What a money-back offer really costs the bettor in 2026

Updated October 2026

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For years the marketing line on a free bet has been some version of “risk-free”: place your wager, get a refund if it loses, walk away with house money. The £20 back, the £40 in bonus bets, the acca insurance that pays out when one leg lets you down, the boosted-odds token that doubles your price if your winner comes in at a longer number. The terms behind those offers are where the real arithmetic lives, and from 19 January 2026 the Gambling Commission has drawn a hard line across the middle of them. A 10x wagering cap on bonuses and a ban on mixed-product promotions now set the ceiling for every licensed UK bookmaker. This page walks through what those rules do to the headline offers, how each operator’s own terms change the calculation, and what a free bet is actually worth when the stake is not returned with the winnings.

Data current as of 27 October 2026, verified against the Gambling Commission’s public licence register.

Responsible gambling and the cost of chasing a bonus

The first number a money-back offer plants in a reader’s head is the size of the refund: £10, £20, £40, sometimes more. The number a reader should hold onto instead is the wagering requirement that comes attached, the minimum odds that gate it, and the deadline by which the whole construction collapses. Those three figures decide whether the offer is a small bonus for a casual flutter or a small treadmill that costs more than it pays.

A free bet in Great Britain in 2026 lives under a particular set of rules. The Commission’s promotion framework, in force since 19 January 2026, caps any wagering requirement attached to a bonus at ten times the bonus amount or the deposit plus bonus, whichever the offer uses as its base. An offer that asks a customer to gamble across two or more product types, for example betting and casino on the same promotional mechanic, is banned outright. Free bets that carry no wagering condition sit in a grey zone the framework does not settle, and operators handle them under their own house rules.

The cap matters because the older market ran on much heavier turnover. A £10 bonus at 50x wagering used to mean £500 of qualifying bets before a penny could be withdrawn; the new ceiling keeps that requirement at £100 or below. The mixed-product ban closes a different door, the “bet on football to unlock free spins” construction that pulled casino spend out of a sportsbook promotion. Both rules push the cost of accepting a bonus down for the customer who reads the terms.

The cost that does not move is the one built into every price on the slip. A bookmaker’s margin, the slice of every pound staked that the house keeps on average, is what makes a wager an expected loss even before any bonus terms apply. Clearing a £100 wagering requirement on a football 1X2 book at a 5% margin costs the bettor roughly £5 in expected value, before any edge or form study enters the picture. The free bet is the rebate that offsets some of that loss, not a profit centre on its own.

Safer gambling tools every UK bookmaker must offer

A licensed UK bookmaker cannot take a deposit from a customer who has not been verified, and verification means name, address and date of birth confirmed against records before the first pound goes in. That rule has been in force since 7 May 2019 and applies to free bets as much as to cash stakes. No anonymous play, no unverified bonus hunting.

Every brand in the comparison below holds a remote operating licence from the Gambling Commission and is signed up to GAMSTOP, the national multi-operator self-exclusion scheme. GAMSTOP lets a customer block themselves from every UK-licensed online gambling site for six months, one year, five years, or five years with auto-renewal. After the minimum term expires the exclusion stays in force for a further seven years unless the customer asks GAMSTOP to remove it. The scheme covers online sites and apps; high-street betting shops run a separate self-exclusion process. No licensed operator offers a route around it.

A second protection layer runs on deposits. Since 31 October 2025 the first phase of new deposit-limit rules has applied: every operator must offer a customer a gross deposit limit set on a fixed time frame. A second phase has been postponed to 30 September 2026, and whether that phase is live is not established at the time of writing. There is no state-set ceiling on what a customer may deposit; the limit is one the customer chooses for themselves. What the rules add is the requirement that the choice be made explicit, not assumed.

A financial vulnerability check applies once a customer’s deposits minus withdrawals cross £150 in a rolling 30-day window, a threshold in force since 28 February 2025. The check is a public-record search, bankruptcy registers, county court judgments and the like, not a credit reference and not an income test. A separate set of financial risk assessments, the “affordability checks” that have featured in press coverage, sits in an announced staged plan with no start date.

