Existing Customer Betting Offers: What the Marketing Leaves Out

Updated October 2026

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Data current as of 27 October 2026 and cross-referenced against the Gambling Commission’s public register of remote operating licences.

A “free” £30 in bets is never free. A “risk-free” punt is rarely either. And a 100% welcome bonus that arrives with a 10x turnover requirement asks you to risk ten times what it gave you before any of it becomes yours to withdraw. In Great Britain, the rules around what a bookmaker may offer tightened on 19 January 2026 — but the gap between the marketing and the arithmetic has not disappeared, it has just been moved a few feet down the page.

This guide walks through how existing customer betting offers actually work in the UK in 2026: what a wagering requirement costs in real bets, why the stake of a free bet vanishes on settlement, where the Commission’s 10x cap leaves room for operator creativity, and how a punter compares ten licensed brands without mistaking a headline price for value.

What an “Existing Customer Offer” Actually Is

The phrase covers everything a bookmaker sends to a customer who has already opened an account. Welcome bonuses belong to the new-customer side of the fence; once a punter is registered, the offers that follow tend to fall into three families.

Free bets are tokens credited to your account after you place a qualifying bet with real money. They look like cash and feel like cash, but the stake is almost never returned when you win. A £10 free bet at odds of 3/1 (4.00 decimal) settles at £30 profit, not £40. The £10 disappears the moment the bet is placed.

Price boosts and enhanced odds improve the price of a specific selection — a first goalscorer priced at 5/1 (6.00) bumped to 8/1 (9.00), say, or a horse’s SP lifted by a quarter. The stake rules vary: some boosts pay the boosted price in cash, others restrict the boosted portion to a free bet or cap the maximum stake that qualifies.

Acca insurance and acca boosts attach to accumulators. Insurance refunds your stake (as a free bet, not cash) if one leg lets you down. Boosts add a percentage on top of accumulator winnings — 10% on a five-fold, 50% on a twelve-fold — usually with a maximum boost ceiling and minimum odds per leg.

A fourth family, cashback on net losses, runs on a weekly or daily basis and pays a percentage of what you lost back as either withdrawable cash or bonus funds with a turnover attached. The mechanics differ enough from one operator to the next that reading the terms is the only reliable way to compare.

The Commission’s 19 January 2026 promotion rules cap wagering requirements on bonuses at 10x and ban mixed-product promotions — offers that make you gamble on two or more product types, for example “bet on football to unlock free casino spins.” The cap applies to bonuses; whether it reaches free bets with no wagering condition is not established in the published rules. A bonus that once demanded 50x play now demands at most 10x, which is a real change for the punter, but the underlying offer is still a marketing instrument built to keep you betting past the welcome.

The Landscape: Ten Licensed Brands and Their Offers

Every brand below holds a Gambling Commission remote licence for general betting on real events. The Commission account number is the cleanest check that the licence exists; the licence holder is the company ultimately responsible for the product. Several well-known consumer brands sit under one licence holder — LC International Limited covers both Ladbrokes and Coral, for instance — and the table treats each brand as it presents itself to customers.

These are not recommendations. A row in a comparison is not a licence to bet. The table shows what each operator’s own terms state on the subject of new-customer and existing-customer offers; the rest of the page is about the arithmetic behind those statements.

How the Promotion Rules Changed in 2026

The Commission’s consultation on fairer gambling culminated in a set of rules that took effect on 19 January 2026. Two of them are visible in almost every offer a punter now sees.

The 10x wagering cap. A bonus that comes with a wagering requirement may not demand more than ten times the bonus amount in qualifying bets. A £10 bonus can ask for at most £100 of turnover; a £50 bonus, £500. The cap is on the bonus, not on the deposit. A “100% up to £100” offer that credits a £100 bonus may legally ask for £1,000 of bets before withdrawal — the full £100 at the 10x ceiling. The cap does not apply to free bets whose only condition is that you use them within a set time; the Commission has not published a view on that.

No more mixed-product offers. “Bet £10 on the football to get 50 free spins” is no longer permitted. The rule stops a bookmaker from tying a sports betting offer to a casino, bingo or lottery promotion. Casino welcome packages and sports welcome packages now stand on their own.

