What a betting welcome bonus really costs in 2026

Updated October 2026

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A welcome bonus is the price a bookmaker pays to win your first deposit. The headline number on the advert — “£40 in free bets”, “100% matched”, “bet £10 get £30” — is the price the bookmaker is willing to pay; the wagering requirement, the minimum odds, the expiry clock and the markets that qualify are the price you pay back. Most punters read the first number and skim the second. This page reads them both, because the second number is the one that decides whether the first is worth taking.

Last verified against the Gambling Commission’s register on 26 October 2026.

The cost ranking of approved welcome offers

Every brand on this list holds a remote operating licence from the Gambling Commission for Great Britain. Every one runs a welcome offer for new customers in 2026. The ranking below is ordered by what the offer costs the punter who claims it and uses it as the terms intend — not by the headline value of the free bets.

Spreadex is reviewed on its own terms because its offer sits in a different market — fixed-odds plus spread betting under the same roof. Unibet is reviewed separately because its terms mirror Coral’s headline but its licence and operating company are not the same. That is why this page runs to twelve write-ups when the shortlist is ten. The four brands marked “Not established in this guide” still hold a Commission licence and are GAMSTOP participants; their omission is a gap in the offer data, not a judgement of the brand.

The cost band is what matters when you order a claim. An offer that hands you £40 in free bets but demands you turn that £40 over ten times on accas at minimum odds 1/2 inside a week is not £40 of value: it is a £40 token with a treadmill attached. The point of the ranking is to put the treadmill in the offer statement before you walk onto it.

How a sign-up offer actually works in Great Britain

The mechanics behind every welcome bonus on this page are the same. A new customer opens an account, completes the Commission’s identity verification (name, address, date of birth), deposits, opts in, places a first bet at or above the qualifying stake at or above the qualifying odds, and receives the bonus as free bet tokens, bet credits or a cash boost. The free bets are then used on another set of selections, usually inside a short window, and any winnings are paid back — but, for the typical free bet, the stake itself is not paid back with the win. That single rule, stake not returned, is what separates a £40 free bet from a £40 cash bonus, and it is the rule that turns most of the offers on this list into something less generous than the headline suggests.

The terms differ from brand to brand on five points: the size of the qualifying bet, the minimum odds that bet must carry, the time you have to place it, the time the free bets survive, and any wagering requirement on the free bet itself. The first four are easy to read. The fifth is the one that turned the Commission’s 2026 promotion rules from a quiet amendment into the most important sentence in this article.

The 10x cap and the ban on mixed-product offers

Since 19 January 2026, the Gambling Commission’s promotion rules have capped wagering requirements on bonuses at ten times the bonus amount and banned mixed-product promotions — an offer that makes you gamble on two or more product types, for example a free spins bonus unlocked by a sports bet. A £10 bonus at fifty times wagering used to mean £500 of qualifying turnover; under the cap, no more than £100 of qualifying bets are needed to clear that same bonus. The cap is a hard ceiling on the worst end of the market, not a guarantee that every offer on this page is cheap.

The cap does not say that ten times is cheap. It says ten times is the most a licensed operator may ask of you. The market that grew up under the old rules settled around four to six times for the bigger brands; the floor and the ceiling are both tighter than the worst the pre-2026 industry traded at. Whether the cap reaches free bets whose own terms carry no wagering condition is not established in the public material, so each operator’s own terms are the answer for that operator.

The mixed-product ban removes the worst of the cross-sell. An offer that paid a free bet on the casino side for a sportsbook wager is no longer compliant. Two of the offers on this shortlist, Octobet’s £10 casino bonus alongside its sportsbook free bet, would in their old form have been the kind of bundle the new rule targets. The current shape of those offers, and whether each one still sits inside the new rule, is something each operator’s customer terms should be checked against at the point of claim.

The legal frame that sets the floor

The Commission licenses every commercial bookmaker in Great Britain under the Gambling Act 2005. Since the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014, any operator whose remote facilities are used in Great Britain needs a Commission licence wherever it is based; a Curaçao, Maltese or Gibraltar licence does not substitute. Northern Ireland is outside the 2005 Act and runs on its own older law, which is why a “GB-licensed” label on a bookie refers to the regulator in London, not the whole United Kingdom.

Five rules set the floor under the welcome offers on this page.

The first is identity. Since 7 May 2019, every customer has to pass name, address and date-of-birth verification before the first deposit or the first bet — including a free bet. Anonymous play at a licensed bookie no longer exists.

