Existing customer offers in UK betting: what stays, what the cap costs

Updated October 2026

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27 October 2026 · Cross-checked against the Gambling Commission’s public licence register.

A welcome offer is the front door. Most of what a UK bettor actually collects over months on a bookmaker comes from a different set of mechanics — the price boost, the acca insurance, the free bet credit that lands in an inbox on a Friday afternoon, the daily odds nudge on a single Premier League fixture. These are the existing-customer offers, and they behave nothing like the headline free bet that drew the account in. The stake is not returned. The wagering requirement is not the headline number. The expiry is shorter than the marketing implies. And in Great Britain since 19 January 2026 a single hard cap sits over the lot: a wagering requirement on a bonus cannot exceed 10x. That cap is the frame for everything on this page, because it changes what an offer is worth and what a careful bettor will accept.

What follows is a working guide to those mechanics, the operators that run them, and the arithmetic that separates a worthwhile free bet from a costly one. The angle is choice. There is no single right path through the offers a UK bookmaker runs — the right path is the one that matches the kind of punter you are.

Responsible gambling and the way UK offers are policed

The cap, the verification rules and the safer-gambling tools are not extras bolted onto the market. They shape the offer a customer is allowed to see in the first place. Starting with the wellbeing side is not a courtesy — it is the only honest order, because a free bet that takes five hours of wagering to clear is also a free bet a bettor on a tight budget may not be able to clear at all.

GAMSTOP is the national multi-operator self-exclusion scheme, mandatory at every GB-licensed remote operator since 31 March 2020. A customer who signs up chooses six months, one year, five years, or five years with auto-renewal; after the minimum period the exclusion sits for a further seven years unless the customer asks GAMSTOP to remove it. Online sites and apps are covered; high-street betting shops run a separate service. GAMSTOP is the front line. It does not replace a personal deposit limit, but it is the cleanest single action a punter who has decided to step back can take.

A financial vulnerability check sits one rung down. It is a public-record check — bankruptcy registers, county court judgments — not a credit reference, and it is triggered when a customer’s deposits minus withdrawals pass £150 over a rolling 30 days. The check is automatic and silent, and a passing result does not need anything from the customer. A flag does. From 28 February 2025 this has been the trigger across the remote market. Announced alongside it is a staged plan for fuller financial risk assessments (the “affordability checks” of the press coverage) with no start date as of writing — the honest framing is that they have been signalled, not that they are in force.

The promotion rules in force since 19 January 2026 finish the triangle. Wagering requirements on bonuses are capped at 10x. A £10 bonus that carried a 50x requirement in the old market demanded £500 of qualifying bets; the cap reduces that to £100 and bans the rest. Mixed-product promotions — an offer that requires a customer to gamble on two or more product types, for example betting and casino, “bet on football to get free spins” — are out. The Commission has not, as of writing, confirmed whether the 10x cap applies to free bets that carry no wagering condition at all, so this is the open question the rest of the page works around.

The safer-gambling tools on the operator’s account page are where a careful bettor spends the most useful two minutes. Deposit limits on a fixed time frame have applied since 31 October 2025, with a second phase postponed to 30 September 2026 — the honest line is that the first phase is live and the rest is signposted. Loss limits and wagering limits sit alongside. GamCare runs the National Gambling Helpline, GambleAware funds treatment and education, the NHS runs gambling clinics in several regions, and Gamblers Anonymous runs meetings in person and online. None of these is a marketing line.

What a betting offer actually is in Great Britain

The free bet, the boosted price, the acca insurance and the cash bonus are four different products with four different costs, and a bettor who treats them as the same thing is the customer the marketing is written for.

A free bet is a token credited to the account that can be placed on a market, usually at a minimum price (1/2 or 1.5 is common) and almost always with the stake not returned on a win. A £10 free bet at odds of 3.0 returns £30 in cash, not £40. The free bet itself is the operator’s cost; the return is the customer’s. The expiry is short — seven days is the most common length in the data the licensed brands publish — and the stake forfeit is the rule, not an oversight. This is the single most-misread line on a betting site.

A boosted price, sometimes labelled an odds boost or price boost, raises the price of one selection or one short accumulator above the market level. The boost is a one-off price change; it does not change the market margin in any structural way. The cost to the operator is the difference between the boosted price and the price the same selection would have carried without the boost. The cost to the customer is the missed chance to lay the same selection on an exchange at the unboosted price, if a lay market exists at all.

