insurance or an accumulator boost is a different shape again. Price boosts raise the price on a specific market, often pre-event, for a stake limit the operator sets. Acca insurance refunds a stake as a free bet if one leg of a qualifying accumulator lets the punter down. Accumulator boosts (sometimes called acca boosts or profit boosts) pay a percentage bonus on winnings, settled in cash or a free bet depending on the operator’s own terms. These are usually aimed at existing customers, not new ones — they are the offers this page is really about — and they are the offers most often moved, tightened or replaced week to week.

The thing all four have in common is the wagering and the clock. Wagering is the turnover the bonus or free bet has to pass through before a withdrawal is allowed. The minimum-odds rule decides which bets count: a 5/2 shot usually counts, an odds-on shot often does not. The expiry is the window in days, and the headline number does not say how short it is. Coral’s and Unibet’s £40-in-free-bets welcome offers run seven days from issue; QuinnBet’s free bets are valid for seven days from credit; BoyleSports’ acca insurance refund free bet expires in seven days; SBK’s £60 in free bets arrive within 48 hours. Those are the windows in which a stake has to be placed and settled before the value of the offer falls off.

Whether the cap on wagering requirements applies to free bets without a wagering condition is not established, so the page does not assert either way. The honest framing is that the cap is on bonus geometry, not on every token a bookmaker credits. A free bet whose only condition is “use within seven days at minimum odds 1/2” does not carry a wagering multiple, and the question the rule answers is the question the offer does not ask.

The single biggest effect of the 19 January 2026 rules has been on the longer-running 30x, 40x and 50x offers that used to be standard at casino-facing brands. A 50x wagering requirement on a £10 bonus meant £500 of qualifying bets before any winnings were withdrawable, and it changed the arithmetic on whether the bonus was worth claiming at all. The 10x cap has pushed the more betting-led brands closer to £100 of qualifying bets on a £10 bonus — a tenth of the work — and the marketing on the heavier sign-up offers has got quieter as a result. The mixed-product ban — the rule that a promotion cannot tie a sports bet to a free spin, a bingo bonus or a lottery entry — has clipped a layer of “bet on football to get free spins” promotions that used to dominate welcome pages.

When assessing the arithmetic of the current Coral offer (“Get £40 in Free Bets when you bet £20”), the operator’s terms align with the current regulatory 10x wagering cap. This offer is notably light on wagering requirements compared to recent market standards. The primary conditions for the customer — such as minimum odds, token expiry, and the stake-not-returned rule — apply to the free-bet tokens themselves, rather than the initial qualifying stake.

The ten bookmakers compared

Ten bookmakers hold a Gambling Commission remote betting licence and run an offer aimed at existing customers. They are not all the same kind of offer, which is itself the point — the reader who already has an account wants the bookmaker that suits his sport, his stake size and his appetite for leg-by-leg legwork, not the one with the highest headline number on its banner. The table below sets the four fields a reader needs to compare them on.

Coral and Sky Bet are bookmakers that run layered offer stacks for existing customers: free-to-play games, daily odds boosts, jackpot pools. Kalooki is a newer licence holder whose pitch is the cash-out side of the book (instant withdrawals, Best Odds Guaranteed on the racing). Sporting Index is a spread-betting specialist whose free-bet bundle mixes fixed-odds and spread markets. Copybet’s headline existing-customer feature is an acca bonus paid in cash, not in free bets. QuinnBet’s distinction is the rule book on its free bets — where they work, which systems they cover, what the price limits are. 10bet runs a matched-deposit welcome bonus that the £50 ceiling keeps modest. Smarkets and SBK share a licence and a Gibraltar holding company; SBK is the sportsbook face of that combination. BetTom’s welcome offer pairs a sports free bet with a casino free-spin bundle — a shape the January 2026 mixed-product rules did not retroactively unwind, but would not permit in any offer placed after the rule took effect, and the bonus-versus-free-bet distinction on it is sharper than its marketing suggests.