The second is the financial vulnerability check. Since 30 August 2024 the operator runs a public-record check on customers whose deposits minus withdrawals exceed £150 in a rolling 30 days; since 28 February 2025 that trigger has been live. It is not an income check and not a credit reference check.

The third is GAMSTOP, the national multi-operator online self-exclusion scheme that has been a mandatory licence condition for online operators since 31 March 2020. Every brand on this shortlist is a GAMSTOP member; periods run from six months to five years, with an auto-renewal option, and after the minimum period the exclusion stays in place for a further seven years unless the customer asks GAMSTOP to remove it.

The fourth is the credit card ban. Since 14 April 2020 the LCCP has banned credit cards for gambling, including credit-card-funded e-wallet top-ups. Debit cards and bank-based payments are not covered by that ban.

The fifth is the duty regime. The player pays no tax on betting winnings in Great Britain. General Betting Duty is the operator’s tax, currently 15%, with a remote rate of 25% from 1 April 2027 within it; whether operators pass duty on through odds is not established in the public material.

Where the gambling help lives

The hard look. The same Commission licence that lets a bookmaker advertise a welcome bonus also obliges it to surface safer-gambling tools, deposit limits, time-outs and reality checks. The national services sit one click deeper.

GamCare runs the National Gambling Helpline. GambleAware funds treatment and education. The NHS runs gambling clinics across England. Gamblers Anonymous runs meetings in person and online. GAMSTOP is the self-exclusion scheme for online sites and apps; betting shops use a separate service.

Deposit limits, loss limits and wagering limits are available on every account on this shortlist — DAZN Bet names them on its help pages, and the rest of the brands follow the same baseline. The Commission’s RTS 12 framework made gross deposit limits on a fixed time frame a licence condition, with the first changes live since 31 October 2025 and a second phase postponed to 30 September 2026.

Welcome offers, free bets and the wagering treadmill

A free bet is what you get. The wagering requirement is what it costs to turn that free bet into withdrawable cash, where the bookmaker imposes one at all. Coral’s headline, Issued in free bets within 7 days and expiring 7 days after issue, leaves no wagering requirement on the free bets themselves: whatever the free bet wins, you keep. That is the cleanest shape on the page.

The same is true of Unibet, whose £40 free bets for a £20 qualifying bet expire inside seven days with no rollover. Sky Bet, who is not on this shortlist but whose terms are widely referenced, credits £30 in three £10 tokens after a 5p first bet at odds 1/1 or greater, also without a wagering requirement. The absence of rollover is the reason the headline-to-cost ratio of these offers is competitive.

A wagering requirement appears on offers where the headline number is larger than the qualifying bet. Betboro’s 100% matched free bet of up to £25 is the obvious case: the larger the matched amount, the more the bookmaker wants the punter to play again before withdrawing. The exact rollover figure, where research did not carry it, is on Betboro’s customer terms and should be checked before claiming. Octobet’s 50% back as a free bet up to £50 is in the same shape — a higher ceiling on the headline, a higher implicit ask on the playthrough.

A cap on the maximum winnings from a free bet, where one exists, is another layer of cost. QuinnBet’s terms, which are not on this shortlist but show the structure, cap free bet odds at 50/1; the equivalent ceiling on each of the brands below is on that brand’s terms.

The stake-not-returned rule is the cost the headline does not state. A £40 free bet at odds 3/1 does not return £160; it returns £120 of profit, because the £40 stake is the bookmaker’s, not yours. The Commission has not standardised this rule; it is a market convention, and almost every offer on this page follows it.

Coral

Coral runs the headline offer this page uses as the reference: Bet £20 at minimum odds 2.0 (1/1), get £40 in free bets, issued inside seven days and expiring seven days after issue, for new GB customers who opt in. The qualifying bet must use a debit card or instant bank transfer; the site lists Apple Pay, Visa, Visa Electron, Mastercard, Revolut Pay, Google Pay, TrueLayer, Earthport and Trustly among the deposit methods. There is no wagering requirement on the free bets themselves.

Coral also runs a free daily Reward Shaker, an Odds Booster on hundreds of markets, and free-to-play games such as Football Super Series with a £10,000 jackpot. The brand sits under LC International Limited, which also runs Ladbrokes; they are not separate operators for the purposes of Commission licensing, and a punter who has self-excluded from one has self-excluded from the other.