Acca insurance refunds a losing accumulator as a free bet, usually when exactly one leg lets the bet down. The structure of the refund is the offer’s whole point: the original stake is gone, and what comes back is a token that itself expires (seven days is the standard) and that itself does not return its stake on a win. A bettor who reads “money back if one leg loses” as a money refund has read the offer wrong.

A cash bonus is credited as withdrawable cash once a wagering requirement is met. The 10x cap is the relevant rule here: a £20 cash bonus at 10x requires £200 of qualifying bets at the minimum price the offer states. Where the bonus is expressed as a percentage of the deposit, the base is the deposit, the bonus or both — the operator’s own terms are the only honest source.

Three rules of thumb follow. First, the headline figure is never the offer’s worth. Second, the minimum price for a qualifying bet decides how much of the wagering the offer can realistically be cleared against. Third, the expiry decides whether the offer is even claimable in the rhythm a punter actually bets at. A seven-day expiry on a bet that needs five qualifying football weekends is, for a part-time punter, an offer that cannot be cleared.

Wagering requirements and the arithmetic of a free bet

The 10x cap is the ceiling. The floor is zero, and several licensed brands do run free bets with no wagering condition at all. Whether the cap binds every kind of free bet is the open question the Commission has not closed; in practice the licensed brands have moved most of their free-bet structures inside the cap regardless, because a wagering-free free bet is harder to clear profitably for the operator and easier to make a clean marketing line of.

A worked example shows the shape. Take a £40 free bet bundle, four £10 tokens, on a market at minimum odds of 1/2 (1.5), expiring seven days from credit. The bundle’s face value is £40, but only the qualifying bets placed on those tokens return winnings; the £40 of stake is the operator’s cost, not the customer’s. Each token, placed at 1.5 and winning, returns £15 — a £5 profit on a stake that was never the customer’s money. Place three of the four at 1.5 and the bundle is worth £15 of profit if all three win. The bundle is worth nothing if none win. The expected value sits between those two numbers, weighted by the probability of the qualifying market, and the probability is set by the market margin the bookmaker already holds.

The point of the arithmetic is not to give a number. It is to make the structure of the offer visible: a free bet is a percentage of its face value, not its face value, and the percentage is the price of the market the token is placed on.

The mechanics the marketing copy leaves out

Three further mechanics turn up across the brands reviewed on this page, and each carries a condition the marketing tends to drop.

Best Odds Guaranteed, usually abbreviated BOG, raises the payout on a UK or Irish horse race to the higher of the price at placement and the starting price, when those terms are stated. The customer who takes 5/1 at 10am and the horse wins at 3/1 the SP collects at 5/1. The customer who takes 3/1 at 10am and the horse wins at 5/1 the SP collects at 5/1. The mechanic is a free option on the price; the cost is in the margin the operator runs on the rest of the card.

Cash Out closes a bet before the event settles, at a price the operator sets. The price is not the same as the same outcome on a betting exchange; the operator’s margin sits inside it. Cash Out availability is not guaranteed and a bet stands if Cash Out is unavailable — that line is a real one in the help pages of several brands, including DAZN Bet.

Each-way betting is two bets of equal stake: one on the win, one on the place. The stake doubles; the place terms are set by the race and the operator, not by the customer. A £10 each-way bet at 10/1 is a £20 stake, with the place leg paying a fraction of the win price.

These three mechanics are not, strictly, existing-customer offers. They are the machinery the existing-customer offer usually sits inside, and a price boost on a Best Odds Guaranteed selection behaves differently from a price boost on a market that does not have BOG. Reading the offer means reading the machinery too.

Choosing an existing-customer offer: what separates a worthwhile one

The 10x cap, the seven-day expiry, the minimum price and the stake forfeit apply across the market. What varies is how the brands reviewed here use them. The choice a punter faces is not “which free bet is biggest” — it is “which operator’s daily rhythm matches the way I actually bet.”

A punter who bets mostly on football accumulators wants a brand whose acca insurance and acca boost structure is generous, whose minimum-leg count is low and whose minimum odds on the legs are realistic. The same punter does not need Best Odds Guaranteed on horse racing and gains little from a deep in-play tennis offering.

A punter who bets mostly on horse racing wants Best Odds Guaranteed on UK and Irish racing, extra-place races on the big meetings, and a non-runner policy that does not punish early prices. The acca insurance is incidental; the in-play tennis offering is irrelevant.

