UK gambling law
Every licence account printed on this site comes from one public register, and that register comes from one Act. This page sets out which Acts apply to a remote casino serving Great Britain, what the licence conditions oblige an operator to do, and where the stake and wagering limits are actually written down.
On this page — contents
Who licenses what
We check every brand on this site against one register, and this is the law that register comes from. Gambling in Great Britain runs under the Gambling Act 2005, which created the UK Gambling Commission and made it the body that licenses operators, software suppliers and the people who run them. A remote casino needs an operating licence from that commission before it may offer gambling to a customer in Great Britain, wherever the company itself sits: that was settled by the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014, which moved licensing from the point of supply to the point of consumption.
Two consequences follow, and both show up on the review pages here. A licence from another regulator — Malta, Gibraltar, Curacao — does not entitle an operator to take a GB customer; it may hold both, and then the GB-facing business runs under the GB licence. And one licence account often covers several brands, so a complaint about one of them goes to the company named on that account.
The account numbers printed on this site can be read straight off the public register of licensees. Doing it from a phone takes well under a minute: the whole check, step by step.
What the licence forces an operator to do
The conditions come in one document, the licence conditions and codes of practice. It is the place where most of what a reader notices actually comes from:
- Age. Eighteen is the minimum for commercial gambling, and the operator has to verify a customer’s name, address and date of birth before that customer can gamble.
- Self-exclusion. Participation in the national multi-operator scheme is required, and the duty to enforce it sits on the licensee under provision 3.5.5.
- Bonus wagering. Social responsibility code provision 5.1.1 caps the play-through a licensee may attach to a new-customer offer at ten times the bonus funds, and bars promotions that require play on one product to unlock a reward on another. In force from — what it changed.
- Customer interaction. A licensee has to identify and act on indicators of harm, which is where affordability questions come from: what is asked, and when.
Stake limits on online slots
Maximum stakes for online slots are set by statutory instrument rather than by the operator. The instrument was laid before Parliament on and attached a mandatory condition to every remote casino operating licence. It came in two phases: a £5 ceiling per game cycle for all adults from , and a £2 ceiling for players aged 18 to 24 from . Both are enforced at the operator, not at the device — the two numbers and the two dates.
What a licence does not do
A licence is not a quality mark and it is not a guarantee about any outcome of any game. What it buys a reader is narrower and more useful than that: a named company on a public register, a set of conditions that company can be sanctioned for breaching, an age check before play, participation in the national self-exclusion scheme, and a published route for a complaint. It says nothing about how fast that company pays, how pleasant its support is, or whether its welcome offer is worth taking.
Two limits are worth knowing before money sits in an account. The first is customer funds: a licensee has to state in its terms how it holds customer money and what would happen to that money if the business failed, and to rate that arrangement — no protection, basic, medium or high. The rating is in the operator’s own terms, and the three levels mean genuinely different things in an insolvency. The second is the licence itself, which can be surrendered or revoked while a balance is still sitting there: what happens to the money then is the part nobody plans for.
Advertising, complaints and data
What an offer may say is governed by the CAP code as well as by the licence: the Advertising Standards Authority rules on gambling advertising are the ones that bar a guaranteed outcome and restrict how an offer may be presented, and a misleading advertisement is complained about to the ASA rather than to the commission. A complaint about the operator itself — a refused withdrawal, a closed account, a term applied after the event — goes first to the operator, then to the alternative dispute resolution body named in its terms, and the commission takes regulatory, not individual, action.
Personal data sits under the Data Protection Act 2018 and the UK GDPR, with the Information Commissioner's Office as the regulator; what this site itself stores is set out in the data protection notice.
This page describes the framework the pages on this site are written against. It is not legal advice, and where a reader needs that, the Citizens Advice consumer service is free.
Written and maintained by the i-phonecasino.co.uk desk. Licence status comes from the UK Gambling Commission public register; bonus figures, wagering and withdrawal rules come from the operator’s own published terms, read on the dates printed beside each figure. Where a number is not published, this site leaves the field out rather than estimating it.
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