For readers who want help or want to talk, GamCare runs the National Gambling Helpline, GambleAware funds treatment and education, the NHS runs gambling clinics across the regions, and Gamblers Anonymous runs peer-support groups. GAMSTOP is the self-exclusion route. A licensed operator’s customer-services team can also set deposit limits, time-outs, or full account closure on request.

What a money-back offer actually is

The phrase “money back as a free bet” describes a particular construction. A customer places a real-money wager, the wager loses under a stated condition, and the bookmaker refunds part or all of the stake as a free bet rather than as withdrawable cash. The word “free” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and most of it is misleading.

A free bet is a one-shot token. Place it, let it win, collect the winnings only. The stake that bought the bet does not come back. A £10 free bet at decimal odds 2.00 that wins returns £10 in profit, not £20 in total. A real-money bet at the same odds returns £20, stake and profit. The reader who treats a free bet like a cash refund will misread every offer on this page.

The cost of a free bet is what the stake-not-returned condition costs the customer. Take a free bet at decimal odds 1.90 (fractional 9/10) on a two-way market priced 1.90 / 1.90. The payout share of that market is 1 ÷ (1/1.90 + 1/1.90), which works out to roughly 0.95, or 95%. The free bet’s worth on average, in the formula’s own terms, is the free-bet amount multiplied by (odds minus 1) divided by odds, then multiplied by the market’s payout share. For a £10 free bet at 1.90 on that 95% market, the expected value is £10 × 0.90 ÷ 1.90 × 0.95, which is £4.50. Anywhere in the band of £4 to £5 is the honest answer for a £10 free bet priced this way, before the book’s own margin tightens or widens that window.

Three things follow from that calculation. First, a free bet is worth less than half its face amount even on a market with a thin margin. Second, the higher the odds the customer takes, the more the free bet is worth, because the (odds minus 1) term grows while the divisor grows more slowly. Third, the lower the market margin, the higher the payout share, the better the free bet performs. A free bet used on a boosted-odds market is worth more than the same free bet used on a standard market, which is why operators who price their free bets narrowly tend to lose them to customers who read the small print.

Reading the small print on a UK welcome offer

Every welcome offer in the ranking below shares a common skeleton: a qualifying bet, a trigger, a credit, and a window. The differences live in the size of each part.

The qualifying bet is the wager the customer must place with their own money to unlock the offer. A minimum stake, often £10 or £20, sits at the bottom of it. A minimum price, expressed as decimal odds (1.75, 2.00, 3.00) or as fractions (1/2, evens, 2/1), gates which markets count. Coral asks for a £20 stake at minimum odds of 2.00 (1/1). Bet600 asks for five separate £10 bets at minimum odds of 2.00 within seven days. VBet asks for a single £10 bet that loses. SBK, the sportsbook side of Smarkets, asks for a £20 first deposit followed by a £20 bet at minimum odds of 3.00.

The trigger is the event that credits the offer. Lose the qualifying bet, the trigger fires. Win the qualifying bet, no free bet is issued. Some offers flip this logic: Betway credits free bets carrying 1x wagering at minimum odds of 1.75 regardless of whether the qualifying bet wins or loses, because the credit is automatic on a £10 deposit. The trigger is the deposit plus the qualifying wager, not the result.

The credit is what the customer receives. The headline is almost always a number: £10, £20, £40, £60. The composition matters more. A £40 credit split into four £10 free bets that each expire seven days after issue is not the same as a single £40 free bet with a 30-day window. A free bet whose stake is not returned with winnings is not a £40 refund; it is a token worth somewhere in the £15-£20 range on a typical market.

The window is the deadline. Sky Bet’s free bets expire 30 days after crediting. Dabble’s expire seven days after issue. Coral’s expire seven days after issue. Sporting Index’s free bets run on the operator’s own clock. The window decides how much work the customer must do to convert the credit into withdrawable cash, and a tight window converts fewer offers than a long one.

Three further rules recur. Free bets are non-withdrawable, meaning the customer cannot cash the token out without using it on a wager. Free bets are restricted to certain market types: Sky Bet allows only singles and each-way bets, not multiples, and excludes virtuals. Void selections are handled operator by operator: Sky Bet refunds the stake on a void single but settles multiples on the remaining selections, so a five-fold with one void leg becomes a four-fold.