The column on operators’ own terms is the column the reader is here for. The licence column is the column the comparison rests on: any brand not on the Commission’s public register is outside the protections covered earlier, and the register is the test of whether the brand belongs on the page at all. The holder column names the company the Commission licences, not the brand — Ladbrokes and Coral share LC International Limited; Paddy Power and Betfair share Flutter; SBK and Smarkets share Smarkets (Malta) Limited — and that is why a single brand gets spoken of as an “operator” only when the licence and the holder line up.

There is no “best” line in the table. A punter who bets on football accumulators every week gets a different answer from a punter who backs single winners on Saturday racing, and a punter with a £20 weekly budget gets a different answer again. The rest of the page lays out which bookmakers fit which shape.

How the offers stack against each other

Three shapes stand out across the ten.

The first is the cash-extra shape, where the offer pays a percentage bonus on winnings in real money. Copybet’s acca boost is the clearest example on the table: up to 100% bonus on accas of three or more selections, settled as cash. Spreadex’s acca boost runs from 5% on three legs up to 100% on the longer football accumulators, also paid as cash. William Hill’s Football Acca Boost — running until 30 May 2027 — runs from 3% on a double up to 200% on twenty or more legs with a £10,000 ceiling per online bet. These offers sit in the same family and they are the ones that pay the bonus in money rather than in tokens; the wagering requirement is paid by the boost itself, not by the punter.

The second is the free-bet-token shape, where the offer pays in tokens whose stake is not returned. Coral, Unibet and BoyleSports bet on “Get £X in free bets when you bet £Y” mechanics, and Dabble’s £10-on-£10 offer is in the same family. These are the offers the £40 in free bets on Coral and Unibet belong to — Coral’s £40 on a £20 qualifying bet at minimum odds 2.0 (1/1), £40 issued within seven days and expiring seven days after issue. The stake-not-returned rule sits on every token in this group and the wagering, where there is one, is small.

The third is the mixed bundle shape, where the operator’s offer combines a sports free bet with a casino free-spin token or a similar product. BetTom’s welcome offer is the headline example: 50% back as a free bet of up to £50 paired with 50% back as free slot funds up to £50. The shape itself is the one the Commission’s January 2026 rules now prohibit for new offers, on pain of the Gambling Commission; offers placed before 19 January 2026 still stand under their existing terms.

The right offer for an existing customer is one whose shape suits his sport. A football acca reader wants Copybet or Spreadex. A racing reader wants Kalooki or one of the larger bookmakers whose Best Odds Guaranteed runs from early on the card. A casual £10-a-week punter wants one of the free-bet-on-qualifying-bet offers and a long enough window to use it in.

The legal frame the offers sit inside

The Gambling Commission licences every bookmaker on this page under the Gambling Act 2005, the statute that covers Great Britain — England, Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland is outside the Act and runs on a separate, older law, so a GB licence is the right test for a GB customer, not a UK-wide one. Since the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014, an operator whose remote facilities are used in Great Britain needs a Commission licence wherever it is based — a Curaçao, Maltese or Gibraltar licence is not a substitute. Several of the licence holders on this page are themselves Gibraltar-, Malta- or Dublin-incorporated; what the Commission licences is the UK-facing operation, and the public register is the test of whether that licence exists.

The Commission issues different licences for different products. The relevant ones for this page are remote general betting standard (real events) — the licence under which fixed-odds sports betting on real events runs — and remote betting intermediary, which is the licence for a betting exchange. Smarkets’ UK exchange sits under the betting intermediary licence. Copybet’s exchange side sits under the same family of licences. The two are not interchangeable in the Commission’s categories and an exchange-style product is not the same product as a sportsbook even when the two sit on the same domain.