The cost is low because the rollover is zero. The price is the qualifying bet — £20 at 2.0 — which is what a serious football punter would place anyway, and the seven-day expiry on the free bets, which is short enough that the punter has to plan for them. For a customer who already bets football accas on a Saturday, Coral’s offer is the cleanest on the page.

Spreadex

Spreadex runs two products under one licence: fixed-odds betting, regulated by the Gambling Commission, and financial spread betting, regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. The combined licence is the reason the welcome offer is on the page, and the reason it has to be read carefully: the £60 in free bets for a £10 fixed-odds qualifying bet is the Commission’s domain; the spread-betting side of the account is the FCA’s, and spread-betting losses can exceed the deposit.

The qualifying fixed-odds bet must be at minimum odds of 1/2 and must be placed within 28 days of opening the account. The free bets themselves can be used across fixed odds and spread betting, which is a flexibility no other brand on the page offers. Spreadex also runs Acca Boosts on football accumulators of three or more selections, with a cash boost from 5% on a three-leg acca up to 100% on the longest accumulators.

The cost is low in fixed-odds terms. The risk on the spread-betting side is that the FCA does not set the same safer-gambling rules the Commission does, and the leverage on a spread position is not the same as a fixed-odds stake. A punter who treats the two products as one book should know they are two books with two regulators. For the punter who wants a fixed-odds welcome offer with a 28-day qualifying window and a spread-betting side to play with, Spreadex is the only option on the page.

William Hill

William Hill’s headline number for this page is not a welcome bonus; it is the Football Acca Boost, which covers accas of two or more legs with each selection at 1/5 or bigger. The boost runs from 3% on a double up to 200% on twenty or more legs, with a maximum boost of £10,000 per online bet, and is live until 30 May 2027.

William Hill does hold a Commission licence and does run a welcome offer, but the verified material for this page covers the acca boost rather than the headline free bet. The acca boost is the better-known product for the existing customer base, and the welcome offer sits alongside it.

The cost is low because the boost is paid in cash on top of winnings, not in free bet tokens that need to be cleared. The price is the acca format itself: every leg has to win, and the more legs the punter adds, the longer the odds and the smaller the probability. A 200% boost on a 20-leg acca pays a lot on a win, but the win itself is the rarer event by a long way. For the punter who already plays football accas, William Hill’s boost is the cheapest headline on the page.

Fitzdares

Fitzdares’ verified material for this page covers payment rails rather than the welcome offer. The brand accepts Apple Pay, Mastercard and Visa, with Visa withdrawals usually same-day and Mastercard withdrawals taking up to 48 hours. Fitzdares is positioned as a premium bookmaker and the payment set reflects that — fewer rails, faster payouts on the cards that exist.

The Commission’s register lists Fitzdares Limited as the licence holder. The welcome offer itself is not in the verified material for this page, and a punter who wants the figure should check the brand’s own customer terms before claiming.

The cost is not established in this guide. For the punter who pays with Apple Pay or Visa and wants same-day withdrawals, the payment set is the strongest on the page; for the punter who wants a clean welcome-offer headline, the comparison falls elsewhere.

Betboro

Betboro’s sports welcome offer is a 100% matched free bet of up to £25 on the first qualifying wager. The qualifying conditions are specific: a debit card deposit of at least £10, and a first bet between £5 and £25 with at least three selections, each at 3/5 (1.60) or higher. Webmedia Development N.V. is the licence holder behind the brand.

The cost is moderate because the matched free bet sits under a wagering regime that is not in the verified material, and the minimum three-leg acca at 3/5 per leg means the qualifying bet itself is a small multi, not a single. A punter who only places singles has to build an acca to qualify; that is a real friction.

For the punter who already plays small accas, Betboro’s offer is competitive on the matched-amount side. For the punter who plays singles, the cost is the qualifying bet format itself.

VBet

VBet’s sports welcome offer is the simplest on the page: a £10 free bet if a new, verified customer stakes £10 or more on a first-ever bet that loses. SCGO Limited is the licence holder behind the brand. The offer is a one-leg refund in free bet tokens; the qualifying bet is a single, not an acca.

The cost is low because the qualifying bet is a single at any odds, the refund is on a loss rather than a win, and there is no wagering requirement implied in the verified material. The price is that the punter has to lose the first bet to claim the bonus, which is a different shape from “bet £20 get £40” — VBet pays only when the customer does not.