UK bookmakers with money-back offers in 2026

Each operator below holds a remote operating licence from the Gambling Commission. The comparison table that follows lists the licence number and holder, then the headline terms on money-back and free-bet mechanics. The write-ups add the texture: what each brand’s construction actually delivers, and where the small print changes the picture.

Smarkets — the SBK sportsbook side

Smarkets runs a betting exchange under a Commission intermediary licence and a separate sportsbook branded SBK under the same holder. The sportsbook welcome offer asks for a £20 first deposit followed by a £20 bet at minimum odds of 3.00, crediting £60 in free bets within 48 hours of the qualifying bet settling. The exchange’s commission rates on winning back bets are a separate product line and are not affected by the sportsbook promotion.

The minimum odds of 3.00 (2/1) on the qualifying bet are unusually high for a welcome trigger. Most rivals gate the trigger at evens (2.00) or 1.75. The 3.00 threshold filters out the bonus hunters who would otherwise back a heavy favourite and walk away, which means the £60 credit lands on accounts that have shown some appetite for a longer-priced wager. Three £20 free bets at the standard stake-not-returned terms, used on a typical football market, are worth somewhere in the £45-£55 range on average before expiry. The 48-hour credit window is the tightest on this list and the bettor who delays loses the offer.

The verdict: the SBK offer suits a customer who already plans to take a longer-priced view on a football or racing market in their first 48 hours as a customer. Anyone staking only at short odds will not qualify, and the offer does nothing for them.

William Hill — the long-established high-street name

William Hill’s offer structure in 2026 centres on the Football Acca Boost rather than a single welcome credit. Accas of two or more legs qualify, with each selection priced at 1/5 or bigger (decimal 1.20). The boost scales from 3% on a double up to 200% on twenty or more legs, capped at £10,000 per online bet, and the promotion runs to 30 May 2027. The boost is paid as added winnings, not as a free bet, which is a meaningful distinction: the stake rides with the boost, and a winning accumulator pays the boosted price in full.

The mathematics of the boost favour longer accumulators. A treble at 3.00 per leg would land at combined odds of 27.00 without a boost; the 10% boost on a treble lifts that to roughly 29.70, an addition of £270 on a £10 stake. A twenty-fold at modest per-leg odds is the realistic ceiling, and the 200% boost at that length is where the offer delivers its headline number. The downside is the variance: a twenty-fold is a long way from paying out, and the boost only matters when the bet wins.

The verdict: a customer who already builds accas of three legs or more gets genuine value from the boost, and the £10,000 cap is high enough that few recreational stakes will hit it. A customer who bets singles will see nothing from this promotion.

Bet600 — the volume-driven welcome

Bet600’s offer is unusual in asking for five qualifying bets rather than one. Five single bets of £10 or more at minimum odds of 2.00 (evens) within seven days of registration unlocks one £10 free bet. The construction is closer to a volume rebate than to a one-shot welcome: a customer placing £50 of their own money across the week to receive £10 of bonus money, with the standard stake-not-returned rule applying.

The cost-benefit depends on the customer’s natural betting cadence. A bettor who places five singles a week anyway clears the requirement as a side effect of their normal activity, and the £10 free bet lands as a small thank-you. A bettor who would otherwise place one £20 bet is being asked to spread that stake across five wagers to unlock the same credit, which raises the question of whether the five bets are the betting the customer wanted to do in the first place. Five singles at 2.00 with a typical bookmaker margin around 5% carry an expected cost of £2.50 in margin alone, before the £10 free bet is even credited.

The verdict: the offer suits a customer whose normal week involves five singles at or above evens. For a casual once-a-week punter, the requirement is a grind the offer does not reward.

Coral — the £40 headline with a tight window

Coral’s welcome package asks for a £20 deposit and sports bet at minimum odds of 2.00 to credit £40 in free bets, issued within seven days of the qualifying bet settling and expiring seven days after issue. The £40 headline is generous against most rivals, and the qualifying trigger at evens is in line with market norms. The constraint is the seven-day expiry on the credit, the tightest on this list alongside Dabble’s.

