Sign-up offers, stripped of marketing: how the bonus cap shapes what UK bookmakers actually give away

Updated October 2026

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A punter scanning the homepages of ten UK sportsbooks sees a parade of generous phrases: “free bets”, “boosted odds”, “£40 back”. The phrases are designed to look interchangeable. They are not. Two offers with the same headline number can cost the customer three or four times as much depending on the conditions attached — and from 19 January 2026 the Gambling Commission has put a ceiling on one of those conditions. This page is built around that ceiling and around the offers sitting beneath it. The arithmetic, not the marketing, is where the value lives.

All figures here were verified against the Gambling Commission’s public register and the operators’ own UK terms on 27 October 2026.

The 2026 promotion rules: what changed and what stayed put

On 19 January 2026 the Gambling Commission’s revised social responsibility code came into force, and the change that lands hardest on this page is a single cap. A bookmaker licensed in Great Britain can no longer attach a wagering requirement above 10x to any bonus it offers. A £10 bonus used to be cleared with £500 of bets at a 50x multiple; under the rule the same £10 bonus now needs no more than £100 of qualifying bets at 10x. The figure is not negotiable between operator and customer — it sits in the licence conditions and codes of practice and any breach is the operator’s problem, not the punter’s.

The same set of rules did something else that matters more than it looks. Mixed-product promotions are out. The format “bet £10 on football to unlock £20 of free spins” was a familiar feature of UK welcome packages; it no longer fits inside the rules, because it asks the customer to gamble on two product types — sports betting and casino — to clear one offer. The wording the Commission uses is “gambling on two or more product types”, and the categories it lists are betting, casino, bingo and lottery. A bookmaker who wants to give a casino bonus can do so, but the bonus cannot be tied to a sportsbook action, and a sportsbook bonus cannot be tied to a casino action.

What the rules do not say is at least as important as what they do. They do not cap the headline value of an offer. A £40-in-free-bets welcome still reads “£40 in free bets” even if the conditions behind it are tight. They do not say whether a free bet with no wagering requirement — the kind where a stake of £10 returns £10 in cashable winnings only — counts against the 10x ceiling, and the Commission’s published position is that it has not settled that point. So a punter who sees a headline free bet without a multiplier is not necessarily seeing an uncapped offer; the operator may simply have structured the promotion to avoid the cap rather than to escape it. The terms page is where the answer lives, and it is the only place it lives.

The third piece of the framework is the layer that has not changed: advertising rules. Marketing is not licensed by the Commission. It runs through the CAP Code on non-broadcast media and the BCAP Code on broadcast, enforced by the Advertising Standards Authority. Section 16 of the CAP Code says gambling marketing must be socially responsible and not of strong appeal to under-18s, and the under-25 rule for people appearing in advertisements is unchanged. These are not the rules of the offer; they are the rules of how the offer can be sold, and they sit one layer above what this page is about.

A bookmaker licensed in Great Britain is also bound by the age and identity checks that have been in force since 7 May 2019. Name, address and date of birth are verified before a first deposit, and the verification must happen before any free bet or bonus is credited — the “free” in free bet is no longer anonymous. From 30 August 2024 a financial vulnerability check applies to remote betting customers whose net deposits exceed £150 in a rolling 30 days; from 28 February 2025 that check has been a public-record one (bankruptcy, county court judgments) rather than a credit reference check. A separate set of “affordability checks” was announced by the Commission on 7 July 2026 with a staged plan and no published start date. What that means in practice today: a £500 monthly deposit will trigger a vulnerability check; a £5,000 monthly deposit will trigger something more intrusive at most operators, even if no rule says so.

Responsible gambling: the limits that come with a licence

A licence is a permission to take bets, and it comes with a set of obligations the operator has to meet for the punter rather than for itself. Three of those are worth knowing about before any welcome offer is claimed.