A punter who bets in play, on football, tennis and the US sports, wants depth of in-play markets, a Cash Out that is reliably available and a price-boost cadence that runs through the week, not just at the weekend. The same punter gets less out of a brand that runs its best mechanics around the Cheltenham meeting.

A small-budget punter wants short expiries (because long expiries invite forgetting), low minimum stakes on the qualifying bets and free bets that can be placed on markets the punter would have bet on anyway. A higher-stake punter wants a brand that does not restrict the account after a few wins, which is its own kind of cost.

The rest of this section walks through ten brands, each licensed by the Gambling Commission, each running a recognisable existing-customer mechanic. The point is to fit the operator to the punter, not the other way around.

BetUK — acca-shaped free bet bundle

BetUK’s sports welcome is four £10 free bets, two of them restricted to football accumulators of four or more selections and two to multiples of two or more, valid for seven days from credit, with opt-in required. The structure of the bundle — two of the four free bets acca-only — is the meaningful detail. A punter who bets singles is paid in tokens they cannot fully use. A punter who already runs four-fold football accas as a habit is the customer this welcome is written for. Beyond the welcome, BetUK runs ongoing price boosts and acca-style promotions under the LeoVegas Gaming PLC umbrella.

Copybet — acca cash bonus and daily profit boost

Copybet’s Acca Booster pays up to a 100% cash bonus on accumulators of at least three selections, and a Daily Profit Boost pays up to 15% on selected markets. The Acca Booster is a cash bonus, not a free bet, and the difference matters: cash bonus winnings are withdrawable once the wagering requirement is met, while free-bet winnings carry the stake forfeit. The daily boost is the more interesting existing-customer mechanic, because the cap on the boost percentage is per-day and the markets the boost applies to are stated in the offer. Copybet runs under Copybet UK Limited.

Ladbrokes — Best Odds Guaranteed and acca boost on a deep card

Ladbrokes offers odds boosts on horse and greyhound bets, Best Odds Guaranteed on UK and Irish horse races, in-play betting and an Acca Boost. The breadth of the card is the brand’s defining feature; the existing-customer mechanic is the rhythm of daily odds boosts across the major sports, plus Best Odds Guaranteed on the racing side. Ladbrokes runs under LC International Limited, the same licensee as Coral; the two brands share a parent and a platform without being the same offer.

Bet600 — qualifying bet on five singles

Bet600’s app welcome requires at least five qualifying single bets of £10 or more at evens (2.0) or greater within the first seven days, after which one £10 free bet is credited. The structure — five singles before the free bet lands — is the brand’s defining condition. A punter who bets singles as a habit and is willing to run the five-bet qualifying sequence will see the £10 token; a punter whose betting is mostly accas will not, because accas do not count as qualifying singles here. Bet600 runs under Tyche Tech Limited.

Bet Ahoy — the £10-in, £10-out structure

Bet Ahoy’s welcome is “Bet £10 & Get £10 in Free Bets”, split as a £5 sports bet token and a £5 acca token. The bundle is small and the structure is plain. The brand runs under Bet Ahoy Ltd on a remote general betting standard licence and is a useful counterpoint to the higher-headline brands, because the offer’s whole cost is low and the qualifying conditions are simple.

Betway — four-token welcome on a debit-card deposit

Betway’s welcome is £40 in free bet tokens, four £10 each, 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 condition that bites: a punter who prefers to deposit by bank transfer, e-wallet or prepaid will not trigger the welcome. Once credited, the four tokens carry the usual stake forfeit and the usual minimum price on a qualifying bet. Betway runs under Betway Limited.

Fitzwilliam Sports — capped-membership Dublin bookmaker

Fitzwilliam Sports describes itself as a Dublin bookmaker with capped membership and a “High Stakes Welcome” subject to compliance criteria. The brand sits inside a smaller circle of UK-licensed operators and is, by its own framing, a different kind of customer relationship from the high-street names. The trade is account-level attention; the cost is a smaller, less liquid market and a welcome that is not a standard bundle. The licensee is SBKI Limited.

BetGoodwin — three £5 tokens across three bet types

BetGoodwin’s welcome is “Bet £10 & Get £15 in Free Bets”, split as a £5 sports bet token, a £5 acca token and a £5 Sub-Cover token. Three tokens, three different bet types, seven-day expiry on each. The Sub-Cover token is the brand’s own product; the mechanic behind it sits inside BetGoodwin’s racing product and is worth checking in the brand’s own terms before placing. BetGoodwin runs under Goodwin Racing Limited.