A £40 credit split into free bets, on Coral’s standard terms, carries the stake-not-returned rule. Used on a typical 5%-margin market, the £40 is worth somewhere in the £15-£20 range on average. The seven-day window means the credit is use-it-or-lose-it: a customer who waits three weeks to place it will find it gone. The qualifying bet must use a debit card or instant bank transfer, not a credit card (credit cards are banned for gambling in Great Britain anyway), and the site lists Apple Pay, Visa, Visa Electron, Mastercard, Revolut Pay, Google Pay, TrueLayer, Earthport and Trustly among its accepted payment methods.

The verdict: the headline number is competitive, and the customer who plans to bet within seven days of receiving the credit gets the full value. A customer who bets occasionally will lose the credit to expiry.

VBet — the simple refund

VBet’s welcome offer is the cleanest construction on the list. A new, verified customer stakes £10 or more on a first-ever bet that loses; VBet credits one £10 free bet. No qualifying odds threshold beyond the implicit minimum the betting slip carries, no volume requirement, no time pressure beyond the standard free-bet expiry. The trigger is loss, and only loss.

The simplicity is the offer’s strength and its weakness. A customer who wins their first bet gets nothing from the offer, and the free bet that follows a loss is worth somewhere in the £4-£5 range on a typical market. A customer who would have bet anyway, win or lose, sees the offer as free insurance on a small first wager; a customer who would not otherwise have placed a first bet is being invited to place one specifically to qualify.

The verdict: a low-friction entry for the customer who plans a first wager regardless. Anyone who would prefer to wait and learn the platform first gets nothing from the offer.

Kwiff — the surprise boost mechanic

Kwiff does not run a fixed welcome offer in the conventional sense. Instead, the Supercharge feature can boost the odds on any bet, single or multi, on any sport, mid-slip. The marketing example is a 2/1 selection boosted to 20/1, a ten-times increase, applied automatically and unpredictably. The bettor does not know in advance which bets will be Supercharged, which is the hook.

The mechanic changes the calculation. A free bet is a known token with a known ceiling; a Supercharged price is an unknown windfall on a bet the customer has already decided to place. The expected value of the boost over many bets depends on Kwiff’s own allocation, which is not published, but the upside on a single boosted bet can be substantial. A £10 bet at 20/1 that wins returns £210 in profit; the same bet at 2/1 would have returned £30.

The verdict: a customer who likes the unpredictability of an occasional ten-times price gets genuine entertainment value from Kwiff’s mechanic. A customer who wants a clear, calculable welcome credit will not find it here.

10bet — the headline bonus with mixed terms

10bet advertises a 100% up to £50 betting bonus for UK sign-ups, plus daily free bets and free spins. The headline carries the £50 ceiling; the construction is a matched deposit rather than a free-bet credit, and the difference matters. A matched deposit bonus is paid as bonus funds that carry a wagering requirement before withdrawal; a free bet is a one-shot token. The 10x wagering cap that came in on 19 January 2026 applies to any bonus of this type.

A £50 deposit bonus at the 10x ceiling would require £500 of qualifying bets at the operator’s minimum odds before the bonus becomes withdrawable, and the daily free bets add a separate stream of stake-not-returned tokens. The free spins on the casino side fall outside the Commission’s betting-bonus cap but trigger the mixed-product ban if they are credited as a direct result of placing a sports bet. The construction sits right at the edge of the new rules.

The verdict: a customer who wants a matched deposit bonus and plans to bet £500 within the bonus window gets the headline number. A customer who prefers free bets with no wagering should look elsewhere, because the headline and the mechanics are different products.

Star Sports — the boosts-led offering

Star Sports runs no single welcome headline in the same way as Coral or VBet. The product is built around Bet Boosts, Daily Specials and Weekend Enhanced Boosts on pre-event and in-play markets across football, horse racing, golf and US sports. The in-play coverage on those four categories is the differentiating feature, and the boosts are the promotional wrapper.

A customer evaluating Star Sports against a fixed welcome offer should compare the value of an enhanced-odds token against a one-shot free bet. An enhanced-odds token pays the boosted price if the bet wins and the original price if it loses, on a stake the customer has funded; a free bet pays the winnings only on a stake the operator has funded. The two constructions reward different behaviour, and a customer who likes betting on boosted prices will prefer Star Sports; a customer who wants bonus funds will prefer a rival with a clearer credit.