The change matters less for the welcome offer — most major operators had already moved to low-turnover or no-turnover welcome bonuses — and more for the long tail of existing-customer promotions, where 30x and 50x turnover requirements on small bonus credits were a quiet staple. The cap clips those.

The other pieces of the framework sit beside the promotion rules. Identity verification is mandatory before a first deposit (in force since 7 May 2019), so no licensed operator runs anonymous play. A financial vulnerability check kicks in once a customer’s net deposits exceed £150 in a rolling 30-day window (since 28 February 2025) — a public-record search for bankruptcy or county court judgments, not an income or credit check. A fuller financial risk assessment regime has been announced in stages, with no start date as of mid-2026; the Commission has signalled the direction but the obligation is not yet in force.

What Wagering Requirements Cost in Real Bets

A wagering requirement — also called a turnover requirement or rollover — is the number of times the bonus must be staked before winnings become withdrawable. It is the line in the small print that decides whether a bonus is worth claiming.

The arithmetic works like this. Required turnover equals the bonus amount multiplied by the wagering factor. The number of bets to clear it depends on the stake per bet and whether each bet’s odds meet the minimum. Most offers set a minimum odds floor (1/2 or 1.5 decimal is common) below which a bet does not count.

Take an example from the offer terms. Suppose a bookmaker credits a £20 bonus with a 10x wagering requirement. The turnover the punter must generate is £200. If each qualifying bet is staked at £10 at minimum odds of 1/2 (1.50 decimal), twenty bets are needed. If the punter stakes £5 each at the same minimum, forty bets. The 10x cap, which is the current ceiling, does not change the calculation — it changes the maximum the bookmaker is allowed to ask for.

The cost of clearing the bonus sits on top of the time and the betting volume. Every one of those qualifying bets is settled against a margin the bookmaker holds, and the expected cost of clearing the offer is the turnover multiplied by the market margin. A punter clearing £200 of bonus turnover on a 5% margin market should expect to lose around £10 of expected value, before considering variance and the chance of going on a run that busts the bankroll first. The bookmaker is not paying you the bonus; you are paying for the privilege of betting at its prices for long enough to clear it.

The cap is the ceiling. Most offers demand far less. Coral’s welcome, for example, is structured as free bets rather than a turnover-bearing bonus — the £40 in free bets that arrive after a £20 qualifying bet are used once, settle as profit only, and expire seven days later. There is no wagering requirement on the free bet itself. A punter who reads “free bets” as a no-cost windfall is still paying in time and in the margin the bookmaker holds on whatever the free bet is used on; but the 10x cap does not apply to the free bet’s headline value.

Free Bets, the Stake That Disappears, and Why It Matters

The single most misunderstood line in a free bet offer is the one about stake returns. A £10 free bet at 5/1 (6.00 decimal) does not return £60 if it wins. It returns £50 — the profit, with the £10 stake gone. The mechanics are simple and the surprise is universal, because every other transaction in a betting account treats stake and winnings as a single payout.

The reason is contractual, not accidental. A free bet is a token that grants you the right to the profit only. The bookmaker’s exposure on a successful free bet is the profit; the stake is “paid” by the bookmaker at the point of issue, not at the point of settlement. A punter who treats a free bet as a £10 cash stake is overstating its worth by the stake-to-return ratio, which grows worse at shorter odds. At odds of 1/1 (2.00), a £10 free bet wins £10. At odds of 10/1 (11.00), it wins £100. The stake is gone in both cases.

The free bet’s expected value can be worked out. Multiply the free bet amount by (decimal odds − 1) and divide by the decimal odds, then adjust for the margin the bookmaker holds on the market. A £10 free bet placed at 5/1 (6.00) on a market with a 5% margin has an expected value of roughly £8.30 before any further adjustment. That is the price the bookmaker has effectively paid for your business; the rest of the offer’s appeal — the qualifying bet, the time pressure, the cap on what you can win — is the price you pay back.