There is no state monopoly and no statutory cap on the number of licences. There is also no statutory list of permitted bets or markets: an operator holds a licence for a category and offers markets under its own house rules and the Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice. In-play betting is widely offered by GB bookmakers under their licence conditions; no statutory rule says it is “unrestricted”, and the controls in any individual event are the operator’s. Esports are treated like any other event; virtual events are a separate licence category. Bets on politics, TV shows and novelty markets are offered by GB operators and no statutory prohibition was found. Spread betting that is not a financial product sits inside General Betting Duty; financial spread betting is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, not the Commission. Spreadex is the only bookmaker on this page that operates under both regulators — FCA for spread betting, the Commission for fixed-odds — and the loss-can-exceed-deposit warning on spread bets sits with the FCA’s territory.

The customer pays no tax on betting winnings in Great Britain. General Betting Duty is the operator’s tax on gross profits, currently 15%; from 1 April 2027 a remote betting rate of 25% will apply within it, with UK horse racing, betting-terminal bets, pool betting and in-person betting staying at 15%. Spread betting carries its own rates (3% financial, 10% other). The player is not charged duty on any of this; whether the operator passes it through to the price of the bet is a separate question, and one that is not established.

Promotion rules in force since 19 January 2026 cap wagering requirements on bonuses at 10x and ban mixed-product promotions. The cap is on the wagering multiple, not on the money value of a bonus, and does not retroactively unwind offers placed before that date. The mixed-product ban is the rule that bans “bet on football to get free spins” promotions; the Commission has published the rule and the trade has written and spoken about it since. “Whistle-to-whistle” advertising — the absence of betting ads from five minutes before to five minutes after a live sporting broadcast before the 9pm watershed — is an industry code, not law, and is a different rule from the promotion rules. The Premier League clubs’ voluntary withdrawal of gambling sponsorship from the front of matchday shirts from 2026/27 is voluntary, not law, and the rest of matchday inventory (sleeves and hoardings) remains.

The Commission’s public register is the test of whether a brand holds a licence. It can be searched by business name, trading name, domain or account number. A licence number is a ten-character string — for example 64959-R-339314-003 for BetTom — and a check on the register against that number is the cleanest way to confirm the licence. A brand that does not appear on the register is not GB-licensed, and the offers on this page are not available there in the same form. A licensed brand using a .com domain is normal, not a red flag — the domain proves nothing on its own. The Commission’s register is the proof.

Offshore is the case the legal frame makes most sense to name in full. A GB licence is compulsory at the point of consumption: providing gambling facilities in Great Britain without the licence the Act requires is an offence under section 33 of the Gambling Act 2005 — on summary conviction up to 51 weeks’ imprisonment, a fine up to level 5, or both; six months in Scotland — and aimed at the operator. There is no offence aimed at the customer who merely bets on an unlicensed site. The honest framing is the loss of protection: no GAMSTOP coverage, no Commission complaints route, no approved dispute-resolution body, no British consumer redress if funds are withheld, and not bound by the 10x bonus cap or the £150 vulnerability check. Enforcement against unlicensed operators is disruption, not blocking — cease-and-desist notices, search-engine referrals, registrar and payment-provider work, and the court-order DNS blocking powers the regulator has been given, or is about to receive. A licensed site comes with the checks, the limits, the GAMSTOP membership and the bonus cap, and with the verification before the first bet. An unlicensed site comes with none of those and the possibility of losing the funds. Neither is “the safe choice” by default — that is a question for the reader.

What an existing customer offer costs to clear

Calculating the true cost of an offer like Coral’s “Get £40 in Free Bets when you bet £20” involves looking at the specific qualifying steps required. The key factors include the initial £20 deposit and sports bet at minimum odds of 2.0 (1/1), the seven-day window for using the £40 in free bets, and the fact that the stake is not returned. By examining these terms alongside the current 10x wagering cap, customers can assess whether the offer aligns with their typical betting volume. The effective cost depends on how the tokens are utilized and the types of markets selected before the seven-day expiry period ends.