The verdict: a strong fit for the customer whose betting calendar already includes the four sports Star Sports covers well. A casual once-a-week bettor will see less value from the daily mechanics.

Sporting Index — the spread-bet hybrid

Sporting Index’s welcome package bridges fixed-odds and spread betting. A £10 fixed-odds bet at minimum odds of 1/2 (decimal 1.50) unlocks three £10 fixed-odds free bets, three £5 Total Goals spread bets, three £5 Winning Favourites spread bets and a £1 Race Index spread bet. The qualifying bet cannot be placed in-play and cannot be cashed out early, which closes two routes a customer might otherwise use to lock in value on the trigger.

The spread-bet side is the distinctive element. Spread betting carries its own risk profile: losses can exceed the original stake, the margin is built into the spread rather than the odds, and settlement is on the size of the outcome rather than a binary win or loss. Sporting Index is regulated by the Gambling Commission for fixed-odds betting and the FCA covers financial spread betting on the same platform, with separate rules on each side. A customer new to spread betting should read the platform’s own spread-betting explanation before placing any of the bonus credits.

The verdict: a customer with spread-betting experience gets a multi-product welcome that no fixed-odds rival offers. A fixed-odds-only customer should ignore the spread-bet credits and treat the three £10 fixed-odds free bets as the offer.

Fafabet — the racing-focused bookmaker

Fafabet’s signature product is Best Odds Guaranteed on UK and Irish horse racing, win and each-way bets from 9am on race days. If the starting price is bigger than the price the customer took, the bigger price is paid. The promotion runs across the racing schedule rather than as a one-shot welcome, and it rewards a customer who takes an early price and sees the market drift at the off.

BOG does not require a sign-up. It runs continuously on the racing markets and pays out at the better of the two prices without any opt-in. The cost to the customer is the discipline to take a price early on a horse they expect to shorten, rather than waiting for the off and missing the longer number. The Commission’s promotion rules do not cap BOG because it is not a bonus; it is a price-concession mechanic.

The verdict: a must-have for a racing-focused customer, and the strongest BOG product among the comparison set. A customer who bets only football will find nothing here.

Where the Commission’s rules meet the offers

The 10x wagering cap and the mixed-product ban are the two rules that change the most offers in 2026. A bonus at 50x wagering, common before 19 January 2026, is no longer offered by any GB-licensed operator. A promotion that requires a sports bet to unlock casino free spins, also common before the rules took effect, is no longer offered. The market has reorganised around the new ceiling.

The cap does not cover everything the marketing calls a “bonus”. A free bet whose stake is not returned is not a bonus in the Commission’s framing; it is a promotional token with no wagering requirement, and the 10x cap does not bite. The operators in this comparison have largely moved towards free-bet-based welcome offers rather than matched-deposit bonuses for that reason, and the credit numbers on this page should be read as free-bet values rather than bonus funds.

The £150 rolling-30-days vulnerability check is the rule customers notice least and feel most directly. Once deposits net of withdrawals cross the threshold, the operator runs a public-record check; the customer may see a short delay or a request for further information. The check is not a credit reference and not an income test, and the Commission has not published the rate at which checks convert into account restrictions.

The credit-card ban is a quieter rule with a long reach. Credit cards have been banned for gambling in Great Britain since 14 April 2020, and the ban extends to credit-card-funded e-wallet deposits. A customer who tops up an e-wallet from a credit card and then deposits from the e-wallet is still using credit for gambling, and operators screen for this. The accepted payment methods across this comparison set run through debit cards and bank transfers, with some operators also accepting Apple Pay, Google Pay and a handful of open-banking providers.

How an offer’s true cost is calculated

Understanding the arithmetic behind a free bet reveals its real value. Take a £10 free bet at decimal odds 1.90 on a two-way market priced 1.90 / 1.90. The stake is not returned with the winnings, so a winning £10 free bet returns £10 × (1.90 – 1.00) = £9.00 in profit. The market’s payout share is 1 ÷ (1/1.90 + 1/1.90) ≈ 0.95, or 95%, meaning the margin is roughly 5%. The expected value of the free bet on that market, averaged over many uses, is £10 × 0.90 ÷ 1.90 × 0.95, which is £4.50.