For the punter who wants to place a first bet anyway and is comfortable with the loss-or-bonus structure, VBet’s offer is the cheapest on the page in qualifying-stake terms. For the punter who wants a free bet on top of a winning first bet, the structure does not match.

BetGoodwin

BetGoodwin’s sports welcome offer is “Bet £10 & Get £15 in Free Bets”, split across a £5 sports bet, a £5 acca and a £5 Sub-Cover bet. Goodwin Racing Limited is the licence holder behind the brand. The split across three products is unusual on this page; most offers hand the free bet as one token or a small number of equal tokens.

The cost is low because the headline-to-qualifying ratio is 1.5x and the tokens are usable across different bet types, which raises the chance that a punter finds a market for each one inside the expiry window. The price is the Sub-Cover bet, which is a brand-specific product the punter has to read up on before the free token expires.

For the punter who already bets singles, accas and the kind of markets Sub-Cover covers, BetGoodwin’s offer is the most flexible split on the page. For the punter who bets one product, two of the three tokens go unused.

Octobet

Octobet’s sportsbook welcome offer is 50% back as a free bet up to £50, plus a £10 casino bonus for new customers. Octopus Game Limited is the licence holder. The 50% match and the casino addition put the offer in the same shape as a mid-tier bookmaker’s bundle.

The cost is moderate because the matched amount is the largest on the page after Betboro’s, and the casino addition is exactly the kind of mixed-product shape the Commission’s 2026 rules target. Whether the current Octobet offer sits inside the new rule is on the brand’s customer terms.

For the punter who wants both a sportsbook bonus and a casino starter credit from the same brand, Octobet’s bundle is competitive. For the punter who only bets sports, the casino side is dead money until it is played through.

Betmaster

Betmaster is operated by BM Solutions GB Ltd, registered in Malta, and holds Commission account number 65699. The verified material for this page covers the licence and the operating company rather than a specific welcome offer headline.

The cost is not established in this guide. The brand is on the Commission’s public register and is a GAMSTOP member, which puts it on the same regulatory footing as the rest of the shortlist. For the punter who wants to compare Betmaster’s actual welcome terms, the brand’s own customer terms are the next step.

DAZN Bet

DAZN Bet’s verified material covers the product set rather than the welcome offer: Cash Out, Bet Builder, daily bet boosts and in-play betting. Cash Out availability is not guaranteed, and bets stand if it is unavailable — a sentence every punter should read before relying on the feature. DZBT Limited is the licence holder.

DAZN Bet also publishes safer-gambling tools on its help pages: deposit limits, loss limits and wagering limits. The brand is on the Commission’s public register and is a GAMSTOP member.

The cost of the welcome offer is not established in this guide. For the punter who values Cash Out and Bet Builder as features rather than the welcome bonus, DAZN Bet is competitive on the product side. For the punter who ranks offers first and features second, the comparison falls elsewhere.

Unibet

Unibet’s sports welcome offer mirrors Coral’s headline — Bet £20 at minimum odds 2.0 (1/1), get £40 in free bets, expiring within seven days of issue, for new GB customers using a debit card or instant bank transfer. The operator is Platinum Gaming Limited, Gibraltar, under Commission account 45322, which is the structural reason Unibet is reviewed on its own and not folded into the Coral write-up: a different licensee, a different operating company, the same offer mechanics.

Unibet also runs Bet Builder, daily Uniboosts, live streaming through Unibet TV, in-play betting, Best Odds Guaranteed on horse racing and Cash Out on thousands of markets. The product set is wider than most of the shortlist, and the brand has operated since 1999.

The cost is low because the rollover is zero and the qualifying bet format is a single at evens or longer, which is what most punters place anyway. The price is the seven-day expiry on the free bets, which is short enough to need a plan. For the punter who wants the Coral offer mechanics with a wider product set behind them, Unibet is the same offer from a different shop window.

Spreadex, BetVictor and the wider market

Two brands sit just outside the shortlist but reference the same offer mechanics and are worth a sentence each.

BetVictor offers regular price boosts, acca offers and free bets on selected events, with welcome offers shown in the app and governed by its customer terms. The brand is on the Commission’s public register and is a GAMSTOP member.

Spreadex is reviewed above because the verified material covered both the fixed-odds and the spread-betting side of the offer. The 28-day qualifying window and the cross-product free-bet use are unique on this shortlist.