GAMSTOP is the first. It is a national multi-operator online self-exclusion scheme, and since 31 March 2020 every GB-licensed online operator has had to enrol customers in it. The exclusion periods are six months, one year, five years, or five years with auto-renewal. After the minimum period the exclusion continues for seven more years unless the customer asks GAMSTOP to remove it. What this means mechanically: if a punter has self-excluded through GAMSTOP, none of the brands reviewed here can take a bet or credit a free bet from them while the exclusion is in force. The welcome offer becomes unreachable by design. That is the point.

Deposit limits are the second layer. The Commission’s Remote Technical Standards (RTS 12) require operators to offer a gross deposit limit on a fixed time frame; the first changes to that regime applied on 31 October 2025, and a second phase was postponed to 30 September 2026. The Commission has not published a state-set deposit ceiling. What the customer can do is set their own: a £100 weekly limit, a £500 monthly limit, a daily limit, however the operator frames it. Limits the customer sets must be enforced. There is no maximum stake set in law either — operators set their own maximum stakes and may restrict individual customers on a commercial basis.

The third layer is the help that is not the operator’s. GamCare runs the National Gambling Helpline; GambleAware is the information and treatment signpost; the NHS runs gambling clinics; Gamblers Anonymous runs meetings. None of these is a brand being reviewed on this page. They exist for the situation the rest of this page is not designed to address — when gambling stops being entertainment. The point of repeating them in an article about offers is not to gesture at a problem; it is to remind a reader who is comparing ten welcome packages that the comparison matters less than the decision to keep gambling a deliberate, paid-for hobby.

Bonuses and free bets: the vocabulary behind the headline

Every welcome offer on a UK sportsbook is built from a small set of components, and the components carry different costs. Naming them is the first step to reading the offers.

A free bet is a token the operator credits to an account, and the stake is usually not returned with the winnings. Stake £10 as a free bet at odds of 3.0 and the return is £30 in profit; the £10 stake never comes back. That is why a free bet advertised as “£20” is worth less than £20 in cash: the £20 is what the customer has to play with, not what they end up with if they win. The expected value of a free bet is its size multiplied by the decimal price minus one, all divided by the price, and scaled by the payout share of the market it is placed on. A £10 free bet on a 3.0 market with a 95% payout share is worth roughly £6.33 on average across many bets; on a 1.5 market at the same payout share the expected value drops below £2. The headline number is the same; the cost to the operator is not.

A wagering requirement, also called a turnover or rollover requirement, is the amount a bonus has to be staked through before the bonus or its winnings can be withdrawn. Under the 2026 cap the multiplier is 10x at most. The base it multiplies is the operator’s choice: the bonus alone, or the bonus plus the deposit that triggered it. A “10x the bonus” rule means £100 of bets to clear a £10 bonus; a “10x the deposit plus bonus” rule means £200 of bets to clear a £10 bonus on a £10 deposit. The second is twice the betting volume for the same headline number, and the distinction is rarely printed on the offer card.

Minimum odds are the floor below which a bet does not count towards clearing the wagering requirement. A minimum of 2.0 (1/1) is the most common setting on the offers reviewed here; some operators go higher and a few go lower. The floor matters because the bets that satisfy it are also the bets most exposed to the bookmaker’s margin, and the bonus-clear volume is bet at prices that work against the customer.

An expiry window is how long the customer has to use the free bet or clear the bonus. Seven days is a familiar figure on UK welcome offers, and a tight window combined with a 10x turnover is a substantial pressure: £100 of qualifying bets in seven days means £15 or so of stakes per day, which is not heavy in absolute terms but is heavy as a share of the bonus. The “free bet expiring in 7 days” line is the line that decides whether the offer is workable or merely nominal.

A price boost is a one-off enhanced price on a specific outcome, paid in cash with no wagering requirement and usually no minimum odds attached. The boost is the offer; what limits the value is whether the boosted price still carries a margin in the customer’s favour or has been re-priced to offset it. Enhanced odds welcome offers (a headline price of 50/1 instead of a true price of 25/1, say) are the same mechanism under a different name.