LiveScore Bet — the payment-method breadth

LiveScore Bet accepts debit cards (Visa and Mastercard), Apple Pay, PayPal, Pay by Bank (Open Banking) and Revolut Pay, and runs a standard welcome under a Gibraltar-incorporated licensee. The payment-method breadth is the meaningful existing-customer mechanic for a punter whose deposit method is the binding constraint. A punter who wants to fund the account from a Revolut current account or an Open Banking flow has more room at LiveScore Bet than at a brand that takes debit card only. The licensee is LiveScore Betting and Gaming (Gibraltar) Limited.

Kalooki Sportsbook — instant bank withdrawals and racing focus

Kalooki Sportsbook 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 instant withdrawal is the differentiator for a punter who wants funds in a current account the same morning, and the racing focus — Best Odds Guaranteed, extra-place races, daily boosts — is the structure of the card. Kalooki runs under Kalooki Sportsbook Limited and is a GAMSTOP member, as every GB-licensed remote operator is.

How the table is read

The ten operators above each hold a Gambling Commission remote licence for general betting on real events. The four columns in the table below are the columns that matter when comparing them on existing-customer offers: brand, the licence number and the company that holds it, and what the operator’s own terms state on the key subject — which, for this page, is the existing-customer mechanic that defines the offer the operator is best known for. Cells where research does not carry a specific figure are left blank; the absence is the point, and a row without that data is not an incomplete row.

The pattern in the table is the same pattern that runs through the whole UK market in 2026: a welcome bundle of free bet tokens, a daily rhythm of price boosts, a racing product with Best Odds Guaranteed on the bigger brands, and a payment-method story that ranges from debit-card-only to a full spread. The wagering requirement on the cash portion of these offers sits inside the 10x cap; the free-bet tokens carry the stake forfeit and the short expiry. None of this is hidden in the terms, and none of it is in the headline either.

The fundamentals of an existing-customer offer

The fundamentals sit underneath the offer and do not change. Three of them carry the rest of this page.

A free bet’s stake is not returned on a win. This is the most-frequently misread line on a UK bookmaker’s welcome page. A £10 free bet at odds of 4.0 returns £40, not £50, and the £10 of stake was never the customer’s money. The expected value of the free bet is the profit weighted by the probability of winning, not the face value. The arithmetic in this page’s calculation runs the structure of that expectation against a generic offer; the per-offer number depends on the market the token is placed on.

A wagering requirement is a multiplier on the bonus, not a multiplier on the deposit. A £10 bonus at 5x is £50 of qualifying bets, not £50 of deposit plus bonus. The 10x cap is on this multiplier, and the cap binds harder on a percentage-of-deposit bonus than on a flat bonus of the same size. The minimum odds on a qualifying bet decide which markets the bonus can be cleared against; a bonus that demands 1.5 (1/2) clears comfortably, a bonus that demands 2.0 (evens) clears more slowly because fewer of the day’s markets carry that price.

The expiry decides the offer. A seven-day expiry on a token that needs a Premier League weekend to clear is an offer a part-time punter will let lapse. A thirty-day expiry on the same token is workable; a ninety-day expiry is generous. The market has converged on seven days for the bundle tokens, partly because the operator’s margin on the qualifying bet is collected faster, partly because a lapsed token is free money to the operator. A punter who plans to claim an offer should look at the calendar first and the offer second.

The three fundamentals land in the same place. The offer’s headline figure is the marketing’s number. The offer’s value is the structure: the stake forfeit, the wagering multiplier, the minimum odds, the expiry, the qualifying bet and the cap the regulator sets. A punter who reads the structure is the punter the offer is not built for.

The statute that frames the offer

The statute is the Gambling Act 2005, with the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014 closing the point-of-consumption gap. The Commission licenses the whole commercial remote market under sections 33 and 36 of the 2005 Act as amended, and a Curaçao, Maltese or Gibraltar licence is not a substitute for the GB one. The licensed brands on this page each hold a remote general betting standard (real events) licence; a few hold a remote betting intermediary licence alongside it, which is the licence for a betting exchange. Northern Ireland is outside the 2005 Act and has its own older law; a GB licence does not cover Northern Ireland, and a Northern Ireland-licensed brand is not covered by it either.

