Wagering requirements: what a bonus actually costs you

Turnover is the requirement, not the price

A wagering requirement tells you how much you must stake before bonus winnings become withdrawable. Multiply the bonus (or, on worse terms, the deposit plus the bonus) by the multiplier and you have the turnover.

The turnover figure by itself is neutral. £200 of stakes is not £200 of loss — most of it is recycled winnings being staked again. What it costs you is the house edge charged on every one of those stakes.

On a slot with a 96% return to player, the house keeps 4% of everything staked. Run £200 through it and the expected loss is £8, well under half of a £20 bonus. Before 19 January 2026 the same £20 bonus commonly carried 35×: £700 of turnover and £28 of expected loss, more than the bonus itself. That gap is what the cap changed.

Under the cap the arithmetic on paper favours you more often. What still takes the value away is everything around the multiplier — the basis, the games that count, the maximum stake, the expiry and the cap on winnings — and the rest of this guide is about those terms.

The 10× cap: what the rule says since 19 January 2026

Since 19 January 2026 every operator licensed by the Gambling Commission has been bound by Social Responsibility Code 5.1.1, which says licensees must not "apply wagering requirements, which requires a customer to play through bonus funds, over a maximum of 10 times". The Commission's response to its consultation describes the same rule as wagering requirements that "must not exceed 10 times the incentive amount", and records that some licensees had been applying up to 60 times.

The code applies to all licences, including ancillary remote licences, except gaming machine technical and gambling software licences. Because it is a licence condition rather than a marketing guideline, a promotion cannot set it aside.

Two things the rule does not settle in so many words. It does not name free spins separately, and we have not found a Commission statement on requirements set on the deposit and the bonus together. Ten times a £20 deposit plus a £40 bonus is £600 of play, which is fifteen times the bonus; where an offer in this catalogue reads like that, its page says so.

A multiple above ten on an offer described as British usually means you are reading another market's terms: operators serve different versions by location, and the version at your own account's cashier is the one that binds you.

The four numbers that decide everything

• The basis. "10× bonus" and "10× deposit + bonus" look almost identical and differ by a factor of two or more in turnover. Under the cap the second is the one to check first, because it is where an offer can still ask for more play than ten times the bonus.
• The multiplier. For a British licensee 10× is the ceiling, not the norm: offers with no wagering at all, and multiples as low as 1×, sit in this catalogue alongside 10×. A figure above 10× on an offer aimed at British players is a reason to check which market the terms were written for.
• The maximum bet while wagering. Typically £5 per spin. Exceed it once, even accidentally, and most terms allow the operator to void the bonus and everything it produced.
• The cash-out cap and expiry. A cap on winnings from free spins — often £50 or £100 — turns a big win into a small one. An expiry of 48 hours or seven days turns even a capped requirement into a deadline that decides how fast you have to play.

Game weighting: the multiplier behind the multiplier

Slots normally contribute 100% of each stake toward wagering. Table games often contribute 10%, and live dealer games sometimes contribute nothing at all. If blackjack contributes 10%, a £200 requirement becomes £2,000 of blackjack stakes.

This matters more than it looks, because the games with the lowest house edge are exactly the ones weighted lowest. You cannot clear a bonus cheaply by moving to a 0.5% edge game — the weighting is designed to prevent that, and terms usually exclude the strategy explicitly.

The cap does not touch weighting. A requirement that is ten times the bonus on slots is, in effect, a hundred times the bonus on a game weighted at 10%, and that is why the weighting table deserves the same attention as the multiplier.

When a bonus is actually worth taking

• No wagering at all on free spin winnings, paid as cash. Several UK operators now do this, and it removes the question entirely.
• A multiple below the 10× ceiling, on the bonus only, at a deposit size you were going to make anyway.
• No cash-out cap, so an unlikely large win is actually payable.
• An expiry long enough that clearing it does not force you to play faster or larger than you meant to.
• And the one that matters most: an offer you would still take if the bonus were not there. A bonus is a discount on something you were buying, not a reason to buy.

Run your own numbers

We built a calculator that does the second step rather than the first: it takes the bonus, the multiplier, the basis and an RTP, and returns both the turnover and the expected cost of generating it. On the 35× terms common before the cap it usually returned a negative number; at 10× on the bonus alone and a 96% slot it returns a positive one.

Use it before claiming anything, and use the four numbers above as the inputs — read from the terms page, not from the banner.