A stake-not-returned free bet, sometimes labelled a “bet credit”, is the same as a regular free bet but with the stake-exclusion rule made explicit. Bet365, Sky Bet and William Hill all use the term “bet credits” on at least some of their promotions; the underlying arithmetic is the same as a stake-not-returned free bet.

A “risk-free” or “no-sweat” first bet is a refund in free bets if the first bet loses, not a refund in cash. Vbet’s offer of a £10 free bet if a first, losing bet of £10 or more was placed is the shape of this. The marketing word “risk-free” hides two facts: the refund is in free bets, not money, and the free bet is then subject to its own expiry, minimum odds and stake-not-returned rule. The risk that is “free” is the risk of the first bet only.

A minimum deposit is the floor on the deposit that triggers the offer. £5 is the most common setting on the offers reviewed here, and a £5 deposit combined with a £5 first bet at minimum odds of 2.0 is the smallest qualifying bet that the typical welcome offer allows. The deposit must be made with a debit card or instant bank transfer on most offers — credit cards have been banned for gambling in Great Britain since 14 April 2020, and a deposit made through an e-wallet funded by a credit card is also covered by the ban.

Worked example: how the cap shapes the cost

The arithmetic on this page is built around one calculation: what does it take to clear a Coral-style welcome offer under the 2026 cap. The offer is “Get £40 in Free Bets when you bet £20” — a deposit and sports bet of £20 or more at minimum odds of 2.0 (1/1), with £40 in free bets issued within 7 days and expiring 7 days after issue. The wagering requirement on this particular offer is zero: the £40 in free bets is paid in as a credit, and any winnings from staking those free bets are withdrawable as cash without further turnover. So the question is not “how much betting to clear the bonus” but “what is the £40 in free bets actually worth”.

Take the assumption that the free bets are split into four £10 tokens, each used at a price of 3.0 (a familiar accumulator line on Premier League football), and that the market’s payout share at that price is 95%. For a stake-not-returned free bet, the expected value per token is £10 multiplied by (3.0 − 1) divided by 3.0, then multiplied by 0.95 — roughly £6.33 per £10 token, or £25.33 across the four. That is the band a punter should expect the £40-in-free-bets headline to pay back across a realistic set of selections. At 2.0 prices the expected value drops to roughly £9.50 across four tokens; at 5.0 prices with a 95% payout share it climbs above £30.

The cost to the punter is the qualifying bet of £20 at minimum odds of 2.0. At a market margin of 5% (a 95% payout share), the expected loss on that qualifying bet is £1. So the offer delivers roughly £25 of expected free-bet value at a cost of about £1 in expected margin on the qualifier, with the rest of the value dependent on what prices the punter chooses for the free bets themselves. That is the shape of a modern UK welcome offer: a thin qualifying-bet cost, a meaningful free-bet expected value, and the headline number (£40) sitting well above the realised value (£25-ish at 3.0) because the £40 is a stake amount, not a payout.

Where the offer is structured with a real wagering requirement — say a £20 bonus with a 6x turnover at minimum odds of 2.0 — the picture changes. The required turnover is £120, all at prices that cost the customer margin. At a 5% margin the expected cost of clearing is £6; at an 8% margin (common on in-play markets and combination bets) it climbs to £9.60. The cap at 10x is the ceiling on that cost: a 10x turnover on a £20 bonus is £200 of qualifying bets at an expected cost of £10 to £16 depending on the market. Beyond the cap the operator is breaking the licence conditions; below it the operator is making a commercial offer that can still cost the punter a meaningful share of the bonus.

Top 10 UK betting sign-up offers: the shortlist and what each is worth

The ranking below covers ten operators licensed in Great Britain and ordered as research sets them. The list is not a recommendation: every brand here is licensed, every offer is the operator’s own, and the question the page is built to answer is “what does each one cost the punter who claims it”. A bare name with no condition would tell the reader nothing, so each entry closes with the figure that decides whether the offer is worth taking.