Identity checks have applied since 7 May 2019. A customer cannot deposit or place a bet, including a free bet, until name, address and date of birth are verified. The verification is the first thing the new-account flow does, and a free bet that arrives in the inbox before verification is a token that cannot be placed until verification clears. That is by design. An anonymous-play bookmaker is not a GB-licensed bookmaker.

Credit cards are banned for gambling in Great Britain since 14 April 2020, including credit-card-funded e-wallet deposits. Debit cards and bank-based payments are not covered by the ban. A bookmaker that accepts a credit card is not a GB-licensed bookmaker. A bookmaker that takes a Revolut current account funded by a credit card is on the wrong side of the rule, and the licensed brands that take Revolut apply the test on the funding source.

The 10x cap on bonus wagering requirements and the ban on mixed-product promotions took effect on 19 January 2026. Both are in the Commission’s social responsibility code and bind every GB-licensed operator. The cap does not yet cover free bets with no wagering condition; the Commission has not, as of writing, ruled on that point.

The player pays no tax on betting winnings in Great Britain. The bookmaker pays General Betting Duty at 15% on its gross profit from general betting, and from 1 April 2027 a new remote betting rate of 25% applies within the duty, while remote bets on UK horse racing, self-service betting terminal bets, pool betting and in-person betting stay at 15% (HM Government policy paper of 26 November 2025). Until that date the remote rate is 15%. Whether operators pass duty on through odds is not established, and the honest framing is to write neither that the punter pays duty nor that the punter does not.

The enforcement side runs the other way. Providing gambling facilities in Great Britain without the licence the Act requires is an offence under section 33 of the 2005 Act, on summary conviction up to 51 weeks’ imprisonment, a fine up to level 5, or both (six months in Scotland), aimed at the operator. A customer who bets on an unlicensed site commits no offence under the Act as drafted, but loses the British consumer protections: no GAMSTOP coverage, no Commission complaints route, no approved dispute-resolution service, no British route to recover funds if the operator withholds them, and no binding by the 10x bonus cap or the £150 vulnerability check. The unlicensed site is not “the same as the licensed one” — it is a different product with a different set of risks.

Where a bettor actually checks an offer

A punter who has decided to claim an offer has four places to look, in this order, before placing a bet on the token.

The first is the offer’s own terms, on the operator’s site. The headline is not the terms; the terms are several paragraphs below the headline and they say what the marketing does not. The minimum odds, the expiry, the qualifying bet, the payment-method restriction and the cap on the free-bet’s winnings are all in there. The terms are also where the operator states which markets the offer does not apply to, and that list is often longer than the marketing implies.

The second is the Commission’s public register. The register is searchable by business name, trading name, domain or account number, and it is the test of whether a brand holds a GB licence. A brand on this page is on the register; a brand not on the register is not the same kind of product. The register does not endorse an offer, but it confirms the operator is bound by the Act.

The third is the betting slip itself. The slip names the price, the market and the stake; it is the document that determines what is paid out. A punter who has placed a free bet at 1.5 (1/2) and the price moves to 1.6 (4/7) before the event settles has bet at 1.5, not 1.6. The slip is the contract.

The fourth is the operator’s safer-gambling page. The deposit limit, the loss limit, the time-out and the self-exclusion are set on the account, and they apply to free-bet play as much as to cash play. A punter who sets a deposit limit before claiming a welcome offer has set the cap on the offer’s qualifying bets too, and a limit that is too tight to clear a bonus is a limit that protects the bankroll at the cost of lapsing the token. The choice is the punter’s.

The arithmetic on a typical welcome offer

The page’s calculation is the bonus-turnover cost of a representative welcome, framed as a band because the inputs vary across the market and the result follows them.

Take the structure research names for the £40-in-free-bets welcome, the kind offered across several of the brands reviewed here. The free-bet bundle is £40 in face value. A wagering requirement of 10x on the bonus — the cap — is £400 of qualifying bets at the minimum odds the offer states. The minimum odds in the offers research describes sit between 1.5 (1/2) and 2.0 (evens). Stake per qualifying bet is the operator’s minimum, which is usually £5 or £10 on the UK-licensed brands. Expiry is seven days from credit.

The number of qualifying bets needed ranges from 40 (at £10 per bet) to 80 (at £5 per bet) at the lower minimum odds, and from the same band to roughly double it at the higher minimum odds, because fewer markets on a given day carry 2.0 than 1.5. Across the band, the qualifying-bet sequence is 40 to 160 bets inside seven days — a rate of between six and twenty-three qualifying bets per day. A full-time punter clears the lower end of the band without thinking; a part-time punter clears none of it, and the token lapses. That is the practical shape of a 10x cap on a £40 free-bet bundle: the cap does not stop a serious bettor from clearing, and the cap does not help a casual one.