Time pressure is a real cost. Coral’s free bets expire seven days after issue; Betway’s expire in seven days; BoyleSports’ acca insurance refund expires in seven days. A free bet that is not used is a free bet that paid the bookmaker nothing. The clock is part of the offer.

Comparing Offers Without Being Misled

A punter looking at three £30 free bet offers from three different bookmakers should compare on four things: the qualifying bet (how much you have to stake, at what minimum odds, in what time window), the free bet’s expiry, the markets on which the free bet may be used, and any cap on winnings.

Qualifying bet. A £5 qualifying bet at minimum odds of 1/1 (2.00) is a cheaper ticket into the offer than a £20 qualifying bet at the same minimum. The qualifying bet is itself a real-money bet at the bookmaker’s margin, so the lower the qualifying stake and the lower the minimum odds, the less you are paying for admission.

Expiry. Seven days is the common window. A shorter window — three days, twenty-four hours — means the offer has to be used on events that fit, and the punter is pushed towards whatever is available rather than what is well-priced. A longer window, where one exists, is rare.

Market restrictions. Some free bets are restricted to certain sports, certain bet types (single only, no accas), or minimum odds. BoyleSports’ free bets, for example, may not be used on Trixies, Patents or Yankees — only on straightforward singles and accumulators. The restriction is a quiet one and the punter who reads the headline offer and ignores the restricted-markets list may find the bet voided at settlement.

Win caps. Some offers cap the payout from a free bet, usually at a level well above anything a punter would realistically reach. A cap of £10,000 on a price boost is not a practical concern; a cap of £100 on a free bet placed at long odds is.

The arithmetic above — turnover times margin, free bet expected value adjusted for stake return — is the underlying comparison. Two offers that look identical on the page can have very different expected values once the qualifying bet, the expiry and the market restrictions are priced in.

The Responsible Gambling Frame

The promotion rules sit inside a wider player-protection regime that the licensed operators must follow. The framework is the Commission’s, and it sets the floor below which a licensed brand cannot operate.

GAMSTOP is the national multi-operator self-exclusion scheme. Every GB-licensed online operator is required to participate, and a customer who registers with GAMSTOP is blocked from opening new accounts or depositing with any participating operator for the chosen period — 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. GAMSTOP covers online sites and apps; the high-street betting shop self-exclusion scheme is separate.

Deposit limits are a customer-set tool, not a state ceiling. The Commission has signalled staged changes to the Remote Technical Standards on deposit limits — the first set applied from 31 October 2025, a second phase has been postponed to 30 September 2026 — but there is no published state-imposed cap on how much a punter may deposit in a day, a week or a month. The limit is what the punter agrees with the operator at account opening, and any lowering takes effect immediately while any increase has a cooling-off period.

Financial vulnerability and risk checks form a two-stage process. The financial vulnerability check (in force since 30 August 2024, with the £150 rolling-30-day trigger applying since 28 February 2025) is a public-record check — bankruptcy registers, county court judgments — that runs automatically. The fuller financial risk assessment, often called “affordability checks” in the press, has been announced in stages but is not yet in force, and the Commission has not published a start date.

Help lines and support. GamCare runs the National Gambling Helpline. GambleAware funds treatment and research. The NHS runs gambling clinics in several regions. Gamblers Anonymous runs peer-support meetings. None of these is an operator, and the contact details do not depend on which bookmaker the punter uses.

The frame is not optional. A licensed brand that fails to apply GAMSTOP, to verify identity, or to honour a self-set deposit limit is breaking its licence conditions and is open to Commission action. The same framework does not apply to offshore operators; the protection gap is the one practical consequence of betting with an unlicensed brand.

Offshore and Unlicensed Brands: What Is Lost

A Gambling Commission licence is compulsory at the point of consumption. 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 business registration is not a substitute; the test is whether the Commission has issued a remote operating licence against a Commission account number on its public register.

