UK Casino Licence Check

What this check actually proves

The Gambling Commission publishes its register because a licence only protects anyone if it can be verified from outside. This tool queries our mirror of that register and reports what it says — nothing more, and nothing softened.

A positive result establishes four things. A named legal company holds a licence. That licence covers specific activities, and casino, bingo and betting are separate entitlements rather than one permission. The licence is currently active, or it is not, and the tool says which. And the domain you searched is registered to that company, which is the link between the website in front of you and the company that would owe you money.

What follows from that is enforceable rather than decorative. A British licensee must verify age and identity before you gamble, must disclose how customer funds are held and at what protection rating, must appoint an alternative dispute resolution provider whose decisions bind it, must honour the national self-exclusion scheme, and must offer deposit limits. When those obligations are breached, the regulator publishes what it found — and those published cases are the enforcement feed we mirror elsewhere on this site.

Reading a result properly

Search the domain rather than the brand. Brand names appear in the register only when the operator registers them as trading names, so a missing brand proves nothing while a missing domain is significant. Enter bet365.com, not bet365.

Expect more than one company for large brands. A single site is frequently operated by two licensed entities — one holding the betting entitlements, another holding casino and bingo. bet365.com is the clearest example in this catalogue: the sportsbook sits with Hillside (UK Sports) ENC and the casino with Hillside (UK Gaming) ENC. When you are checking a casino, the row that matters is the one with an active casino activity.

Read the activity column, not just the company name. A licence for General Betting Standard does not authorise casino games, and an operator running games on a betting-only licence would be a serious matter rather than a technicality.

Note the account number. It is the stable identifier: brands change names, domains move between companies, and the number persists. It is also what a well-run operator prints in its own footer, and comparing the two closes the identity loop from both directions.

And check the date on the snapshot at the foot of this page. The Commission publishes its register files daily and licences lapse, transfer and are surrendered without announcement, so a mirror is only as good as the day it was taken. Ours prints its date because a stale register looks identical to a current one.

Treat a long list of licensed domains as normal rather than alarming. Multi-brand licensees are the standard structure in British online gambling — one company in this catalogue stands behind sixteen trading names — and the register makes the arrangement visible, which is more than most industries manage.

Three checks that take a minute between them

The licence lookup is the first of three, and the other two are worth doing at the same time because together they settle almost everything that can be established from outside a casino.

One: the footer against the register. A British-licensed site must name its licensee and account number in the footer. Compare what the site says with what this tool returns. A match closes the identity loop from both directions; a mismatch, or a missing number, means the operator has made itself harder to verify than it needs to be. Across the casinos in our catalogue, only a minority publish a number that matches.

Two: the enforcement record. A valid licence and a clean record are different questions, and most sites conflate them. The Gambling Commission publishes every settlement and public statement it issues, and we mirror that feed and tie each case to the licensee in the register. Nine casinos in this catalogue hold entirely valid licences and carry penalties against their licensees, several running into millions.

Three: the sister brands. The domain list returned above is the group. If you have had a problem with any brand on that list, you have had a problem with the company operating the one you are considering, because verification, complaints, affordability decisions and account closures are usually handled at company level rather than per brand.

None of the three requires an account, a deposit or a support ticket, and together they eliminate the failure modes that cost people the most: an unlicensed site, a company with a recent regulatory history, and a "new" brand that is the same operator you left last year.

What a licence check cannot tell you

It cannot tell you whether an operator pays quickly, answers support at night, publishes the return-to-player setting on its games, or offers a bonus worth taking. Those are commercial choices and they are what the rest of this site measures.

It cannot tell you whether the licensee has been penalised. That is a separate published record, and conflating the two is a common mistake: a company can hold a perfectly valid licence and carry a multi-million-pound enforcement settlement at the same time. Nine casinos in our catalogue are in exactly that position.

It cannot tell you what a company is like to deal with when something goes wrong. A licence establishes that an obligation exists and that somebody can be held to it; whether the operator meets it promptly, or only after a complaint reaches an adjudicator, is a matter of behaviour rather than of registration. That is what the reviews on this site try to measure, and what the nine-check protocol on each of them makes visible.

And a "not found" result on a domain is not proof of a scam. It proves the site holds no British authorisation, which is a serious thing on its own — no ADR route, no GAMSTOP coverage, no regulator to report to — but the operator may hold a licence elsewhere. What it does mean is that any "UK licensed" claim on that site is unsupported, and that is worth knowing before a deposit rather than after a withheld withdrawal.