Under the old shape of the market — a 50x wagering requirement on a £10 bonus = £500 of qualifying bets — the headline numbers worked as advertised. Under the Commission’s 10x cap on bonuses, the picture is different. Coral’s £40 free-bets package is a free-bet offer, not a bonus-with-wagering; it carries no wagering multiple on the £40 itself. The qualifying bet is the £20 placed at minimum odds 2.0 (1/1). The wagering geometry on this offer, if the £40 had a 10x wagering factor attached, would be £40 × 10 = £400 of qualifying bets on top of the £20 — a real but bounded turnover requirement. Stated plainly: even if Coral attached the maximum 10x wagering to the £40 token bundle, a customer would need to turn over £400 on bets at the minimum price to release the bonus, plus the £20 qualifying stake. The arithmetic is the bonus base × wagering factor (the base research names: the bonus, or bonus plus deposit), giving required turnover; the number of qualifying bets is that turnover divided by the stake per bet, with only bets at or above the minimum price counting.

A worked example, taking the qualifying bet alone: a £20 qualifying bet at minimum odds 2.0 returns £40 on a win (the £20 stake plus £20 of profit), giving a return of stake × odds = £40 and a net profit of stake × (odds − 1) = £20. With the £40 in free bets paid out across, say, four £10 tokens, a customer who backs four winners at average odds 5.0 (4/1) — well above the 1/2 minimum that usually applies on free bets — sees £10 × 4.0 × 4 = £160 in profit across the four tokens, with the £40 of stake not returned. The qualifying bet returns £40 with the £20 stake; the four free-bet tokens return £160 profit. Total profit on the offer, with four winners and zero losers, is £160. Total profit with one winner and three losers is £40; with zero winners, the qualifying bet is the only return and the customer walks away with the £20 of qualifying-bet profit plus a £0 from the tokens. The expected cost is what the page’s other calculation addresses, and it depends on the market margin on the bets the customer actually places.

The cost side of the offer is the bookmaker’s margin on the markets bet into. A typical Premier League 1X2 market runs at a margin in the band of roughly 5% to 8% at GB-licensed bookmakers; an each-way horse race at the standard take is closer to 20% to 30% across the place and win pools. On a turnover of £400 (the bonus base × 10x) cleared on football at a 6% margin, the expected cost is £24. On the same turnover cleared on horse racing at a 25% margin, the expected cost is £100. The headline number is the band: somewhere between roughly £24 and £100, with the lower end on football singles and the upper end on racing each-ways. With no wagering attached, the £40 of free-bet turnover itself carries no clearing cost; the cost sits in the bonus geometry where there is one, and in the margin on the bets the customer actually places.

The honest gloss on this offer, then, is that it is light on the qualifying work by recent historical standards. The £20 qualifying bet is a £20 stake on a 1/1 shot — a single weekend fixture pays for it. The £40 in free-bet tokens, with a seven-day-from-issue expiry and the standard stake-not-returned rule, give a punter a week to place them. If the £40 carried a 10x wagering factor (which it does not on Coral’s current terms), the customer would need £400 of qualifying bets at minimum odds to release the bonus, and that work would carry the margin of the markets the bets sit on. A punter whose weekly football acca is already £50 of qualifying bets at the right odds finds that work reuses the offer’s requirement, not adds to it. A punter who bets only at Cheltenham in March finds that work concentrates in one week, with the seven-day expiry on the tokens.

The arithmetic is a statistical estimate, not a guaranteed outcome: an average over many bets under the stated assumptions, and a result that depends on the markets the customer actually plays and on the outcomes of the bets the wagering passes through. It promises no win, no payout and no return.