LiveScore Bet

LiveScore Bet is the sportsbook arm of the LiveScore brand and the simplest of the ten offers to read. The site carries no headline-grabbing free-bet welcome on its sportsbook home page in the data reviewed here; what it carries instead is a payment-method breadth that matters to a punter who wants to fund an account the way they pay for anything else. Debit cards from Visa and Mastercard, Apple Pay, PayPal, Pay by Bank through Open Banking and Revolut Pay are all listed on the help pages. For a punter who pays with Apple Pay on the high street and wants to keep the same habit on a betting account, that breadth is the offer. The Commission’s account number is 56859, and the licence holder is LiveScore Betting and Gaming (Gibraltar) Limited. For punters who want a payment-method-flexible GB-licensed sportsbook without the noise of a marketing-led welcome, LiveScore Bet sits cleanly in the field.

Vbet

Vbet’s welcome offer is the textbook stake-back promotion dressed in “risk-free” clothing. A first, verified bet of £10 or more that loses is refunded as a £10 free bet. The headline reads as if the loss is reimbursed in cash; it is not, and the free bet that replaces the loss carries its own stake-not-returned rule, its own minimum odds and its own expiry window. A punter who reads the headline and stops there thinks they are guaranteed to break even on their first bet; a punter who reads the small print sees that a losing first bet at 2.0 is replaced by a £10 free bet whose expected value is closer to £6 than to £10. That is still a fair offer for a punter who would have placed a first bet anyway, but it is not the same offer as £10 back in cash. SCGO Limited operates the brand under Commission account 44662, with vbet.co.uk serving as the UK site.

Betmaster

Betmaster is one of the thinnest-presence brands on this list and is included because the question “what does this operator actually offer” is itself the point. The Betmaster homepage names BM Solutions GB Ltd as the operator and gives the Commission’s account number (65699) on its own page; the brand is licensed, registered in Malta, and operating on a remote general betting standard licence for real events. What the public-facing pages reviewed here do not document in detail is the shape of the welcome promotion or the depth of the sportsbook, and that absence is the verdict: a punter comparing ten offers who cannot find the terms on the homepage should pick a brand that puts them in front. There is no calculation that saves a missing terms page.

Geoff Banks

Geoff Banks is published by GB Sports Advisors Limited under Commission account 54095 and runs as a sportsbook rather than an exchange. The app listings describe a focus on live in-play prices and ante-post markets on future events, which puts the brand in the same niche as the more established sportsbooks but with a narrower product catalogue. The app’s value to a punter who already uses a mainstream sportsbook is limited: the in-play and ante-post coverage on the major UK sports is on a par with what the bigger names offer, and the welcome promotion does not appear in the data reviewed here at a headline level. For a punter who likes the founder-led identity and prefers an app-only experience over a desktop-heavy sportsbook, the brand has a place. For everyone else, the absence of a documented welcome in the reviewed data is the gap.

Coral

Coral’s welcome is the headline number that sets the benchmark. A £20 qualifying bet at minimum odds of 2.0 returns £40 in free bets, split into tokens, expiring 7 days after issue. Coral’s terms make two points that matter more than the headline. The first is the qualifying payment method: the offer must be triggered with a debit card or instant bank transfer, which excludes credit cards (already banned for gambling in Great Britain) and excludes any e-wallet that the punter funds with a credit card. The second is the qualifying price: 2.0 is the floor, and any bet below 2.0 does not count. The expected value calculation earlier on this page applies cleanly: at 3.0 prices on the free bet tokens the realised value is roughly £25 across four £10 tokens, well below the £40 headline. Beyond the welcome, Coral runs a free daily Reward Shaker, an Odds Booster on hundreds of markets, and free-to-play games such as Football Super Series with a £10,000 jackpot. The licence is held by LC International Limited under Commission account 54743, and Coral shares that licence holder with Ladbrokes.