An unlicensed brand cannot be recommended to a GB punter on the strength of its own marketing. The brand may pay out, may run a fair book, and may be run by people of integrity — the relevant question is what recourse a GB punter has when something goes wrong. With a Commission-licensed brand, the answer runs: GAMSTOP coverage, a Commission complaints route, an approved alternative dispute resolution (ADR) provider, and the LCCP and Remote Technical Standards as a backstop. With an unlicensed brand, the answer runs: none of those, and the consumer protections of British law may not apply because the operator is not within the Commission’s jurisdiction.

Enforcement against unlicensed operators has run through cease-and-desist notices, search-engine referrals, registrar and host work, and payment-provider pressure. The Commission has, or is about to receive, court-order DNS blocking powers; this is not the same as the wholesale ISP blocking regimes in some other jurisdictions. The cleanest framing is the one the Commission uses: licensed means the checks, the limits, the bonus cap and the dispute-resolution route, and it also means identity verification before the first bet. Unlicensed means none of the protections and a real risk of losing funds with no British consumer redress if the operator withholds them.

The advice for a punter who has decided to bet: check the Commission’s public register, search by business name or domain, and confirm the Commission account number against the brand’s own terms. The register is the only test that counts.

Taxation, Duty and the Punter’s Bottom Line

A punter in Great Britain pays no tax on betting winnings. The operator pays General Betting Duty, currently 15% on gross profits from betting, which the operator sets its prices to cover. From 1 April 2027 a new remote betting rate of 25% applies within General Betting Duty, while remote bets on UK horse racing, bets on self-service betting terminals in licensed premises, pool betting and in-person betting stay at 15%. Until 1 April 2027 the remote rate remains at 15%; whether operators pass the duty on through tighter prices is not established, and a punter who sees odds fall after April 2027 should not assume the bookmaker is the only reason.

Spread betting has its own tax structure (3% on financial spread bets, 10% on other spread bets) and is, in the financial-spread sense, regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority rather than the Commission. The customer-facing point is that financial spread betting losses can exceed deposits, and Spreadex — a Commission-licensed brand for fixed-odds betting and an FCA-regulated firm for spread betting — is the example the Commission’s own register cites.

A professional gambler, defined for tax purposes by HMRC, should ask HMRC or an adviser. The “no tax” line applies to recreational punters and is general information, not tax advice.

Ten Operators, Reviewed

What follows is a closer look at each of the ten licensed brands in the comparison table, with the focus that the page’s angle demands: what the offer costs the punter, and where the offer is honest about it.

BetUK

BetUK is a LeoVegas Gaming PLC brand running under Commission account 39198. The welcome structure rewards new customers who deposit £10 or more and place a sports bet within seven days: four £10 free bets, two of them on football accumulators of four or more selections and two on multiples of two or more, each with a seven-day expiry. The offer’s main quirk is the split: a punter expecting four flexible £10 free bets gets two of them pinned to football and two to multi-leg bets. The qualifying bet’s minimum stake is low (£10), but the markets the free bets may be used on are not.

Copybet

Copybet runs under Commission account 53774 against Copybet UK Limited. The brand’s identity is built around acca-related promotions rather than a headline welcome. The Acca Booster pays up to 100% in cash on accumulators of three or more legs, and a Daily Profit Boost tops out at 15%. The “cash” qualifier on the Acca Booster is the relevant one — cash, not free bet tokens, means the stake and the profit are both withdrawable. The punter is, as always, paying in the margin the bookmaker holds on each leg of the acca.

Ladbrokes

Ladbrokes sits under LC International Limited, Commission account 54743, alongside Coral. The brand’s existing-customer offer is a set of recurring mechanics rather than a single headline: odds boosts on horse and greyhound bets, Best Odds Guaranteed on UK and Irish racing, in-play markets, and Acca Boosts. The mix is the same one most big-brand bookmakers run; Ladbrokes’ differentiator is the racing focus, where BOG and extra-place races are part of the everyday offer. The licensed brand sits inside the Entain group; the Commission’s register is the only place the parent structure shows up.

Bet600

Bet600 runs under Tyche Tech Limited, Commission account 44731. The welcome requires five qualifying singles of £10 or more at minimum odds of 2.0 (evens) within seven days of registration, after which one £10 free bet is credited. The arithmetic is unfavourable to a low-volume punter: £50 of qualifying stakes at the bookmaker’s margin, against a £10 free bet, against a seven-day clock. A punter who would have placed those five bets anyway is in a different position from one placing them only to clear the offer.

