UKGC Announces 2 Strict New Rules for Online Gaming

The United Kingdom Gambling Commission (UKGC) has announced new rules for licensed online gaming operators pertaining to promotional offerings. The new regulations are set to come into effect Dec. 19, 2025. According to the UKGC’s Executive Director for Research and Policy Tim Miller, “These changes will better protect consumers from gambling harm and give consumers much better clarity on, and certainty of, offers before they decide to sign up.”

Details of the New Rules

The first new directive pertains to promotions that encourage users to partake in multiple forms of wagering. It reads:

3. Licensees must not

b. Include more than one type of gambling product (betting, casino, bingo, and lottery) within an incentive.

This prohibits, for example, granting a customer a casino bonus after they’ve wagered a certain amount on bingo. Let’s take a look at a real-life example of this type of promotion:

One of the Poker Missions at Everygame

We can see that customers of Everygame Poker can play in certain events for the opportunity to win free bets in the attached sportsbook. Because this promotion involves multiple gambling products (poker and sports betting), it would be disallowed under the terms of the new UKGC rule. According to the Gambling Commission, “evidence shows consumers are more at risk of harm when they gamble on multiple products rather than a single product.”

The second change relates to wagering requirements and is reproduced below for your edification:

3. Licensees must not

a. Apply wagering requirements, which requires a customer to play through bonus funds, over a maximum of 10 times. A wagering requirement is a where a customer is required to make wagers totaling a particular value for funds to become withdrawable.

This basically prohibits bonuses with playthrough requirements greater than 10 times the amount of the bonus. Here’s a bonus currently offered by Wild Casino that falls into this category:

Wild Casino Reload Bonus Terms

We can see that this bonus requires a rollover of 45x not just on the bonus value but also on the deposit as well. This well exceeds the 10x limit stipulated by the UKGC’s new guidance, so this bonus would be prohibited under the new regime. The UKGC contends that “such high wagering requirements could confuse consumers and lead them to gamble for longer, and faster, than they are used to.”

History Behind the New Rules

The Gambling Commission didn’t just develop these new rules one day out of the blue. Rather, they’re the culmination of a somewhat lengthy process.

Online gambling in the United Kingdom is governed by the Gambling Act 2005. In December 2020, the Johnson government published a policy paper calling for a review of the Gambling Act and soliciting evidence from stakeholders and the general public to determine if the “balance of regulation” for online gambling was correct. After more than 16,000 submissions, a policy paper appeared in April 2023 under the Sunak government called “High stakes: gambling reform for the digital age,” which outlined areas in which the government felt existing protections were inadequate.

From Nov. 29, 2023 through Feb. 21 2024, the UKGC held a consultation regarding proposed changes to the Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice (LCCP) and Remote Gambling and Software Technical Standards (RTS) intended to achieve the goals of the white paper. Among the proposals were the two we’re discussing today. After evaluating the responses it received, the UKGC decided to proceed with these two proposed changes although there were other measures considered but ultimately dropped.

UKGC Demands Could Backfire

As evidenced by the fact that we were quickly able to find relevant examples, the promotions being targeted by the UKGC are not obscure outliers that are occasionally offered but rather popular incentives that many gaming sites extend to encourage customer loyalty.

The ability to cross-sell existing users to other product verticals is a strategy employed by virtually every online sports betting and casino provider in existence. This lets them run a few gaming services at near breakeven or even at a loss with the hopes of transitioning customers to higher-margin forms of gaming. Without the ability to promote multiple types of gaming to their users, some sites might elect to stop offering low-margin products, like online poker and bingo, in order to concentrate on more profitable wagering possibilities. Thus, the UKGC may be unintentionally pushing players toward products where they tend to lose more while simultaneously reducing the choices of gaming available to consumers.

Regarding the limit of 10x on bonus wagering requirements, such a restrictive cap threatens to eliminate most bonuses from being viable. Operators tend to provide bonuses to enable users to play for a longer time and enhance their chances of winning while still retaining an overall advantage for the house. If they’re forced to lower rollover totals to 10 times the size of the bonus or less, then they could be at risk of suffering massive losses, which might lead them to discontinue most bonuses rather than risk financial ruin.

Especially on low house advantage games like blackjack, the new bonus rules make little sense. Let us imagine a bonus of 100% up to $100 with a blackjack rollover of 50 times the bonus amount. With a house advantage of around half a percent (typical for online blackjack), the expected value of this bonus for the player is around $75 ($100 – (50 * $100) * 0.005).

Though most experienced blackjack players would leap at an opportunity like this, the UKGC rules would not permit such a bonus. Ironically, the justification for banning such bonuses is consumer protection, but in this case, the UKGC would be “protecting” the consumer from claiming a deal with a huge positive player expectation. The casino would have no choice but to either discontinue the bonus or reduce the wagering requirements by a factor of five or more: an unattractive proposition given how much the operator would stand to lose from savvy bonus hunters taking advantage of their generosity.

Regulatory Overload?

The UKGC frequently reviews existing regulations and enacts new ones. The direction of these changes is almost always toward a more tightly regulated market with increasing burdens placed on operators.

For example, in April 2019, the Remote Gaming Duty on internet gambling profits was increased from 15% to 21%. In April 2020, credit cards were banned from being used for online gaming. Other regulatory demands have included stricter ID verification protocols, more thorough KYC and source of funds checks, and tougher responsible gaming rules.

For firms that break the rules established by the UKGC, the penalties can be huge. Caesars Entertainment had to pay £13 million ($16 million) in April 2020 for failures to adhere to anti-money laundering and social responsibility regulations. In March 2023, it was the turn of high street bookmaker William Hill, which was penalized £19.2 million ($23.7 million) for similar misdeeds.

All of this regulatory scrutiny and oversight creates a tough operating environment for gaming firms. Many prominent companies in this industry have left the U.K. market in recent years, including Tonybet in 2021, Mr Green in 2024, and just recently, Stake. Quite a few of them have cited regulatory pressures as the reason or one of the leading reasons for their departure.

Offshore Sites Still Available

Notwithstanding the strict licence requirements of the UKGC and the abandonment of Britain by leading online gaming firms, there still exist offshore sites that serve the county without having to follow the whims of the authorities. These operators have taken the chance of serving the United Kingdom without obtaining a UKGC licence. They're able to do this because they're located in jurisdictions where the U.K. government has no control, and they're happy to welcome you through their virtual doors.

One of the best of them is Tiger Gaming, which lets you bet on sports, wager on horse races, compete in squares contests, play casino games (including live dealer fare), and engage in some exciting poker action. When you create an account, you can look forward to a 100% up to $1,000 poker bonus, a 100% up to $250 sports betting bonus, and other valuable promotions. To get started, click the button below:

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