Smarkets (SBK sportsbook)

Smarkets runs two products that look the same on paper and are not. The exchange is the original brand; the SBK sportsbook is a separate app that runs the same fixed-odds sportsbook model as the rest of this list. SBK’s welcome is the most aggressive of the ten on a headline basis: a £20 first deposit and a £20 bet at minimum odds of 3.0 returns £60 in free bets within 48 hours. The minimum odds of 3.0 are higher than Coral’s 2.0, which means the qualifying bet has to be placed on a market with a longer price — and that single change has consequences for both the punter and the offer. A bet at 3.0 carries more variance than a bet at 2.0; the qualifying bet is more likely to lose, but when it wins the return is larger. The free bets are credited within 48 hours, which is a faster turnaround than Coral’s 7-day window. Cash Out, Bet Builder and live horse racing streams are all in the product mix. Smarkets (Malta) Limited holds the remote betting intermediary licence for the brand under Commission account 39173.

bet365

Bet365 is the brand that defines the upper end of the product catalogue. Bet Builder+ allows the punter to combine markets from a single event into one bet, both pre-match and in-play; Super Boosts and daily Bet Boosts run across the sportsbook; Winnings Boosts apply to Bet Builders and selected singles. The welcome offer does not feature as the loudest headline on the reviewed data — the strength of bet365 is the product rather than the promotion — but the account number is 55148 and the licence holder is Hillside (UK Sports) ENC. For a punter whose decision criterion is the depth of in-play markets and the breadth of bet-building options, bet365 is the reference point. The product is the offer.

Kwiff

Kwiff is the brand that does one thing differently, and the one thing is the Supercharge feature. The Supercharge can instantly boost the odds on a bet — from 2/1 to 20/1 in the example on the app’s own listing — and it can apply to single or multi bets on any sport. The rest of the product is more conventional: Bet Builder, Bet Builder+ for combining bet-builder bets across games, and a guaranteed weekend acca boost. The licence is held by Eaton Gate Gaming Limited under Commission account 44448. For a punter who likes the idea of an unpredictable odds boost and is happy to bet on a brand whose headline offer is “we might just upgrade your price”, Kwiff is the interesting read on this list. The volatility cuts both ways — the boost can push a bet from a fair price into a long one, and it can also leave the bet where it was.

BetGoodwin

BetGoodwin’s welcome is the smallest of the ten on a headline basis and the one that asks the most of the punter in terms of structure. A £10 qualifying bet returns £15 in free bets, but the £15 is split three ways: a £5 sports bet, a £5 acca and a £5 Sub-Cover bet. The split matters because each token has its own rules — the acca token has to be used on an accumulator, the Sub-Cover token has its own market — and the realised value of the offer depends on whether the punter can place each token on a market that suits its rules. Goodwin Racing Limited holds the licence under Commission account 2927, and the brand is the racing-focused arm of a longer-established on-course bookmaking business.

NetBet

NetBet sits at the promotional end of the ten. Daily Boosts, Profit Boosts and free bet offers run across the sportsbook; a Bet Builder with instant dynamic odds is in the product mix; sports stats for major leagues are built into the page. The welcome offer does not feature in the reviewed data at a headline level, and the account number is 39170 under Netbet Enterprises Limited. For a punter who values the frequency of ongoing promotions over a single large welcome, NetBet is the brand to read. For a punter who wants one large welcome and one set of conditions to read once, Coral or Smarkets/SBK is the cleaner offer.

How the ranking was put together

The ten brands above are not ranked by headline offer size, by welcome value, by sportsbook depth or by payment-method breadth. They are ranked as research sets them, and the order is the order this site publishes them in. The audit the ranking supports is simpler than a single score: every brand is GB-licensed, every brand is on the Commission’s public register, every welcome is described as the operator’s own terms state it, and the cost of each offer is calculated from the conditions attached to it. A punter reading this page from top to bottom sees the field as it is, not as a marketing department would order it.