That figure is a band, not a point. Anywhere in the £4 to £5 range is the honest answer for a £10 free bet priced this way, before adjusting for the operator’s actual market margin. A bookmaker whose 1X2 margin runs at 7% rather than 5% widens the band downward; a bookmaker running at 3% narrows it upward. The point is that a £10 free bet is worth roughly half its face amount on a typical market, and the headline number on the welcome page overstates the customer’s actual gain by a factor of two.

The same calculation explains why a free bet is worth more at longer odds. The (odds – 1) term grows faster than the odds divisor for any price above 1.00, and the (odds – 1) / odds ratio rises from about 0.47 at odds 1.90 to about 0.67 at odds 3.00 to about 0.80 at odds 5.00. A £10 free bet at 5.00 on a competitive market is worth around £7.60 in expected value, well above the £4.50 at 1.90, before any payout-share adjustment. Operators who restrict free bets to short odds are passing the cost on to the customer; operators who allow longer prices are giving the customer a fairer deal.

The calculation is an estimate. It averages over many bets under the stated assumptions, not a single outcome. A free bet on a 5.00 shot that wins pays £40 in profit; the same free bet on a 1.20 shot that wins pays £2. The £4.50 expected value at 1.90 is the long-run average, not what happens on any given weekend.

Offshore and the cost of an unlicensed site

A GB-licensed operator carries the protections this page has set out: GAMSTOP coverage, the £150 vulnerability check, the 10x bonus cap, Commission complaints routes, ADR bodies, British consumer law. An unlicensed site carries none of those. No GAMSTOP block reaches it; no Commission complaint is processed; no ADR award is enforceable; no British consumer remedy applies if funds are withheld.

The Commission’s enforcement is disruption, not blocking: cease-and-desist notices, search-engine referrals, registrar and payment-provider work, and the court-order DNS blocking powers the regulator has been given or is about to receive. The Commission has not put ISP-level blocking in operation. A customer who chooses an unlicensed site is not committing an offence; the offence sits with the operator under section 33 of the Gambling Act 2005. The cost to the customer is the loss of every protection listed in the previous paragraph, plus the real possibility of being unable to withdraw funds if the operator decides not to pay.

The Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014 closed the route that used to let an offshore operator serve British customers from Malta, Gibraltar or Curaçao without a Commission licence. Remote facilities used in Great Britain require a Commission licence regardless of where the operator is based, and the licence the Commission offers to overseas operators is the same licence a domestic operator holds. A Curaçao or Maltese licence alone is not a substitute and does not authorise British-facing trade.

The honest framing: licensed means checks, limits, GAMSTOP, and the bonus cap, alongside verification before the first bet. Unlicensed means none of those protections and a credible risk of losing funds. Neither is “the safe choice” by default; the licensed route is the one with a regulator behind it.

Advertising, codes, and what this page does not carry

This page does not print any bonus, voucher or promotional code. Welcome offers are described qualitatively in each operator section, the way the player formats the customer’s understanding of what the offer is, the way the operator’s own terms display it. A working code would be a moving target, region-dependent, and time-limited; the page describes the construction, not the entry key.

The Commission’s marketing rules, separate from the promotion rules, sit under the CAP Code for non-broadcast advertising and the BCAP Code for broadcast, both enforced by the ASA. Marketing must be socially responsible, must not have strong appeal to under-18s, and no one who is or appears to be under 25 may feature in gambling advertising, with an exception for marketing placed at the point of sale. The rule is about who appears in the ad, not who may bet. The “whistle-to-whistle” ban on broadcast advertising around live sport, in force since 1 August 2019, is an industry code rather than statute, but operates in practice across the major broadcasters.

Operators carry responsibility for marketing run by their affiliates. A code posted by an affiliate is the operator’s code to police. Customers who see an offer that looks too good should check the operator’s own terms page directly, where the address and the conditions sit without the affiliate markup.

Tax, duty, and the customer’s bottom line

The customer pays no tax on betting winnings in Great Britain. General Betting Duty is the operator’s tax on gross profits, currently 15% across the board, with a new remote betting rate of 25% taking effect from 1 April 2027 within the existing structure. The remote rate for bets on UK horse racing, self-service betting terminal bets, pool betting and in-person betting stays at 15%. Until 1 April 2027 the rate on remote sports bets remains at 15%.

