Casino and Chips is a reference site about online casinos for UK players. It covers how they are regulated here, what a bonus actually commits you to, and the handful of checks worth doing before you put money anywhere.
Two things to say at the top. This site carries no affiliate links at the moment, so nothing on it is paid placement; when that changes, every page carrying one will say so and the advertising disclosure will spell out the arrangement. And we make no claim to have tested the operators described here. Where a licence, a limit or a rule is stated, it comes from the regulator or the operator's own terms, and we keep the date it was read.
Four rules do most of the work
All four are licence conditions. That means they bind the operator, not you: if a site licensed in Great Britain breaks one, it is the Gambling Commission's problem rather than a term you have somehow agreed to. They also apply only to GB-licensed sites, which is the main practical reason to care where a casino is licensed.
| Rule | What it means in practice | In force since |
|---|---|---|
| Online slot stake cap | £5 maximum per spin if you are 25 or over. £2 if you are 18 to 24. | 9 April 2025 (£5) 21 May 2025 (£2) |
| Bonus wagering cap | A bonus cannot carry a wagering requirement above 10 times, and a single offer cannot span two gambling products. | 19 January 2026 |
| No credit cards | Licence condition 6.1.2. It also catches an e-wallet that was itself topped up from a credit card. | 14 April 2020 |
| GAMSTOP | Every GB-licensed online operator has to be signed up to the national self-exclusion scheme, so one registration covers all of them. | 2020 |
The wagering cap is the one that changes how offers read. Until January 2026 a 35x or 40x requirement was unremarkable, and a £50 bonus at 40x meant £2,000 of staking before anything could be withdrawn. The ceiling is now ten times. The second half of the same rule stops a sportsbook bet unlocking casino spins inside one promotion, which is why combined bookmaker-and-casino welcome offers have quietly disappeared from GB-licensed sites. If you find a UK page still quoting 35x as normal, it has not been updated rather than being wrong about the past.
Check the licence first, and check it on the register
The Gambling Commission publishes a register of gambling businesses you can search yourself. The useful field is the search by domain name: type the site's address and you get the licensee behind it, the activities the licence covers, any sanctions the Commission has imposed, and the status.
Status is the part to read properly. Active is the only one that means what you want. Suspended means the Commission has paused the licence pending an investigation; Revoked means it was taken away after regulatory action. Expired, Lapsed, Surrendered and Forfeited all mean the licence has gone, and a website can carry on being reachable for a long time after that.
Two things people get wrong. The brand on the homepage is usually not the licensee's name, because one company commonly holds a dozen brands — which is also why two casinos that look unrelated share a cashier, a support desk and an identical bonus policy. And the licence number displayed in a site's footer looks like 000-012345-N-987654-001, but the account number to search is just the first block of six digits with the leading zeros dropped.
A licence from Malta, Gibraltar or Curaçao is not a GB licence. It may well mean somebody is supervising the operator, but none of the four rules above come with it.
What a bonus actually commits you to
Four numbers decide whether an offer is worth taking, and the headline figure is not one of them. The wagering multiple. What counts towards it — slots usually in full, live and table games at a fraction, which is what game weighting means. The maximum you are allowed to withdraw from bonus winnings. And how many days you have before the lot expires.
With the multiple now capped at ten times at any GB-licensed site, the other three do most of the separating. A £100 bonus at 10x with a £200 withdrawal cap and seven days to clear it is a worse offer than £25 at 10x with no cap and a month, and nothing on the banner will tell you that.
The long version, with the arithmetic worked through and each bonus type taken separately, is on the casino bonus guide. If you want current UK offer tables and codes rather than the mechanics, our sister site keeps a maintained list of UK casino bonuses and codes.
ID checks belong at the start, not at the withdrawal
A GB-licensed site has to verify your name, address and date of birth before you are allowed to gamble at all — licence condition 17, in force since 7 May 2019 — and verify your age before you can even deposit or open a free-to-play version of a game. So the common complaint, that a casino took deposits happily for weeks and then demanded documents the moment a withdrawal was requested, describes a site doing it the wrong way round. The Gambling Commission said as much in its own 2020 guidance: verifying identity only at the point of withdrawal is a high-risk policy and may itself breach condition 17.
Separate from that, a licensed operator can ask where your money came from, and the request gets more likely the more you deposit. It is an anti-money-laundering obligation rather than an excuse to stall, but it is worth having payslips or statements to hand before you need them, because that check can hold a withdrawal for days.
Where to go next
The site is organised by the decision you are making, not by brand.
- Online casinos — what to compare when you are choosing between sites: licence, cashier, withdrawal terms and how complaints get handled.
- Casino bonuses — the canonical explainer for wagering, weighting, withdrawal caps and expiry, plus how bonus codes work.
- No deposit bonuses — why they are now rare, what the small print usually restricts, and what the 10x cap did to them.
- Spins offers — the difference between genuinely free spins and bonus spins that need a deposit, which is a distinction UK advertising rules take seriously.
- Casino games — slots, jackpot slots and live dealer tables, including what RTP does and does not tell you.
- PayPal and Trustly — the two payment routes most often asked about, and how withdrawal times differ from deposits.
There are also pages on the studios whose games you will actually be playing, starting with Microgaming, now Games Global, NetEnt and Playtech. Who built a game determines its mechanics, its volatility and often its RTP range, so it is a more useful lens than it first looks.
If gambling stops being fun
The National Gambling Helpline is free and open around the clock on 0808 8020 133. It is run by GamCare and covers Great Britain.
GamStop blocks you from every GB-licensed online gambling site in one registration, for six months, one year or five years, and it cannot be lifted early once the period starts. GambleAware runs the self-assessment and the directory of local treatment services. Separately, most UK banks will block gambling payments from inside their app, which stops card deposits at sites the other measures miss.
Our own responsible gambling page sets out the deposit, loss and time limits every licensed operator has to offer you, and how to use them before they become necessary.
18+. Gambling should only ever cost what you decided in advance you could lose.