Free Bingo

Where To Play Free Bingo

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There are many variations of free bingo out there but they fall into two main types, the ones where you can potentially win real money and the ones where you can’t.

Free bingo games not involving real money

Bingo for entertainment only, never any real prizes

This includes the vast array of free bingo games playable on Facebook and mobile bingo games via iPhone and Android apps.  These are NOT real money gaming (although you can spend real money on buying in game currency and power ups) and are strictly for fun.

Bingo with free cards and a few real prizes (but NOT cash)

Freebingo.co.uk was the best known of these (but now just advertises other bingo sites). With a free bingo site like this, what you won in most games would be in-game currency that could be cashed out, but might give you entries into a prize draw.  From time to time, however, there would be a game with a tangible prize (but no cash alternative).  Because this type of free bingo site derived its revenue from advertising real money gaming sites, the tangible prizes were usually sponsored by one of the advertisers and were mostly promotional items such as keyrings, mugs and teddy bears from real money bingo sites.  Eventually this became a regulatory problem and sites offering this type of free bingo can now only do so in partnership with a licensed operator.

Free bingo games involving real money

Sounds great, doesn’t it – free online bingo games where you pay nothing for your bingo cards and have the chance of winning actual cash (or bingo bonus which can be used to buy cards to other bingo games where you can win real cash) – but actually, it is hardly ever that simple as we will go on to discuss.  Free bingo games that have real cash prizes and are open to all registered players are pretty unusual in 2025 and you are more likely to come across one of these variations on the theme:

No deposit real money bingo

The cards in these bingo games are not free but the bingo site offers a welcome bonus which does not require a deposit to be made so there is the opportunity, at least in theory, to win real cash without any financial outlay.  Bingo bonus cannot always be used in the same way as cash though; there are almost always restrictions and these can be on which rooms it can be used in, on how many cards per game you are allowed to buy with it, or – increasingly these days- on how much you are allowed to win with it.  If you do win cash with your no deposit bonus and manage to play through any wagering requirements, you are unlikely be able to withdraw it unless you make a deposit (and this usually means accepting another bonus and incurring further wagering requirements which will then have to be met before actually making the withdrawal).

Free bingo for funded or depositing players only

This is a very common arrangement and it depends very much on what that particular bingo site has as its definition of a funded player.  You might think it would refer either to someone who has made a real money deposit at some point or maybe to someone who has cash in their account rather than just bonus.  In fact, many bingo sites including most Dragonfish bingo sites restrict access to free bingo to depositing players and that means players who have made a deposit recently – usually in the last 7 days but in some cases the timeframe can be as short as 24 hours.  Basically these bingo sites are using the free bingo rooms instead of a redeposit bonus as an incentive for players to make a deposit.

Free bingo as part of a promotion

In this type of free bingo promotion you need to complete tasks in order to gain entry to the free room and these typically involve playing a specified amount of cash on bingo or slots and/or making deposits.   Virtue Fusion bingo sites often have free bingo rooms with a minimum spend required the previous day, or over the preceding few days, to gain entry.

Free bingo for new players only

This type of free bingo promotion is most commonly found at Virtue Fusion bingo sites where there is often a newbie free bingo room just for players in their first few days.   Dragonfish also has a free bingo room that can be accessed by new players but this is only for 72 hours, the prize fund per game is just £1 and the room is shared with all players on Dragonfish sites who have made a deposit in the last 7 days.  The now defunct Cozy bingo sites had a newbie room that was open 24/7 with bingo bonus prizes (replacing their long standing no deposit bonus offer), but the maximum that could be carried forward as a bonus was £20.  Do be aware that when a bingo site advertises the newbie free bingo as, say, £5000 of free bingo, they are talking about the total prize fund across all the games that the player could possibly join if they were in the bingo room for the maximum hours, and not the card value!

Free bingo but with extra cards or extra prizes for paying players

This arrangement allows all registered players into the free bingo room but gives an advantage to paying players, so in theory it should keep everyone happy.  Examples are the free 50 ball bingo which used to run at Live Bingo Network where each player got ten free cards and extra cards could be bought for 1p each, and the Free or Superbooks games at Virtue Fusion sites where free cards can be upgraded to pay cards: both types play alongside each other in the game, but if a pay card wins at Virtue Fusion the prize is bigger, often VERY much bigger than if a free card wins (for example, a measly £3 bingo bonus for a free card and a whopping £300 cash for a pay card).  With Superbooks there are typically very large numbers of free cards in play so the chance of a pay card winning is unlikely to be very high; if a free card wins none of the cash stakes have to be paid back out to the players which is great news for the bingo sites but not so much for the players with pay cards.