Whether operators pass duty on through odds is not established. A 25% remote rate from April 2027 is a significant shift in operator cost, and some of that cost may show up in tighter margins or shorter prices, but the effect on the customer’s bottom line cannot be quantified in advance. The Commission’s levy is a separate charge on operators and does not appear on the customer’s betting statement.

Spread betting has its own tax structure: 3% on financial spread bets and 10% on other spread bets. The duty sits with the operator and is not deducted from the customer’s winnings. A professional gambler, defined by HMRC by the regularity and scale of betting activity, should ask HMRC or an adviser for the position; this page is general information, not tax advice.

How the page was checked

Data on this page was current as of 27 October 2026 and verified against the Gambling Commission’s public licence register, which lists every GB-licensed operator by business name, trading name, domain and account number. Licence numbers, account numbers and licence holders in the comparison table above were taken from that register. Operator-specific terms on free bets, minimum odds, expiry windows and stake-not-returned rules were taken from each operator’s own support pages or app-store listings on 16 October 2026.

No price or margin on this page is attributed to a specific event. The free-bet calculation in the worked example uses an illustrative 1.90 / 1.90 two-way market as a teaching example, not as a quoted price. Live odds on real events change continuously and would be out of date by the time the page was read.

Frequently asked questions

What is a money back as free bet deal?

A money-back-as-free-bet deal refunds part of a losing wager as a free bet rather than as cash. The customer places a real-money bet, the bet loses under a stated condition, and the bookmaker credits a free-bet token to the customer’s account. The token can usually only be used on certain markets and expires within a set window. The stake of the free bet is typically not returned with any winnings.

What does money back in free bets mean?

Money back in free bets means the same construction in different words. A losing real-money bet is refunded as one or more free bets, and those free bets replace the cash refund that an older generation of offers used to provide. The value to the customer is lower than a cash refund of the same headline amount, because a free bet at decimal odds 2.00 that wins pays only the profit, not the profit plus a returned stake.

What does use money back in free bets mean?

To use money back in free bets means to place the credited token on a qualifying market and let it settle. The free bet is consumed by the wager whether the bet wins or loses; on a win, only the profit is returned to the customer’s withdrawable balance; on a loss, the token is gone and no second chance is issued. Most operators require the free bet to be used within a window of seven to thirty days, and many restrict the token to singles or each-way bets rather than multiples.

What is the maximum wagering requirement on a betting bonus in Great Britain?

The Gambling Commission’s promotion framework, in force since 19 January 2026, caps any wagering requirement on a betting bonus at ten times the bonus amount or the deposit plus bonus, whichever the offer uses as its base. A £10 bonus at the cap requires £100 of qualifying bets before withdrawal; a £50 bonus at the cap requires £500. The cap does not apply to free bets whose stake is not returned, because those tokens carry no wagering condition. Mixed-product promotions, an offer that requires gambling on two or more product types such as betting and casino on the same promotion, are banned outright.

What do minimum odds and the wagering requirement mean in a sign-up offer?

Minimum odds are the threshold below which a wager does not count toward the offer. Coral asks for a £20 bet at minimum odds of 2.00 (1/1); SBK asks for a £20 bet at minimum odds of 3.00 (2/1). A bet placed below the threshold does not unlock the credit. The wagering requirement is the volume of betting the customer must complete before a bonus becomes withdrawable. A £10 bonus at 10x wagering requires £100 of qualifying bets at or above the offer’s minimum odds. The two terms work together: minimum odds decide what counts, wagering requirement decides how much.

Why is the stake of a free bet not paid back with the winnings?

The stake of a free bet is not returned because the token is a promotional credit rather than a cash balance. The bookmaker funds the wager but does not treat the token as the customer’s money, and the contract specifies that only the profit is returned on a win. A £10 free bet at decimal odds 2.00 that wins returns £10 in profit; the same bet funded with £10 of the customer’s own cash returns £20 in total (£10 profit plus the £10 stake). The mechanic is the difference between a free bet and a cash refund, and the difference is roughly half the face value of the token on a market with a 5% margin.

Content created by the «Free bets» team