Pricing a bonus: the arithmetic, worked through

British offers: UKGC bonus wagering requirements have been capped at 10 times since 19 January 2026. Higher multiples in this guide are historical or international examples for the arithmetic, not current British offers. UKGC rule.

Most bonus advice stops at explaining what a wagering requirement is. That is the easy half, and we cover it properly in wagering requirements explained. This page is the other half: given a specific offer in front of you, what does accepting it actually cost, and how do you get to a number before you click.

The method is four steps and takes about a minute once you have done it twice.

Step 1 — find the base, not the multiplier

A wagering requirement is a turnover target: bet this much before bonus money can be withdrawn. The argument is never about the multiplier. It is about which figure the multiplier hits.

Same headline, twice the work. Which means an offer advertising 30× on deposit plus bonus (£6,000) is worse than one advertising 40× on the bonus alone (£4,000), and it is written to look like the opposite. Find the base before you look at anything else; it moves the answer more than any other clause.

Step 2 — turn turnover into expected cost

This is the step almost nobody takes, and it is the one that makes offers comparable.

Wagering £3,500 does not mean losing £3,500. Each bet returns most of its stake on average. The expected cost of clearing a requirement is roughly:

turnover × the house edge of the game you clear it on

The house edge is 100% minus the game's RTP. On a slot at 96% RTP the edge is 4%, so clearing £3,500 costs about £140 on average. On a 94% game it is £210. On a 97% game, £105.

So a £100 bonus with a £3,500 turnover target on a 96% slot is, in expectation, £100 of bonus money against £140 of expected loss to obtain it. That offer is negative before you read another clause.

Two warnings about that number, and they matter.

It is a long-run average across many players, not a forecast of your evening. The spread around it is very wide in both directions, especially on high-volatility games — you will not lose exactly £140, you will lose much more or finish ahead, and the average is what happens across thousands of people doing the same thing.

It also assumes that you complete the requirement. Running out of funds first changes the result; no completion-rate evidence is asserted here.

Step 3 — apply the weighting

Not every bet counts in full. Slots usually contribute 100%. Table games are commonly weighted at 10%, and low-edge games such as much of live dealer and most video poker are frequently excluded outright. Wagering requirements, explained sets out how a weighting table is written and where the exclusions hide; this page assumes you have the numbers and shows what to do with them.

The arithmetic is brutal. At 10% weighting, £10 staked on roulette moves the target by £1. Clearing a £3,500 target on a 10%-weighted game means placing £35,000 of real bets. That is not a strategy, it is a different order of exposure, and the expected cost scales with it.

If the terms weight down the games you actually want to play, the offer is not for you regardless of how good the multiplier looks.

Step 4 — check the three clauses that can zero it

Everything above assumes the bonus survives to the end. These three are what stop it, and each is set out clause by clause in wagering requirements, explained.

Maximum bet while wagering, often around £5. Breaching it usually voids the bonus and everything won with it — a single spin at the wrong stake, frequently placed by accident from a previous session's settings. This is the most common way people lose a balance they believed was theirs.

Time limit, commonly seven to thirty days. This is the clause that converts a large requirement from slow into impossible. £7,000 of turnover in seven days is a rate, not a total, and it is worth dividing it out before you accept: £1,000 a day of real staking is a different proposition from a leisurely month.

Maximum cashout, capping what you can withdraw whatever happens. A no-deposit offer with a £50 cap is a £50 offer no matter what the match percentage says, and the cap is where a headline figure quietly becomes a much smaller real one.

Putting it together

A worked comparison of two offers that look similar:

Offer B has the bigger headline, the better-sounding base, and the worse outcome once the multiplier is applied to a larger bonus — and it caps what the whole exercise can return. Neither is a good deal in expectation. Offer A is the less bad one, which is usually the real question.

Two things worth saying plainly

A bonus is a marketing cost, priced to be recovered. That is not a reason to avoid offers, and the arithmetic above sometimes comes out fine — a low multiplier on the bonus alone, on a game you were going to play anyway, with no cashout cap, is a genuine addition. It is a reason to price one before accepting rather than after.

None of this beats the house edge. Every figure on this page is an expected cost, not a route to a profit. Clearing a wagering requirement more efficiently means losing less on average while you do it. It does not mean winning.

Our wagering calculator does steps one to three on any set of terms you give it, and the offers register runs the same arithmetic against live promotions so you can sort by what an offer actually costs rather than by what it advertises.