Smarkets runs the SBK sportsbook, whose offer is a £20 first deposit and a £20 bet at minimum odds 3.0 for £60 in free bets within 48 hours, with Cash Out, Bet Builder and live horse racing streams. SBK sits under Smarkets’ exchange licence and is the only betting-exchange-linked sportsbook on the wider market worth flagging.

Each of these is a background data point for a punter comparing the shortlist. None replaces one of the ten write-ups above.

The arithmetic of a £20 qualifying bet at Coral

Coral’s headline is the cleanest worked example on the page. The qualifying bet is £20 at minimum odds 2.0, which means the return on a winning qualifying bet is £40 (stake £20 plus profit £20). The free bets are £40 in total, issued inside seven days and expiring seven days after issue, with no wagering requirement.

The free bets are stake-not-returned, which is the cost the headline does not state. A £40 free bet at odds 3.0 returns £120 of profit if it wins, not £160. The expected value of the free bets depends on the average odds at which they are staked and the margin of the markets on which they are placed; the verified material does not pin those numbers, so the expected value is a band rather than a figure.

The qualifying bet itself is the easy half of the arithmetic. A £20 bet at 2.0 that wins returns £40, of which £20 is the original stake and £20 is profit. The free-bet side is where the cost lives.

The turnover arithmetic on a typical matched welcome offer, where research does carry the figures, looks like this. A £25 matched free bet with a four-times wagering requirement and a minimum odds of 3/5 means £100 of qualifying bets at minimum odds 1.60 to clear the bonus into withdrawable cash. Under the Commission’s 10x cap, no licensed operator can ask for more than £250 of qualifying bets on that same £25 bonus — the cap is the ceiling, not the floor, and the floor on a four-times rollover is competitive by the post-2026 standard. The arithmetic on Coral’s offer is simpler because the rollover is zero.

What the promotion rules do not say

The Commission’s 19 January 2026 rules cap wagering requirements at 10x and ban mixed-product offers. The rules do not cap the headline value of a free bet, do not cap the value of a free bet whose own terms carry no wagering condition, and do not standardise the stake-not-returned rule. The minimum odds on a qualifying bet, the expiry on a free bet, and the maximum winnings from a free bet are still set by each operator’s own customer terms.

The rules also do not require a free bet to be issued at all. An operator may decline to issue a free bet if the qualifying bet is cashed out, voided, or made on a market that does not qualify. The rules do not require an operator to honour a welcome offer if the customer has previously held an account under a different name at the same brand; the operator’s own fraud and duplicate-account rules apply.

The ban on mixed-product offers does not ban an operator from running a casino bonus and a sportsbook bonus on the same account. It bans the cross-sell: a free bet unlocked by a casino wager, or free spins unlocked by a sports bet. Two products on one account, each with its own bonus, are not the same shape as one offer that spans both.

What to check before claiming

Six points sit on every welcome offer’s small print. A punter who reads them before opting in avoids the worst returns.

The first is the qualifying bet format. Coral’s £20 at minimum odds 2.0 is a single at evens or longer; Betboro’s £5 to £25 at minimum odds 3/5 on at least three selections is a small acca. A punter who plays the other format has to build a new bet to qualify.

The second is the qualifying payment method. Coral and Unibet require a debit card or instant bank transfer; an e-wallet deposit may not qualify. The credit card ban means credit-card-funded deposits do not qualify anywhere on the licensed market.

The third is the expiry on the qualifying bet. Most offers give 7 or 14 days from account opening; Spreadex gives 28. A punter who opens an account and forgets to place the qualifying bet inside the window loses the offer.

The fourth is the expiry on the free bets. Coral and Unibet give 7 days from issue. A punter who lets the free bets expire unused has claimed the offer and forfeited the value.

The fifth is any maximum winnings cap on the free bets. QuinnBet’s cap is 50/1 on free bet odds; the equivalent ceiling on the brands above is on each brand’s customer terms.

The sixth is whether the offer excludes specific markets. Most welcome offers exclude virtual sports, eSports and certain novelty markets from the qualifying bet. The full list is on each operator’s customer terms.

The offshore alternative, and what it costs

An unlicensed bookmaker is not subject to the Commission’s 10x cap, the GAMSTOP requirement, the credit card ban or the financial vulnerability check. It does not need to verify a customer’s identity before the first deposit in the same way a licensed operator does. It does not pay into the Commission’s dispute-resolution or ADR routes. A punter whose funds are withheld by an unlicensed operator has no British consumer redress.