Three offers, priced side by side

Comparing bonuses by headline size is the mistake the format is designed to encourage. The only fair comparison prices each offer the same way: work out the turnover, apply the house edge of the game you would actually play, and see what is left. The three examples below use a 96% return to player, which is typical of mainstream British slots.

Offer A — "100% up to £50, 10× bonus". Deposit £50, receive £50. Turnover is 10 × £50 = £500. At a 4% house edge the expected cost of generating that turnover is £20. The bonus is £50, so the offer is worth about £30 on average, provided you finish the turnover inside the expiry, on games that count, without breaching the maximum bet.

Offer B — "50 free spins at 10p, no wagering, £50 cap". The spins are worth £5 in stake value. There is no turnover requirement, so the expected value is straightforwardly positive: roughly £4.80 back at 96% RTP, paid as cash, with the cap only binding if you get lucky.

Offer C — "£40 bonus on a £20 deposit, 10× deposit + bonus". The basis is £60, so the turnover is £600 and the expected cost at 4% is £24. The bonus is £40, which leaves about £16 on average — and the play asked of you is fifteen times the bonus, not ten.

Ranked by headline and by expected value the order is now the same: A, C, B. When 35× and 40× were common, the largest headline was usually the worst arithmetic. What has not changed is that an expected value is an average over many attempts; on a single attempt at a volatile slot the balance often runs out before the turnover is complete, which is why B, small and paid in cash, is the hardest to lose on.

Why the same 10× costs more on some games than others

The multiplier is only half of the price. The other half is the house edge of the game you clear it on, and that varies by a factor of ten across a normal lobby.

A slot at 96% RTP charges 4p per pound staked. A slot at 92% — and plenty exist, often the same title configured differently — charges 8p. Clearing a £500 requirement costs £20 on the first and £40 on the second, for an identical bonus and an identical multiplier.

Table games look like the escape route and are not. Blackjack played correctly runs at a house edge under 1%, which would make clearing almost free — so terms weight it at 10% or 20% of stake toward the requirement, or exclude it outright. A £500 requirement at 10% weighting becomes £5,000 of blackjack stakes, and at that volume the small edge reasserts itself.

This is why the honest question about a bonus is never "how big is it" but "what do I have to do, on which games, to keep anything". The answer to the second question is in the terms, and it is usually two clicks from the banner rather than on it.

Deposit plus bonus: one extra word, double the price

The most expensive three words in a bonus term are "deposit and bonus". A 10× requirement on a £50 bonus is £500 of turnover. The same 10× on deposit and bonus, with a £50 deposit matched by £50, is 10 × £100 = £1,000. Same headline, same multiplier, twice the work, twice the expected cost — and twenty times the bonus rather than ten.

The wording used varies: "10× the bonus amount", "10× the sum of deposit and bonus", "wagering applies to deposit + bonus", "10× (d+b)". They are not interchangeable and the difference is never highlighted.

There is a third variant worth knowing about, mostly on free-spin offers: wagering applied to winnings rather than to the bonus. "10× winnings" on a free-spin package means the requirement is calculated from whatever the spins returned, so a lucky spin creates a larger obligation than an unlucky one — which is counter-intuitive and, on a big win with a 48-hour or seven-day expiry, hard to clear in time.

When you compare two offers, normalise them to turnover before you compare anything else, then divide the turnover by the bonus. Our calculator does the first step so the comparison is like for like.

The 2025 stake limits and the cap, together

Since 9 April 2025 the maximum stake per game cycle on online slots in Great Britain has been £5 for players aged 25 and over, and since 21 May 2025 it has been £2 for players aged 18 to 24. Both limits are statutory: they apply at every British-licensed operator, and no promotion can override them.

Together with the wagering cap they set a ceiling on how long clearing can take. Under the cap a £100 bonus asks for at most £1,000 of play on the bonus funds: 200 spins at £5, or 500 at £2. Before the cap, a 40× requirement on deposit plus bonus could reach £12,000 — 2,400 spins at £5.

For an 18 to 24-year-old the same requirement still takes two and a half times as many spins as for an older player, so an offer with a short expiry remains tighter for younger players than the headline suggests.

The separate maximum-bet-while-wagering clause still applies on top, and it is usually lower than the statutory cap — commonly £5, sometimes £2. Where the two differ, the stricter one governs, and breaching either can void the bonus.