What the ranking does do is close on a different question in each block. LiveScore Bet is a payment-method story. Vbet is a “risk-free” story where the headline and the terms disagree. Betmaster and Geoff Banks are present and licensed but not covered in depth here. Coral is the welcome that defines the field, and the calculation on this page is built around its shape. Smarkets/SBK is the more aggressive welcome with the higher minimum odds. bet365 is the product story. Kwiff is the volatility story. BetGoodwin is the split-token story. NetBet is the promotion-frequency story. Each brand closes on the figure that decides it.

What a free bet is actually worth: the arithmetic in plain prose

A punter who claims a £10 free bet and stakes it at decimal odds of 3.0 on a market with a 95% payout share will, on average across many such bets, end up with roughly £6.33 in cashable winnings. That number is the expected value: the £10 stake is not returned, so the winning return is £30, but only 95% of bets at that price win in the long run, and the 5% margin takes the rest. Across four tokens of £10 at the same price, the expected value is roughly £25.33. A punter who stakes the same £10 free bet at decimal odds of 2.0 on the same market ends up with £4.75 expected per token, or £19 across four. The headline “£40 in free bets” reads the same on both calculations; the realised value is £19 on the lower-priced bets and £25 on the higher-priced ones. The £40 is the stake amount, not the realised value, and the difference is the gap between what marketing promises and what the punter collects.

The expected cost of clearing a wagering requirement is the turnover multiplied by the margin of the market. A £10 bonus with a 10x turnover means £100 of qualifying bets; at a 5% market margin the expected cost is £5. At an 8% margin (common on in-play markets, combination bets and exotic markets) the expected cost climbs to £8. The cap at 10x means that the worst a punter has to bet through on a UK-licensed welcome is £100 of stake for every £10 of bonus, and the expected cost of that turnover is between £5 and £8 depending on the markets chosen. The 10x cap is the ceiling on the customer’s exposure to the margin, not the floor.

Bonus turnover: the cap and what it means for the punter

The 19 January 2026 cap on wagering requirements at 10x is the structural change that defines this page. Before the cap, a £10 bonus at 50x turnover meant £500 of qualifying bets, with an expected cost at a 5% margin of £25 — more than the headline bonus itself. Under the cap, the same bonus at 10x means £100 of qualifying bets at an expected cost of £5 to £8. The cap does not eliminate the cost; it puts a ceiling on it. A punter who would have lost £25 of expected value on a pre-2026 offer now loses £5 to £8, which is a meaningful saving but not a free lunch.

What the cap does not do is change the headline. A bookmaker offering “£20 in bonuses with a 10x turnover” and a bookmaker offering “£40 in bonuses with a 10x turnover” are both inside the cap, and the difference between them is the qualifying bet — a £20 bonus requires a £200 turnover, a £40 bonus requires a £400 turnover, both at 10x. The larger headline comes with the larger turnover, and the larger turnover exposes more of the budget to the margin. The punter’s interest is in the realised expected value, not the headline: a £20 bonus at 10x with a 5% margin costs £10 of expected margin and returns the bonus; a £40 bonus at 10x with the same margin costs £20 of expected margin and returns the bonus. The £40 is the better deal by the same margin as the £20 was the better deal than the pre-cap £10 bonus.

Offshore and unlicensed: what a GB licence is actually worth

The point of the licence framework is that the Commission can hold the operator to it. A GB-licensed sportsbook has to honour the bonus cap, has to honour the GAMSTOP exclusion, has to verify identity before the first deposit, has to offer deposit limits and the vulnerability check at £150 of net deposits, has to mediate disputes through approved alternative dispute resolution (ADR) providers, and has to keep customer funds separate from operating funds under the operator’s licence conditions. The customer who bets with a GB-licensed brand has those protections.

