When Entain reported its half year figures in August, the number that told the real story was the gap between revenue and profit. UK gaming revenue rose 13 per cent, yet underlying earnings slipped 2 per cent to £479mn as the Ladbrokes and Coral owner absorbed a remote gaming duty rate that jumped from 21 to 40 per cent in April. When a tax bill nearly doubles, the marketing budget is usually the first line to get a hard look, and in online casino the biggest marketing line has always been the welcome bonus.
The clearest place to see what that bonus looks like now is the shop window of operators that launched after the rules changed. A scroll through the WhichBingo new casino sites list this month shows offers built around small, fixed value batches of free spins, several with no wagering attached at all, and bonus funds carrying a play through requirement of 10 times written plainly into the terms. Two years ago, that would have looked unusually generous on the terms and unusually modest on the headline.
The old model: big headlines, heavy small print
Before January, there was no ceiling on how many times a customer had to restake bonus money before withdrawing anything won with it. The Gambling Commission’s own worked example is a £10 bonus at 50 times, which means £500 of play before a penny of bonus winnings can leave the account. Around 30 times was common across the UK market.
Customers mostly did not understand what they were signing up to. A randomised trial by the Behavioural Insights Team, published in April 2024 and covering 4,012 adults, found seven in 10 participants could not correctly work out a wagering requirement, and three in five did not notice one existed at all. The trial also produced a less convenient finding for the industry: play rates barely moved whether the requirement was 1, 5, 10 or 30 times. The team recommended a cap of one.
Mixed product offers were the other staple. A customer could be handed a free bet on condition they also played slots, or vice versa, which pulled sports bettors into casino play through the promotions page.
The new model: smaller offers, cleaner terms
The Commission announced its changes on 26 March 2025 and gave the industry until 19 January 2026 to comply. Wagering is now capped at 10 times, and mixed product promotions are banned outright.
The arithmetic for operators is unforgiving. A lower play through means a larger share of bonus money is likely to end up withdrawable, so each pound of bonus costs more than it used to. The response across the newer brands has been to shrink the headline and tighten the mechanics instead. On the WhichBingo list, 44 Aces requires free spin winnings to be wagered 10 times within 30 days, with a stake ceiling per spin. Clover Casino limits how much bonus money can ever convert to cash, tying it to the customer’s lifetime deposits. Los Vegas Casino releases its spins in daily batches over a week and caps what they can win each day. Peachy Games and BetLegend have gone further and dropped wagering on their spins completely.
Evoke, the William Hill owner, was candid about the trade off in its August half year update. With revenue flat at £887.5m and adjusted EBITDA down 10 per cent to £150.2m, it said more than half of a £46m duty hit had been offset, crediting “lower but more effective marketing investment” and “improved promotional efficiency”. In plain terms: fewer giveaways, aimed more carefully.
30 September: the change that landed last month
The rule that actually arrived recently is less visible than a bonus cap, and arguably more important. Since October 2025, customers have been prompted to set a financial limit before depositing. A second phase was due on 30 June 2026, but the Commission pushed implementation back to the end of September to give operators more technical development time.
From 30 September, operators must offer gross deposit limits, may only use the term “deposit limit” for that type, must give it at least equal prominence with any other financial limit, and must run it over fixed time frames. The distinction matters. A net limit lets withdrawals offset deposits, so a customer on a winning run can keep topping up. A gross limit counts every pound that goes in.
For operators, this is a product engineering job as much as a compliance one: account settings, payment flows, limit dashboards and customer messaging all have to be rebuilt to match. The three month extension says a good deal about how much code sat behind it.
What it means for the market
The Commission’s annual statistics, released on 17 September, put online casino gross gambling yield at £5.7bn for the year to March 2026, up 14.8 per cent. Demand has not been the problem. Margin is. Duty now takes 40 per cent of gaming yield, and the bonus model that once bought new customers cheaply no longer works the old way.
The uncomfortable conclusion for the sector is that the bonus cap was probably the gentler of the two reforms. The trial evidence suggests a 10 times ceiling alone will not change how much people play. Gross deposit limits, shown properly and set before the first deposit, might. The Commission’s quarterly data through 2027 will show which reform actually moves spending, and the answer will shape how much of the old promotional budget ever comes back.
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