How this compares with the rest of the market

Across the offers whose terms we have read line by line and published in this catalogue, the cap is visible in the numbers. More than half carry no wagering at all; of the rest, most that state a figure sit between 1× and 10× on the bonus; and the exceptions are a requirement set on the deposit and the bonus together, and an operator whose own British pages give two different figures for the same offer. We mark those on the offer's own page and do not link to them until the British terms are confirmed.

Expiry is most often 48 hours to seven days for free spins and thirty days for a matched deposit. Cash-out caps appear on some free-spin offers, typically £50 or £100, while several of the no-wagering spin offers state no cap at all.

Spins or cash with no wagering, paid as withdrawable money, are no longer rare — in this catalogue they are the larger group — and their headlines are still the smaller ones: thirty spins rather than a matched £100. A matched deposit at 10× can now come out in your favour on paper; whether it does depends on the weighting, the maximum bet, the expiry and the cap.

The other axis worth comparing is the date the terms were read. A bonus page without a date is a claim about an unspecified moment in the past; terms change quietly and often. Every offer we publish carries the date we read its terms, which is the only way to tell a current figure from a stale one.

Sticky, non-sticky, and what happens to your own money

A detail that decides how trapped you are: whether the bonus is sticky. A sticky bonus can never be withdrawn — it funds play, and only the winnings above it become yours once the requirement is cleared. A non-sticky bonus is credited as withdrawable funds after wagering, so clearing it converts the whole amount.

Related, and more important in practice, is the order in which funds are spent. Some operators play the bonus balance first and ring-fence your deposit; others play your cash first, which means you can lose your own money before the bonus is touched — and if you then withdraw, the unspent bonus is forfeited along with any progress toward wagering.

The consequence people run into is this: withdrawing while a bonus is active almost always cancels the bonus and everything it produced. If you deposited £50, took a £50 bonus, and reached £120 with the requirement half cleared, withdrawing now typically leaves you with your own remaining cash and nothing else. The terms say so; the interface rarely warns you at the moment you click.

Before claiming, find two lines in the terms: whether the bonus is withdrawable after wagering, and which balance is spent first. If neither is stated, ask support and keep the answer.

When an operator can change or cancel an offer

Promotional terms in Britain sit under the same consumer-protection expectations as any other contract term, and the Commission has taken enforcement action over terms it considered unfair. That does not mean an operator cannot withdraw a promotion — it means the terms have to be transparent and applied consistently rather than invented after the fact.

Three clauses are worth reading with particular care. The first is the right to amend terms at any time, which is normal, but should not apply retroactively to an offer you have already claimed and started clearing. The second is a bonus-abuse clause, which is legitimate in principle and often written broadly enough to cover behaviour no reasonable person would recognise as abuse. The third is a right to request verification before paying out bonus winnings — reasonable, and a common cause of delay if you have not verified in advance.

If an operator voids a bonus and you believe the reason does not match the published terms, the escalation route is the operator's formal complaints process first, in writing, and then its alternative dispute resolution provider. An ADR decision can order the operator to pay; a chat transcript cannot.

A ninety-second check before you claim

• Find the basis. Bonus only, or deposit plus bonus? If it is the second, work out the turnover on the deposit and the bonus together and divide it by the bonus: above ten, the offer asks for more play than the cap describes for the bonus alone.
• Find the multiplier and multiply. Write the turnover number down; it is the only figure that lets you compare offers. A multiple above 10× on an offer for British players means you should check which market the terms were written for.
• Find the maximum bet while the bonus is active. If it is lower than you would normally stake, you are committing to play differently, and one absent-minded larger spin can void everything.
• Find the cash-out cap. If winnings from the offer are capped at £50 or £100, treat the whole thing as an offer worth at most that much, regardless of the headline.
• Find the expiry, then divide the turnover by the days remaining. If clearing it requires more play per day than you would choose, the offer is asking you to change your behaviour, which is the point at which a discount stops being a discount.
• Check the game weighting for whatever you actually play. If your game contributes 10%, multiply the turnover by ten.
• Finally, ask whether you would have deposited without the offer. If the answer is no, the offer is not a discount — it is the reason for the transaction, which is exactly what it was designed to be.

Questions

Sources

• Gambling Commission — LCCP, Social Responsibility Code 5.1.1 (wagering requirements) · read 18 October 2026
• Gambling Commission — consultation response, Proposal 1: limit on wagering requirements · read 18 October 2026

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