The expected cost of clearing the offer is the turnover multiplied by the margin of the market the qualifying bets are placed on. A 5% margin — ordinary for a Premier League match odds market — on a £400 turnover is £20. A 7% margin on the same turnover is £28. A 3% margin on a tight horse racing market is £12. The offer’s expected cost sits in a band defined by where the qualifying bets are placed, not by the headline figure of the bundle. A punter who clears a £40 free-bet bundle on a tight racing market pays roughly £12 of expected cost; a punter who clears the same bundle on a tennis in-play market pays more. The 10x cap reduces the upper end of that band; it does not eliminate it.

The result is a band, not a number: the qualifying-bet sequence is 40 to 160 bets in seven days, the expected cost of clearing the offer is £12 to £28 on the margin assumptions above, and the bundle’s expected profit sits below the £40 face value, weighted by the probability of the markets the tokens are placed on. The condition is that all qualifying bets are placed inside the seven-day window at the minimum odds the offer states. The honest framing is that the bundle is worth more to a punter who would have bet those markets anyway, and worth less to a punter who is betting only to clear the offer.

How a punter reads the band

A serious bettor with a settled routine — five qualifying bets a day, all on football, all on markets the punter would have bet on at the unboosted price — sits at the lower end of the qualifying-bet band, the lower end of the margin band, and the upper end of the bundle’s expected value. The 10x cap does not bite, because the punter would have done the betting without the offer.

A casual bettor who places a single accumulator on a Saturday and a single bet on a Wednesday sits outside the qualifying-bet band on the seven-day expiry. The token lapses. The bundle’s value to this punter is zero, because the offer’s value is realised only at settlement of the qualifying bet, and the qualifying bet was never placed.

A punter who bets only to clear the offer sits at the upper end of the qualifying-bet band and the upper end of the margin band, because the qualifying bets are placed on the most liquid markets the offer allows, where margins are tight. The bundle’s expected value is the bundle’s face value less the expected cost of clearing, and the expected cost on tight markets is closer to the upper end of the band than the lower. The punter ends roughly where the punter started.

The three punter-types are not a recommendation. They are what the offer’s structure produces when the structure is read honestly. A punter who does not recognise himself in any of the three has not yet decided whether to claim the offer, and the safer move is to leave it.

Where this leaves the choice

A punter in the UK market in 2026 has a working set of mechanics: the welcome free-bet bundle, the daily price boost, the acca insurance, the Best Odds Guaranteed on the racing brands, the Cash Out on the in-play brands, the Bet Builder on the deeper cards. The 10x cap on bonus wagering and the ban on mixed-product promotions frame the whole set. The brands on this page each hold a Gambling Commission remote licence, each publish their own terms, and each run a recognisable existing-customer mechanic that fits a recognisable punter.

The right path is the one that matches the kind of punter you are. The wrong path is the headline that does not.

Frequently asked questions

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

Since 19 January 2026 the Gambling Commission has capped wagering requirements on bonuses at 10x. A £10 bonus at 50x, once needing £500 of qualifying bets, now demands £100 at most. The cap binds every GB-licensed operator. Whether it covers free bets with no wagering is not yet settled by the Commission.

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

The wagering requirement is the bonus multiple turned over before winnings are withdrawable. A £10 bonus at 5x needs £50 of qualifying bets. The minimum odds are the floor on the price of these bets — usually 1.5 (1/2) or 2.0 (evens). Bets below this price do not count toward the turnover.

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

A free bet is a token, not cash. The operator’s cost is the token’s face value; the customer’s cost is zero. On a winning free bet at odds of 4.0, the customer receives £40 in winnings, not £50, because the stake was never the customer’s money. This is the standard operator rule.

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

No. Since 19 January 2026, the Commission has banned mixed-product promotions — offers that require gambling on two or more product types, such as betting and casino. A “bet on football to get free spins” structure is not permitted at any GB-licensed operator. This rule binds every licensed brand in the market.

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

The Commission’s public register, on its site, is the only test of whether a brand holds a GB licence. It is searchable by name, domain or account number. A match is the proof. The register does not endorse offers; it simply confirms the operator is bound by the Gambling Act 2005.

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