The customer who bets with an unlicensed brand has none of them. No GAMSTOP coverage, no Commission complaints route, no approved ADR body, no British consumer redress if funds are withheld, no 10x bonus cap, no £150 vulnerability check, no source-of-funds enquiries under the money-laundering rules. The Commission can issue cease-and-desist notices, refer the brand to search engines and payment providers, and is in the process of receiving court-order DNS blocking powers; the customer is not the target of any offence under the Gambling Act 2005, but the customer is also the one who loses when funds are not paid out. The honest framing is that licensed means checks, limits, GAMSTOP and the bonus cap, but also verification before the first bet; unlicensed means none of those protections and possible loss of funds, with no consumer recourse in Great Britain.

The Commission’s public register is the test. A punter who wants to know whether a brand holds a GB licence can search the register by business name, trading name, domain or account number, and the register lists every active remote licence for betting and casino. A registered domain that ends in .com is not a substitute for a check; GB-licensed operators use both .co.uk and .com, and an unlicensed operator can register either. The check is the register, and the register is free.

Reading the small print: the conditions behind the offer

Three conditions appear often enough on the offers above to deserve their own note.

The minimum qualifying odds. The most common setting on the ten offers is 2.0 (1/1), and the highest is 3.0 on the SBK welcome. The minimum exists to prevent the punter from staking the qualifying bet on a near-certain outcome and walking away with the bonus; the cost is that the qualifying bet has to be placed on a market the punter might not otherwise have chosen. The Smarkets/SBK welcome asks for a bet at 3.0 minimum, which means a market with longer odds than the 2.0 floor on Coral; that change is the operator’s commercial choice and it cuts both ways for the punter.

The qualifying payment method. Coral and Unibet both require a debit card or instant bank transfer for the qualifying deposit; the credit card ban has been in force since 14 April 2020 and is not specific to either brand. Apple Pay, Google Pay, Revolut Pay, PayPal and Pay by Bank are not credit cards and are not banned, but the welcome offer may still require a debit card or bank transfer specifically. The punter’s interest is to read the payment-method line before depositing.

The stake-not-returned rule. This is the rule that decides what the free bet is actually worth. A free bet whose stake is returned with the winnings is worth more than the same headline free bet whose stake is not; a £10 free bet at 3.0 returns £30 in the first case and £30 minus £10 in the second, and the second is the more common setting on UK welcome offers. The expected-value calculation on this page assumes the stake-not-returned rule, which is why the realised value is below the headline.

Frequently asked questions

How does a punter sign up with a UK-licensed betting site?

The customer creates an account, deposits with a debit card or instant bank transfer, and the operator verifies name, address and date of birth before the first bet is placed. The verification is a licence requirement and has been in force since 7 May 2019; a free bet or bonus is not credited until the verification has cleared.

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

10x the bonus base. The rule took effect on 19 January 2026 and applies to any wagering requirement attached to a bonus by a GB-licensed operator; a £10 bonus at 10x needs £100 of qualifying bets, and no GB-licensed operator can lawfully attach a higher multiplier.

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

The minimum odds are the floor below which a bet does not count towards clearing the wagering requirement; 2.0 (1/1) is the most common floor on UK welcome offers. The wagering requirement is the number of times the bonus has to be staked through before the winnings can be withdrawn; under the 2026 cap the multiplier is at most 10x.

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

That is the standard rule on UK free bets: a £10 free bet at odds of 3.0 returns £30 in profit, with the £10 stake not returned. The expected value of a free bet is its size multiplied by the price minus one, divided by the price, then scaled by the payout share of the market it is placed on; a £10 free bet at 3.0 on a 95% payout market is worth roughly £6.33 on average.

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

No. Mixed-product promotions are banned under the rules in force since 19 January 2026: an offer that asks a customer to gamble on two or more product types — betting, casino, bingo or lottery — is not permitted. A sportsbook welcome can offer free bets only, and a casino welcome can offer casino bonus only, and the two cannot be tied together.

How can a punter check that a bookmaker holds a Gambling Commission licence?

The Commission’s public register is searchable by business name, trading name, domain or account number, and lists every active remote licence for betting and casino. A registered .com domain is not a substitute for a check; the register is the only authoritative answer, and it is free.

Content created by the «Best betting» team