The bookmakers in detail

BetTom — bonus and casino bundle on the same welcome

BetTom’s welcome offer pairs 50% back as a free bet of up to £50 with a matching 50% back as free slot funds up to £50. The shape — a sports free bet coupled with a casino free-spin bundle on the same qualifying action — is the mixed-product shape the Commission’s January 2026 promotion rules now prohibit in new offers, and BetTom’s offer sits on the right side of that rule by virtue of when it was placed. The wagering factor on the sports free bet is the rule under which the £50 maxes out at £25 of qualifying stake at minimum odds, and the casino side carries its own wagering factor in the standard online casino band. The Commission account is 64959; the licence holder is Bet Tom Limited.

The verdict: the welcome offer is a pair, not a single product, and a punter who only bets on sport is paying for half an offer he will not use. A punter who plays both the sportsbook and the casino gets the better of it, because the qualifying bet does double duty across the two balances. For everyone else, the single-product welcome offers elsewhere on the page are a cleaner fit.

Coral — daily Reward Shaker and the £10,000 jackpot

Coral runs the bigger offer stack aimed at existing customers. The headline welcome is £40 in free bets when you bet £20 at minimum odds 2.0 (1/1), with the free bets issued within seven days and expiring seven days after issue; the qualifying payment must be a debit card or instant bank transfer. Beyond the welcome, the daily mechanics are a free Reward Shaker, an Odds Booster on hundreds of markets, and free-to-play games such as Football Super Series with a £10,000 jackpot. Coral’s site lists Apple Pay, Visa, Visa Electron, Mastercard, Revolut Pay, Google Pay, TrueLayer, Earthport and Trustly among the payment options. The Commission account is 54743; the licence holder is LC International Limited (the same holder as Ladbrokes, with the two brands running as separate products under one licence family).

The verdict: for an existing customer with a Coral account already in place, the offer is the daily mechanics — the Reward Shaker, the Odds Boosters, the free-to-play jackpot — and the welcome offer is the entry point. The £40-in-free-bets shape is light on qualifying work by recent standards; the seven-day expiry on each token is the rule that decides whether the offer earns its headline. The daily variety of games and free-to-play features makes the offer more versatile for the punter who checks in regularly.

Dabble — small stake, small offer, social-feed design

Dabble’s welcome offer is “Bet £10, Get £10 in Free Bets” on a first deposit, with minimum odds applying, a 7-day expiry and the stake not returned. The shape is small by the £s on the page but the qualifier is light: a £10 first bet, not a £20, and the £10 of free bets is the same £10 that has to clear in seven days. Dabble’s product is built around a social-feed betting interface — a stream of bets from other customers that the punter can copy or tail — and that feature is the offer in a different shape, in that the free bet is what funds the first copy on the feed. The Commission account is 65677; the licence holder is Dabble Sports UK Ltd.

The verdict: the offer suits a punter who is curious about the social-feed shape and wants a low-cost way to try it. The £10-on-£10 offer is one of the smaller on the page; the value of it sits in the seven-day use-it-or-lose-it rule on the free-bet token and in the minimum-odds condition the operator applies. A punter who already has an account with a bigger welcome elsewhere gets a different deal.

Sky Bet — three tokens at 5p minimum stake

Sky Bet’s welcome offer is £30 in free bets, credited as three £10 tokens, on a £5 first deposit and a first single or each-way bet of at least 5p at odds 1/1 or greater. The minimum stake — five pence on the qualifying bet — is the smallest on the page; the £5 first deposit is also the lowest deposit threshold among the welcome offers. The token shape (three £10 tokens, not one £30 block) is what gives the offer its rhythm: three bets, three weekends, three chances. The Commission account is 67370; the licence holder is SBG Sports Limited.

The verdict: for the price-sensitive punter who wants to test a new bookmaker, Sky Bet’s offer is the cheapest entry on the page. The three-token shape suits a punter whose betting is weekly rather than concentrated. A punter betting only at Cheltenham finds the three-token shape constraining against a single meeting.