Bet Ahoy

Bet Ahoy is a smaller brand under Commission account 100094 against Bet Ahoy Ltd. The welcome is a straightforward “Bet £10 & Get £10 in Free Bets”, split as a £5 sports free bet and a £5 acca free bet. The size of the offer is modest; the split between a single-market free bet and an acca free bet is a common pattern at this end of the market, and the punter who likes accas effectively gets a free shot at a multi-leg bet at no qualifying cost beyond the £10 stake.

Betway

Betway runs under Commission account 39372 against Betway Limited. The welcome is £40 in free bet tokens (four tokens of £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 relevant line: an e-wallet or prepaid card deposit will not qualify. The token structure (four free bets, not one £40 free bet) lets the punter spread the wager across four different events rather than tying all of it to a single result.

Fitzwilliam Sports

Fitzwilliam Sports is a Dublin-based bookmaker with capped membership, running under Commission account 48760 against SBKI Limited. The brand’s “High Stakes Welcome” is described as subject to compliance criteria rather than a fixed headline, and the capped-membership model means the brand is not open to every punter. For the punter who is admitted, the offer is tailored rather than standardised; the absence of a single headline number is a feature, not a gap, and any punter considering the brand should expect a conversation with the operator before a welcome is agreed.

BetGoodwin

BetGoodwin runs under Commission account 2927 against Goodwin Racing Limited, one of the longer-standing licences in the table. The welcome is “Bet £10 & Get £15 in Free Bets”, split as a £5 sports bet, a £5 acca and a £5 Sub-Cover bet. The Sub-Cover element is a horse-racing-specific product aimed at non-runner protection on a single race; it is a smaller-stake version of the kind of insurance mechanic that the bigger brands run as a separate promotion. For a punter whose betting is horse-racing-led, the three-token structure is a better fit than four generic £10 free bets would be.

LiveScore Bet

LiveScore Bet runs under Commission account 56859 against LiveScore Betting and Gaming (Gibraltar) Limited. The brand’s strength is its payment-method coverage: Visa and Mastercard debit, Apple Pay, PayPal, Pay by Bank (Open Banking) and Revolut Pay. The variety matters for a punter who has a preferred payment rail and does not want to open a new e-wallet to claim an offer. LiveScore Bet does not lean on a single headline offer in the way the bigger brands do; the appeal is the platform rather than a welcome number.

Kalooki Sportsbook

Kalooki Sportsbook is operated by Kalooki Sports Book Ltd under Commission account 57730 and is a GAMSTOP participant. The brand’s claims are operational rather than promotional: instant withdrawals by bank transfer (advertised as settling within minutes), Best Odds Guaranteed on UK and Irish racing, in-play markets, daily boosts and extra-place races. The faster withdrawal claim, if it holds up, is a real differentiator — the typical e-wallet payout is twelve to twenty-four hours and a bank transfer can take three to five working days at the bigger brands. The punter’s check is whether the brand’s claimed settlement speed holds in practice.

The Calculation: What a Bonus Asks in Real Bets

A worked example puts the cost of a bonus in concrete terms. Take a hypothetical offer that credits a £20 bonus with a 10x wagering requirement, a minimum odds floor of 1/2 (1.50 decimal) on each qualifying bet, and a 7-day expiry. The wagering cap that took effect on 19 January 2026 is exactly that: 10x is the maximum the Commission will permit.

Required turnover is £20 × 10 = £200. Minimum bets to clear it, at a stake of £10 per qualifying bet, is 200 ÷ 10 = 20 bets. The punter must place twenty qualifying bets within seven days, each at minimum odds of 1.50, to convert the £20 bonus into withdrawable cash (assuming the bonus terms credit winnings to a withdrawable balance on completion, which is the standard structure but worth checking on each offer).