The Commission’s enforcement tools are disruption and referrals, not consumer protection: cease-and-desist notices, search-engine referrals, registrar and host coordination, payment-provider work, and the new court-order DNS blocking powers. None of those tools puts a withheld payout back into a customer’s bank account. The honest framing is that a licensed bookie carries the cost of compliance, and an unlicensed one does not pay that cost — but the punter also does not get the protection that compliance buys.

For a punter comparing the shortlist above to an offshore alternative, the trade is between a £40 free bet on Coral with a seven-day expiry and an unlimited-odds bonus on an unlicensed site with no British complaints route. The Commission’s cap does not make every licensed offer good. It makes the worst licensed offer less bad than the worst unlicensed one.

How this page ranks the offers

The ranking above is ordered by what the offer costs the punter who claims it, not by the size of the free bet. Coral and Unibet are at the top because the rollover is zero and the qualifying bet is a single at evens or longer. William Hill’s acca boost is in the middle of the page because the boost is paid in cash, not in free bet tokens. VBet and BetGoodwin sit just below Coral because the qualifying bet format is more restrictive — VBet’s free bet is on a loss, and BetGoodwin’s free bets are split across three products. Betboro and Octobet sit lower because the matched amount is higher and the implied playthrough is heavier. Spreadex is reviewed separately because the offer spans two regulators.

Fitzdares, Betmaster and DAZN Bet are on the shortlist with “Not established in this guide” against the cost column because the verified material for this page did not cover their welcome offer headlines. The brands are still licenced, still GAMSTOP members, and still worth comparing on the features their verified material did cover.

The same ranking applied to a fresh twelve months from now, under the same Commission rules, would look different on the offer mechanics and the same on the licence frame. The Commission’s 10x cap is the floor; the brands above the floor are competing on the offer, not on the licence.

Frequently asked questions

How do I claim a betting welcome offer?

Open an account at the licensed bookmaker, complete the Commission’s name, address and date-of-birth verification, deposit using a payment method that qualifies (usually a debit card or instant bank transfer — credit cards are banned), opt in to the offer on the promotions page, and place the qualifying bet at the required stake and minimum odds inside the qualifying window. The free bets are credited after the qualifying bet settles, and they expire on the date in the offer terms.

Which betting site offers a welcome bonus?

Every brand on this shortlist — Coral, Spreadex, William Hill, Fitzdares, Betboro, VBet, BetGoodwin, Octobet, Betmaster and DAZN Bet — holds a Gambling Commission remote licence for Great Britain and runs a welcome offer for new GB customers in 2026. Unibet is reviewed separately because it sits under a different licence holder and offers the same headline mechanics as Coral.

Which betting site offers the best welcome bonus?

The cheapest welcome bonus to clear is Coral’s Bet £20 at min odds 2.0, get £40 in free bets with no wagering requirement and a seven-day expiry on the free bets. The most flexible split is BetGoodwin’s £15 across three products. The largest matched headline is Betboro’s 100% up to £25 or Octobet’s 50% up to £50, both with implied playthroughs heavier than Coral’s.

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

Since 19 January 2026 the Gambling Commission’s promotion rules cap wagering requirements on bonuses at ten times the bonus amount. A £10 bonus at fifty times wagering used to mean £500 of qualifying turnover; under the cap no licensed operator may ask for more than £100 of qualifying bets on that same £10 bonus. The cap is a ceiling, not a floor, and applies only to offers with a wagering requirement at all.

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

Minimum odds is the shortest price the qualifying bet must carry — Coral’s 2.0 (1/1) means the bet must be at evens or longer; Betboro’s 3/5 (1.60) means each leg of the qualifying acca must be at 1.60 or longer. The wagering requirement is the multiple of the bonus that has to be turned over in qualifying bets before the bonus becomes withdrawable cash. A bonus with a four-times wagering requirement and a minimum odds of 3/5 means £100 of qualifying bets at 1.60 or longer to clear a £25 bonus.

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

A free bet is a token the bookmaker issues from its own balance; the £10 or £40 stake belongs to the bookmaker, not to the punter. A £40 free bet at odds 3/1 returns £120 of profit on a win, not £160, because the £40 stake is not part of the return. The rule is a market convention rather than a Commission requirement, and almost every licensed bookmaker follows it. The exception is a small number of offers that pay the free bet as a cash bonus with the stake returned; those offers are usually smaller in headline value for the same qualifying stake.

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