Wagering requirements, explained with the arithmetic

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.

The headline is not the offer

A bonus has two numbers. The one in the advertisement, and the one that decides what it costs you. They are rarely the same number, and the relationship between them is not intuitive.

The advertised number is the bonus amount. The number that matters is the wagering requirement: the total you must stake before bonus funds, and anything you won with them, can be withdrawn.

This guide does the arithmetic. It is not difficult arithmetic. It is simply arithmetic that offers are not designed to encourage.

What wagering actually means

A wagering requirement — also called playthrough or rollover — is expressed as a multiplier: 30x, 40x, 50x. It answers one question: how much money must pass through the games before the bonus stops being the casino's and starts being yours?

The critical word is stake, not lose. If you bet 1 unit twenty times, you have staked 20 units, whatever happened to your balance. Wagering measures turnover, not damage.

But turnover has a price, and the price is the house edge. Every unit you stake is expected to come back slightly smaller. On a game returning 96% to players, each unit staked costs you, on average, 4% of itself. Turn over enough units and that 4% is the entire story. This is the mechanism by which a bonus is paid for. See what RTP actually means.

The basis: the single most expensive word in the terms

Wagering is applied to a basis, and the basis is where offers quietly double in price.

• Bonus-only. The multiplier applies to the bonus amount alone.
• Deposit + bonus. The multiplier applies to the deposit and the bonus added together.

Same multiplier, same headline, twice the turnover. On a 100% match, a deposit-plus-bonus basis is exactly double the cost of a bonus-only basis, because the deposit equals the bonus. It is one word in the terms, and it is worth more than any difference in the headline amount.

Worked, with a 100 deposit and a 100% match at 35x:

• Bonus-only: 35 x 100 = 3,500 to turn over.
• Deposit + bonus: 35 x 200 = 7,000 to turn over.

At a 96% RTP game, the expected cost of that turnover is 4% of it: 140 in the first case, 280 in the second. You were given 100.

That is the shape of most bonuses when you look straight at them. A bonus is not free money. It is a discount on an expected loss, and sometimes it is not even that.

Compare three offers properly

Here is the comparison that offer pages do not draw. Three deposit bonuses on a 100 deposit. The smallest headline wins, and it is not close.

Offer A has four times the headline of Offer C and is, on these numbers, the worst offer on the table by a wide margin. Its expected cost of clearing exceeds the bonus by 340. Offer C is roughly break-even on expectation, which is about as good as a bonus gets — and note that "as good as it gets" is break-even before variance, not profit.

This is why our bonus listings show the total turnover, not the headline. The headline is the least informative number in the offer.

Game weighting: the multiplier behind the multiplier

Not every stake counts fully. Terms carry a weighting table, and it usually looks something like this:

• Slots: 100%
• Video poker: 20% (sometimes 10%, sometimes 0%)
• Roulette: 10%, or excluded
• Blackjack: 10%, or excluded
• Live dealer tables: often 10%, sometimes 0%

If blackjack contributes 10%, then staking 1,000 on blackjack advances your requirement by 100. To clear 3,500 of wagering on a game weighted at 10%, you must stake 35,000.

There is a trap inside this. Low-edge games — blackjack, some video poker — are exactly the games weighted down or excluded, precisely because their edge is low. The weighting table is not arbitrary. It is engineered so that the requirement is cleared on games with a house edge large enough to pay for the bonus. You cannot clear a bonus cheaply by picking a cheap game; the terms already anticipated it.

Read the weighting table before you accept. A 30x requirement on a 100%-weighted game may be cheaper than a 20x requirement on a table you actually want to play.

Max bet while wagering: the clause that voids everything

Almost every bonus caps the size of a single bet while a requirement is outstanding — commonly 5, sometimes less, occasionally expressed as a percentage of the bonus.

Exceed it, even once, even by accident, even on an auto-spin you forgot to reset, and the standard consequence is that the bonus and everything won with it are forfeited. Not paused. Forfeited.

This is the single most common way a bonus dispute begins, and it is one of the hardest cases to win, because the term is usually clear, published and consistently applied. Our position in the Tribunal is that a clearly disclosed max-bet rule, enforced consistently, is a fair term. It is also a term the player must actually know about.

Max cashout: the cap that makes the rest academic

Some bonuses cap the amount you can withdraw from bonus play — typically as a multiple of the bonus, or a flat figure.

A 50 bonus with a 4x max cashout means that no matter what happens on the reels, no matter what the requirement was or how well it went, the most that can ever leave the account from that bonus is 200. The upside is amputated while the requirement stays exactly the same size. A capped bonus with a large requirement is close to worthless, and no headline discloses that.

A max cashout is not automatically an unfair term — it is disclosed, and it is priced in. But a maximum-win cap on real-money play, applied outside any bonus, is a different animal entirely, and we penalise it. See unfair terms to look for.

The five questions to ask before accepting any bonus

1. 01What is the basis — bonus only, or deposit plus bonus?
2. 02What is the multiplier, and what is the total turnover it produces?
3. 03What is the weighting on the games I actually play?
4. 04What is the max bet while wagering, and what happens if I break it?
5. 05Is there a max cashout, and what is it as a multiple of the bonus?

Once you have those five answers, pricing a bonus turns them into a single figure: what accepting the offer actually costs you. The wagering calculator does the same arithmetic if you would rather type the numbers in than work them through.

Five answers, two minutes, one number at the end: total turnover. Compare offers on that number and nothing else.

The honest conclusion

Most bonuses have a negative expected value once the requirement is priced at the house edge. A small number are close to neutral. Effectively none are positive, and any that appears to be is either capped, weighted, or attached to a term that will be enforced.

That does not make bonuses fraudulent. It makes them what they are: extra playing time, bought at a price disclosed in the small print. If you want more time on the games, and the price is one you can lose without it mattering, a bonus can be a reasonable thing to accept. If you are accepting one because it looks like free money, you have misread the offer.

Decide with bankroll and limits in hand, not the headline.