Expected cost. Each of the twenty qualifying bets is settled against the bookmaker’s margin. A typical Premier League match market carries a margin of around 5% — meaning the bookmaker keeps about 5p of every £1 wagered, on average, across all outcomes. The expected cost of clearing the offer is turnover multiplied by margin: £200 × 5% = £10. That £10 is the average amount the punter pays for the privilege of converting the £20 bonus into cash, before considering the variance of a 20-bet sequence and the chance of running through a stake before the wagering requirement is complete.

Free bet equivalent. A £20 free bet at the same bookmaker has no wagering requirement but no stake return, so its expected value is lower than the bonus’s headline value. At average odds of 3/1 (4.00 decimal) on a market with a 5% margin, a £20 free bet’s expected value is roughly £20 × (4.00 − 1) ÷ 4.00 × (1 − 0.05) ≈ £14.06. The punter is being asked to clear a bonus whose expected cost is £10 to release a headline of £20, or to take a free bet whose expected value is closer to £14 with no clearing required. Neither is a free lunch; the comparison is which structure the punter finds less expensive in expected terms, in time, and in the variance the punter is willing to ride.

The conclusion: the 10x cap, even at its ceiling, makes the bonus more honest than the 50x turnover offers that were common before January 2026. It does not make the bonus a bargain. The qualifying bet, the time window, the minimum odds and the bookmaker’s margin on the qualifying markets are all part of the price.

Choosing Between Free Bets, Boosts and Cashback

The three recurring offer types serve different punter profiles, and a punter who knows which one matches their betting will read the marketing with less friction.

Free bets suit the punter who already plans to place a bet at the bookmaker. The qualifying bet is a bet the punter would have placed anyway; the free bet is, in effect, a rebate on the bookmaker’s margin. The punter’s check is the minimum odds (lower is better), the expiry (longer is better) and the market restrictions (fewer is better).

Price boosts suit the punter who has identified a specific selection at a specific bookmaker. The boost is an improvement on a price the punter was going to take; the question is whether the boosted price is good value in absolute terms, not just relative to the bookmaker’s own line. A boosted price that is still worse than the market best is a marketing exercise, not a concession.

Cashback on net losses suits the punter whose weekly volume is predictable. A 10% cashback on net losses softens a bad week but does nothing for a good one. The mechanic to watch is whether the cashback pays in cash or in bonus funds with a turnover attached — the difference between a rebate and another wagering requirement.

The 10x cap applies to bonuses, not to free bets with no wagering condition. A punter who is offered a £20 free bet with no rollover and a £20 bonus with a 10x rollover is being offered two different products; the expected-value calculation above is the comparison, and the punter’s preference depends on how much variance and how much time they want to spend.

Advertising Rules and Who Appears in the Ad

The Commission does not license advertising. Marketing runs through the CAP Code (non-broadcast) and the BCAP Code (broadcast), enforced by the ASA, alongside the Commission’s LCCP marketing conditions. The rules that matter most to a punter are about who may appear in an advertisement and when.

CAP Code section 16 requires that marketing be socially responsible, not of strong appeal to under-18s, and that no one who is or seems to be under 25 may be featured gambling or play a significant role. The rule is about who may appear in the advertisement, not about who may place a bet — a punter of any age may use a licensed bookmaker’s product, subject to the operator’s own terms. The exception is marketing placed in a context where a bet can be made directly, where the rule relaxes.

The “whistle-to-whistle” code is an industry agreement, not a law. Since 1 August 2019, betting advertisements are not shown on TV from five minutes before a live sporting event to five minutes after it, before the 9pm watershed. Horse and greyhound racing are excluded. The Premier League clubs’ withdrawal of gambling sponsorship from the front of matchday shirts (from 2026/27; sleeves and hoardings remain) is a voluntary agreement, not a regulation.

The marketing a punter sees is, broadly, the marketing the ASA and the Commission’s LCCP permit. The promotion rules — the 10x cap and the mixed-product ban — are the Commission’s, and they apply because the Commission’s social responsibility code says so, not because the ASA has ruled on any individual offer.