Kalooki Sportsbook — instant withdrawals and Best Odds Guaranteed

Kalooki is the newer licence on the page (Commission account 57730, holder Kalooki Sportsbook Limited) and the offer is the cash-out side of the book. 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 existing-customer mechanics are Best Odds Guaranteed and the extra place races — both racing-shaped, both settled in cash — and the daily boosts are the standard odds-boost tile on the homepage. Kalooki is a GAMSTOP member.

The verdict: for the racing-led punter, Kalooki is the cash-out book — Best Odds Guaranteed pays the better of the early price and the SP, and instant withdrawals mean a winning bet does not sit in pending for 48 hours. The newer licence and the smaller customer base mean less of the social-feed feature set other bookmakers run; the offer stack is racing-shaped, with daily boosts and the extra-place offers on the bigger meetings. This approach rewards the racing regular who values the speed of the payout and the BOG pricing.

Sporting Index — fixed-odds and spread bets in one bundle

Sporting Index is a spread-betting specialist whose new-customer offer pairs fixed-odds and spread markets. A £10 fixed-odds bet at minimum odds of 1/2 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. The shape is a bundle: six fixed-odds tokens plus three spread-bet tokens on three different markets, with the smallest of them at £1. The Commission account is 27343; the licence holder is Sporting Index Limited.

The verdict: Sporting Index is the right bookmaker for a punter who already trades spread markets. The bundle is the offer in its own terms, and a punter who only wants the fixed-odds side is paying for half an offer in the spread markets he will not use. For a punter new to spread betting, the bundle is a way to try Total Goals, Winning Favourites and Race Index at a low total stake. The £10-of-fixed-odds, £11-of-spreads total is the largest new-customer spread bundle on the page.

Copybet — acca boost paid in cash

Copybet’s pitch for existing customers is the acca side: an Acca Booster of up to 100% cash bonus on accas of at least 3 selections, plus a daily Profit Boost of up to 15%. The shape is a cash bonus on winnings, not a free-bet token — the boost is paid on the winnings, in cash, and the stake-not-returned rule that applies to free bets does not apply here. The Commission account is 53774; the licence holder is Copybet UK Limited.

The verdict: for the football-acca punter, Copybet is the cleanest fit on the page. The 100% boost on three-leg accas is settled in cash; the daily Profit Boost stacks on top. A punter whose betting is singles on the horses finds the acca-led offer stack a thin fit. The exchange-side of Copybet is a separate product under the same licence family and a different conversation.

QuinnBet — clear rules on free bets, opaque rules on systems

QuinnBet’s free bets are valid for seven days from credit, can be used on any market at odds 1/2 (1.5) or greater, with a maximum odds cap of 50/1. Straight accumulators are allowed; Trixies, Patents and Yankees are not. The seven-day expiry is the same as Coral’s; the maximum-odds cap at 50/1 is unusual and rules out a small set of long-odds multiples. The Commission account is 61011; the licence holder is QuinnBet (Gibraltar) Limited.

The verdict: the rule book on QuinnBet’s free bets is clearer than most — seven days, minimum odds 1/2, no system bets — and the clarity is the offer. A punter whose betting is single bets at evens or longer fits naturally; a punter whose betting includes Trixies and Patents finds the system exclusion a real constraint. The £40-in-free-bets welcome offer sits in the same family as Coral and Unibet, with the same £40 on a £20 qualifying bet shape.

10bet — 100% up to £50, with casino on the same licence

10bet’s app advertises a 100% up to £50 betting bonus for UK sign-ups, plus daily free bets and free spins. The matched-deposit shape is a smaller wagering geometry than the £40-in-free-bets welcome at Coral, with the bonus capped at £50; the wagering on a 10x cap would be £500 of qualifying bets, the upper end of the post-January-2026 bonus geometry. The Commission account is 43173; the licence holder is Blue Star Planet Limited.

The verdict: the 10bet welcome is a matched-deposit shape, not a free-bet-on-qualifying-bet shape, and that changes the cost picture. A punter whose betting volume would clear £500 of turnover at the minimum odds anyway — a weekly £100 acca punter over five weeks — finds the bonus a clean add. For the occasional player, the turnover target on the matched deposit is a larger commitment than the free-bet structure seen at other sites.

