Welcome Offers Are Changing - Here's Why
Over the next couple of weeks, you can expect some very large scale changes to the bingo and casino welcome offers on our listings pages.
What’s Changing And Why
The UK Gambling Commission has added some new rules about marketing to the LCCP (Licence Conditions and Code of Practice) which all UK licensed betting and gaming sites need to adhere to. They take effect from 19th January 2026.
Goodbye to high wagering requirements
- Wagering requirements are going to be capped at 10x
Goodbye to mixed product offers
Operators will no longer be allowed to combine multiple products (bingo, casino, sports, lottery) in one offer. That means:
- No more bingo bonus plus free spins offers, and no more bonus bundles including slots and bingo bonus
- If the offer is a slots bonus or slot spins, any playthrough required has to be on slots. If the offer is a bingo bonus or free bingo tickets, any playthrough required has to be on bingo.
What To Expect – Slots and Casino Offers
Apart from no wagering offers, almost all slot and casino offers are going to have to be changed as historically they’ve had wagering requirements much higher than 10x. Here’s what we know so far:
- Some of the big operators – Rank Interactive for example – have already changed their offers to reflect the new rules.
- A few of the new offers are testing the boundaries by including the deposit in the calculation (for a 100% bonus offer, this effectively doubles the wagering requirement) and/or by retaining game weighting, where some games contribute to wagering at a lower rate (again, effectively increasing the wagering requirement). It will be interesting to see whether thei passes muster.
- Many operators are responding to the new wagering requirement rules by reducing bonus size, restricting bonus usage to a shortlist of games or switching to a free spins offer. Some are going fully no wagering.
- Jumpman sites are interesting as in most cases as they aren’t (yet!) reducing the size of their offers, just cutting the wagering requirement from 65x to 10x.
- It seems very likely that many offers won’t be updated until the last minute. So if you’re thinking of signing up somewhere that currently has a high wagering requirement, you might want to wait until after 19th January.
What To Expect – Bingo Offers
A lot of bingo welcome offers are also going to have to be changed, but for a different reason. Bingo wagering requirements are typically way under 10x, so no issue there. The problem is the widespread practice of including spins or a slot bonus with a bingo bonus, which has to stop. Again, some of the big operators such as Paddy Power have already made the change.
One route operators can take if they want to include slots in their welcome offer is to return to the old concept of a flexible bonus which can be spent on whatever you like; the Gambling Commission issued guidance in December clarifying that this is OK as long as the consumer has full freedom of choice over what product to use their reward on:
- Play £10 on slots, get a £10 bonus for bingo and slots – OK (Doesn’t force anyone to use their bonus on a product other than slots)
- Play £10 on bingo or slots, get £10 bingo bonus – Not OK (If someone plays the £10 on slots, the reward forces them to play bingo which is a different product category)
Unless any operators go this route and switch to a flexible bonus, you have just a few days left to claim offers that combine bingo and slots. Of course, if you like to play slots as well as bingo there’s nothing to stop you claiming a slots only offer at a site with bingo.
What To Expect – Other Player Promotions
The new rules apply to promotions for existing players as well as to welcome offers. What’s more, they apply to freebies as well as to deposit offers and that means that sites with free daily games will have to ensure that the prizes on offer don’t mix product types. For example:
- Spin the daily wheel for the chance to win bingo bonus, free spins, a free bet or cash – Not OK (you might get a product you don’t want)
- Spin the daily wheel for the chance to win slot spins or cash – OK (all the prizes are slot spins and you won’t get a product you don’t want)
If the free daily game has a playthrough requirement, the prizes can only be on the same product as the playthrough requirement.
E.g: “Play £10 on slots to spin the Premium Daily Wheel the following day” – the prizes can only be slot spins, slot bonus or cash.
So we can expect this type of promotion to become more specialised – you can visit Heart Bingo to see how that works in practice as they have loads of them.
We plan to check and update all of our review pages to reflect any changes to promotions for existing players but we expect that to take a while, so in the meantime there may be some discrepancies.
What To Expect From Us
We will do our very best to keep up with all of the hundreds of offer changes as they are notified to us, but there’s bound to be some lag so from now until the 19th January deadline, occasionally you may find what’s on our listings pages no longer matches what’s at the other end when you follow our link and you may also find that offers suddenly disappear from our site.
The Friday before the deadline, we will remove any remaining non compliant welcome offers to ensure readiness for the change, so some listings may not reappear until afterwards.
Here’s to a brave new world of much more reasonable wagering requirements!
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