A Note on “Risk-Free”

The phrase is marketing. A “risk-free” bet in the bookmaker’s terms is usually a free bet credited if the qualifying bet loses, with the stake of the free bet not returned on settlement and the free bet itself expiring within a set window. The “risk” the bookmaker is removing is the loss on the qualifying bet; the risk the bookmaker is taking on is the cost of the free bet if the qualifying bet wins. From the punter’s side, the qualifier is not that the offer is free of risk — it is that the offer shifts the risk from the qualifying bet to the free bet, with the free bet’s expected value scaled by the stake-not-returned rule.

A punter who reads “risk-free” and assumes “no downside” is reading past the offer. The downside is the time cost of placing the qualifying bet, the opportunity cost of not using the free bet on a better-priced selection, and the bookmaker’s margin on whatever the free bet is eventually used on.

How to Verify a Licence

The Commission’s public register is the test. It can be searched by business name, trading name, domain or account number, and the entry shows the licence categories, the licence holder, the trading names and the sites the licence covers. The register is the only reliable way to confirm a brand is licensed in Great Britain.

The domain proves nothing. Licensed operators use .com as well as .co.uk, and an unlicensed brand can register a .co.uk domain. The Commission account number, which appears in each operator’s own terms and in the table above, is the cleanest check: a search of the register on that number returns the licence entry. The licence holder is the company named on that entry, and several consumer brands may sit under one holder.

A punter who cannot find a brand on the register, or whose search returns a different licence holder from the one the brand’s own terms name, should treat that as a red flag. The register is updated as licences are granted, varied or revoked; an entry on the register is current as of the access date, and the access date should be the one the punter notes.

What to Take Away

The 19 January 2026 promotion rules are the most visible change to the UK betting offer landscape in this cycle, and the 10x wagering cap is the line every punter will see in the small print from now on. The cap is real, the ban on mixed-product offers is real, and the rest of the framework — identity verification, GAMSTOP, financial vulnerability checks, the announced financial risk assessment regime — is the licensed market’s floor.

The offers themselves have not become free. The qualifying bet still costs in margin. The free bet’s stake still vanishes. The acca insurance still pays in free bets, not cash. The price boost still depends on the boosted price being a good one in absolute terms. A punter who treats the 10x cap as a reason to claim every available offer is paying for the privilege of doing so; a punter who reads the offer’s qualifying terms, expiry, market restrictions and win caps before opting in is paying less for the same set of choices.

Ten licensed brands sit in the comparison above, each with its own offer shape, each with its own Commission’s account number, and each with its own terms that govern what the offer actually delivers. The page’s job is to make those terms legible. The punter’s job is to decide which of them is worth the price.

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 the bonus amount. A £10 bonus may require at most £100 of qualifying bets before winnings become withdrawable. The cap applies to bonuses; whether it reaches free bets with no wagering condition has not been confirmed in the published rules.

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

The wagering requirement is the multiple of the bonus that must be staked before winnings are withdrawable — £20 bonus at 10x means £200 of qualifying bets. Minimum odds are the threshold each qualifying bet must meet or exceed to count. A bet placed below the minimum does not count toward the requirement, even if it wins.

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

A free bet is a token that grants the right to profit only; the stake is “paid” by the bookmaker at the point of issue, not at settlement. A £10 free bet at 5/1 (6.00 decimal) returns £50 profit on a win, not £60. This is the standard structure across UK-licensed operators and is a contractual term of the offer, not a marketing quirk.

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

No. The promotion rules in force since 19 January 2026 ban mixed-product offers — promotions that require a customer to gamble on two or more product types, for example “bet on football to get free casino spins.” Sports welcome packages and casino welcome packages must now stand on their own.

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

The Commission’s public register is the test. Search by business name, trading name, domain or account number; the entry shows the licence categories, the licence holder and the sites the licence covers. The account number is the cleanest check — it appears in each operator’s own terms and can be matched against the register directly.

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

No — the punter pays no tax on betting winnings in Great Britain. The operator pays General Betting Duty, currently 15% on gross profits, rising to 25% on remote betting (excluding UK horse racing, pool betting and certain other categories) from 1 April 2027. This is general information, not tax advice; a professional gambler should consult HMRC or an adviser.

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