Smarkets / SBK — exchange and sportsbook under one licence

Smarkets and SBK share Commission account 39173 and the holder Smarkets (Malta) Limited. SBK is the sportsbook face of the licence: £20 first deposit and £20 bet at minimum odds of 3.0 for £60 in free bets within 48 hours, with Cash Out, Bet Builder and live horse racing streams. The minimum-odds rule at 3.0 (2/1) is the highest among the welcome offers on the page; the £60 in free bets is also the largest total. Smarkets itself is the betting exchange, with the exchange running under the same betting intermediary licence.

The verdict: SBK is the sportsbook for a punter who already trades on Smarkets’ exchange. The minimum-odds rule at 3.0 (2/1) is the offer’s hinge — a punter whose first bet would have been a 1/1 shot at another bookmaker has to find a longer-odds selection to qualify. The £60 in free bets is the largest welcome total on the page, and the 48-hour issue window is the fastest. A punter whose exchange trading and sportsbook betting already live on the same wallet is the natural fit.

The wagering cap in plain English

The Commission’s promotion rules since 19 January 2026 are a small set of changes with a big effect on how welcome offers read. The wagering cap is the headline: no more 30x, 40x or 50x on bonuses. The 10x cap means a £10 bonus with a 50x factor used to require £500 of qualifying bets; under the cap, no more than £100. The mixed-product ban closes off the “bet on football to get free spins” shape of welcome offer that dominated casino-facing brands through the early 2020s.

The cap applies to wagering requirements; it does not name a maximum money value for a bonus. The free-bet offers — Coral’s £40 in free bets on a £20 qualifying bet, for example — do not carry a wagering factor on the £40 itself in the operator’s own terms. Where a bookmaker attaches a 10x factor to a free-bet bundle, the clearing cost is the bonus base × wagering factor, with the same minimum-odds rule that applies to other turnover. The relevant arithmetic is in the worked example above; the relevant conclusion is that an offer of Coral’s shape is light on wagering work by recent historical standards.

The mixed-product rule is the second prong. Since 19 January 2026, an offer that requires a customer to gamble on two or more product types — betting, casino, bingo, lottery — is banned. BetTom’s welcome offer is a mixed-product offer (50% sports free bet, 50% casino free slot funds); it sits on the right side of the rule by virtue of when it was placed. No new welcome offers of that shape can be placed with GB-licensed operators under the rules now in force.

The cap does not address every question a reader might ask. Whether the cap applies to free bets with no wagering condition is not established — the rule’s plain wording is about wagering requirements, and free bets without such a requirement do not have one. The cap does not name a maximum money value for a bonus; the £10,000 ceiling on William Hill’s Football Acca Boost is the operator’s own ceiling, not a Commission cap. The cap does not address stake limits; operators set their own maximum stakes and may restrict customers on their own terms.

How an existing customer should think about the offers

The right offer for an existing customer is the one whose shape suits his week. A punter whose betting is weekly accas on the Premier League finds the cash-extra shape (Copybet, Spreadex) the cleanest fit: the boost is paid on winnings, in cash, with no wagering work and no token to use. A punter whose betting is concentrated on the Saturday racing card finds Best Odds Guaranteed (Kalooki) and the extra-place races the right offers, with the cash-out side of the book — instant withdrawals — the deciding factor. A punter who plays both football and racing, with a stake of £20 to £50 a week, finds Coral’s daily Reward Shaker and Odds Boosters the right stack: the daily mechanics give a small offer every day, not a single large offer once a year.

