Casino.net finds 115 UK brands at or below 10x wagering limit

Casino.net Research Lab reported that 115 of the 117 British casino brands stating a wagering requirement were at or below the UK Gambling Commission's 10x limit, in a snapshot of offers recorded on 5 October 2026. The lab said it read 297 welcome offers, 148 of them at 128 brands still trading in Britain.

According to the lab, 34 of the trading brands require 1x and 21 require no wagering at all, while fifty-nine land precisely on the 10x mark. Just one brand across the whole market falls anywhere between 2x and 9x, it said.

The cap is set out in Social Responsibility Code 5.1.1 and took effect on 19 January 2026, alongside a ban on offers that combine betting, casino, bingo and lottery into one wagering requirement. The Commission overhauled its rules on promotions in March 2025.

BetBlocker founder Duncan Garvie described the 10x limit as "catastrophically bad", warning that weaker bonuses could push players towards the black market, according to the report. The lab said its snapshot does not measure offshore play and so cannot settle that argument.

The lab set the brands still trading against a group of 56 that have closed in Britain yet retain usable terms. At the exited brands the median stood at 35x, versus 10x at trading ones, and 39% of the former group's headline offers were within the cap, compared with 98% today.

The lab said the median cash bonus dropped from £90 to £50, while the proportion of brands putting cash first went from 57% to 27%. Spins requiring no wagering moved in the opposite direction, accounting for 9% of exited brands' offers and 53% of trading brands' offers.

The lab's snapshot shows that headline offers at 87% of trading brands now include spins, while 91 of the 128 brands hand out spins with no cash attached. A package of 100 spins is the norm. Cash above £100 appears at a single trading brand, in the form of a £200 match at 10x.

The lab said one brand remains at 50x and another at 60x, both above the 10x level. It declined to identify either, and both are waiting on a check against the operators' own terms.

Katya Vasileva, Head of Product at Casino.net, said a figure above the cap could mean a licensee in breach or a stale record on the lab's side. She said earlier outliers were checked against operators' own terms in September and corrected where they had gone stale.

Vasileva said the lab avoids treating the comparison as cause and effect, noting that operators quit a market for a range of reasons. According to her, the figures indicate that in Britain tough wagering rules and departure from the market occur alongside each other, and that the remaining offers are smaller yet much simpler to withdraw from.

The study also found that clauses likely to cost players money are among the least likely to appear in short offer terms. Excluded payment methods are recorded there for 36% of brands and the maximum bet with bonus funds for 56%, the lab said.

Table players come off worst, the lab found: blackjack and roulette count at zero towards wagering at 75% of brands, and live dealer games at zero at 82%. The study's dataset and figures are released under a CC BY 4.0 licence.