The offers to be careful of are the ones whose wagering work is heavier than the headline number suggests. A matched-deposit welcome with a 10x wagering factor (the post-January-2026 maximum) on a £50 deposit means £500 of qualifying bets at minimum odds — five weeks of £100 accas at minimum odds for the average weekly punter. The same £50 of headline value at Coral or Unibet, paid as £40 in free bets on a £20 qualifying bet, is a tenth of the qualifying stake and a tenth of the wagering work, and the headline-to-work ratio is the better deal. The shape is the offer; the £s on the banner are the headline.

The offers to walk past are the ones whose qualifying bet is hard to place at the right odds. SBK’s welcome requires a £20 bet at minimum odds 3.0 (2/1), a price that rules out a chunk of favourites-only betting. Coral’s welcome requires a £20 bet at minimum odds 2.0 (1/1), a price that opens the door to most weekend fixtures. The shape of the minimum-odds rule decides who the offer suits; a punter whose betting pattern is short-odds favourites is not the natural fit for SBK.

The offers that suit no one are the ones whose qualifying work is heavier than the offer is worth. The mixed-product ban is the rule that closed most of them off; the few that remain on the right side of the rule are grandfathered under their original terms, and a punter whose betting is single-product (sportsbook only, casino only) gets a cleaner deal on a single-product welcome elsewhere.

The honest framing on the timing of the offers is that they move weekly. Boosted prices, acca insurances, daily specials and free-to-play jackpots change on a Monday-morning cycle at most bookmakers. The Commission’s promotion rules set the outer frame; the operator’s terms set the inner conditions; the offer on the homepage on a given morning is not the offer on the same homepage the following week. Any number on this page is a snapshot at the time of writing; the operator’s own terms page is the only place those numbers are confirmed at the point of betting.

Frequently asked questions

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

The Gambling Commission’s promotion rules in force since 19 January 2026 cap wagering requirements on bonuses at 10x — a £10 bonus at 50x would have needed £500 of qualifying bets before any winnings could be withdrawn; under the cap, no more than £100 of qualifying turnover. The cap applies to wagering requirements on bonuses; it does not address the money value of a bonus or the question of whether the cap covers free bets with no wagering condition.

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

Minimum odds are the shortest price a qualifying bet must be at for it to count toward the offer’s requirements — usually 1/2 (1.5) or 2.0 (evens, written 1/1) at GB bookmakers. The wagering requirement is the multiple of the bonus that has to be turned over in qualifying bets before any winnings can be withdrawn. Coral’s £40 in free bets on a £20 qualifying bet has no wagering factor on the £40 in Coral’s current terms; the qualifying bet is the £20 at minimum odds 2.0, and that is the only wagering work the offer asks for.

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

The standard rule in the British online betting market is that the stake of a free bet is not returned when the bet wins — a £10 free bet at 3/1 returns £40 (£30 of profit plus nothing on the stake), not £50. The rule sits in the operator’s terms and is the difference between a free bet and a cash bonus. Where a bookmaker does refund the free-bet stake on a win, the offer is richer; where it does not, the operator’s terms say so plainly.

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

Since 19 January 2026, mixed-product promotions — offers that require gambling on two or more product types such as betting, casino, bingo and lottery — are banned at GB-licensed operators. BetTom’s pre-rule welcome offer (a sports free bet paired with a casino free-spin bundle) is the textbook mixed-product shape; the rule does not retroactively unwind offers placed before 19 January 2026 but does prevent any new offer of that shape.

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, and it is the test of whether a brand holds a GB remote betting licence. Every bookmaker on this page sits on the register; the column on the Commission account in the comparison table above is the licence number a reader types into the register’s search. A brand that does not appear on the register is not GB-licensed and is outside the protections covered earlier.

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

The customer pays no tax on betting winnings in Great Britain — General Betting Duty is the operator’s tax on gross profits, currently 15%, with a remote betting rate of 25% applying from 1 April 2027. Spread betting carries its own rates (3% financial, 10% other). Whether the operator passes duty on through the odds is not established, and a player is not charged duty on any of it.

Content created by the «Best Betting Tips» team