Free bingo but for bingo bonus prizes not cash

This is such a common arrangement that it is actually the norm – very few free rooms pay cash.   Free rooms that pay bingo bonus are popular with players as it enables them to keep playing after they run out of funds.  It is in the bingo site’s interest to offer this type of free bingo as it encourages people to play in both the free bingo games, and in pay games with the bonus funds that they win from the free games. This creates more activity on the site which is great for keeping players interested as there’s more people around to liven up the chat. The wagering requirements ensure that the site gets good value in terms of player activity from any bonus funds they give out.

Free bingo that can’t be accessed by a person with any sort of normal life

Free bingo almost never has a pre-buy facility, so you need to be in the room shortly before the game starts to claim tickets.  This is difficult to manage if the free bingo games run at an antisocial time such as late at night or if the window for claiming the tickets is just a couple of minutes.

Free bingo – but pay attention!

In this type of arrangement – often seen at Sky Bingo where even the newbie room runs in this way –  the bingo site runs free bingo games with substantial bingo bonus prizes at a popular time of day, but there is no pre-buy and the games alternate with pay games.  A player who is not paying VERY close attention to what is going on in the bingo room can easily accidentally buy max tickets to a pay game instead of a free game – and we know this does happen as we’ve seen people complaining about it in the chat.

Free bingo cards

Some bingo sites give away free bingo cards to a specific game as part of their welcome offer or loyalty scheme or as part of another promotion.  One very common proviso is that the player must be in the bingo room at the time the game is run in order for the cards to play and this is definitely something to check on before deciding to take up an offer of this type.

Usually a free bingo card offer is vastly inferior to a bingo bonus offer as all the cards are for the same game and if you don’t win anything that’s the end of the entertainment – but this type of offer can be worthwhile if the game includes a community pot.  In these games, a substantial portion of the prize fund is shared between all the tickets held by non winning players, so if free tickets to one of them are included in a welcome offer the player is guaranteed to get some kind of return.

In 2025, free bingo card offers have moved on somewhat and at Virtue Fusion they can be redeemed in any bingo game with a ticket price of 10p or less, making them almost as flexible as a bingo bonus.

Nasty surprises lurking in the small print

Furthermore, bingo sites generally (and understandably) don’t want to pay out large sums of money to players who have never even made a deposit, so they usually impose caps and/or withdrawal restrictions on winnings from free bingo and/or no deposit bingo and these may not be immediately obvious without a thorough reading of the site terms and conditions.  Some sites have policies such as not letting non funded players enter certain bingo rooms or buy tickets to big jackpot games, or placing restrictions on who can win progressive jackpots (at Bingocams, for instance, you needed to have made a deposit in the last 3 months to be eligible for the sitewide progressive which seems reasonable enough), but others cap the amount that anyone who has not yet made a deposit can win, or even cap the amount that can be won with free bonus money at any time.  The Live Bingo Network, for instance, reset any winnings when a first deposit was made and converted them into a bingo bonus equal to the value of the deposit up to a maximum of £20. And at Jumpman, there’s a max conversion of £50 for accounts that have not made a deposit.

In our opinion there is a big, big problem with this sort of arrangement, because capping or resetting non funded and/or bonus bingo winnings impacts ALL bingo players, not just the ones whose winnings are subject to the rule.  The more players that buy tickets for a bingo game with cash, the bigger the cash prize gets and if no-deposit players are allowed to play and win, the prize that the real money players have funded with their ticket purchases may not ever actually be paid out at all but may end up being confiscated by the bingo site.

Withdrawal restrictions also used to be widespread and these were on top of any wagering requirements.  At sites with withdrawal restrictions, NO withdrawals of winnings were allowed until a deposit requirement had been met.  The total of deposits required varied; if it was a single deposit of the minimum the bingo site allowed it was not much of a problem (especially if it was possible to reject a bonus) but at some sites it was £20 or £30 and what this meant is that not only could you not withdraw winnings from a no deposit bonus, you couldn’t withdraw them from your welcome bonus either (assuming you just deposited the £5 or £10 required to claim it) without making a further deposit.  The CMA requirements that were introduced in Spring 2018 finally put a stop to this appalling practice.

Big prizes for VIPs only

It’s also important to remember that while there may be cash to be won in open access free bingo games, it may not be very much cash; large cash jackpots for free bingo tend to be in VIP free bingo rooms only, where the player needs to have substantial lifetime deposits to be allowed entry.  The bingo sites use these free bingo games to reward long term loyalty.

The perils of overdoing free bingo

Finally, a word of warning; most if not all of the online bingo sites that offer free bingo games will eventually get annoyed if you play (in their view) too much free bingo and not enough pay bingo. Check the terms and conditions to see if there are any guidelines as to how much is too much.  In particular, we have heard of players who apparently overdid the free bingo at a Dragonfish site and ended up being banned from all Dragonfish bingo and slot sites – that’s a lot of sites to be banned from!

Free Bingo – Network Overview

• Virtue Fusion
• Gamesys
• Dragonfish
• United Bingo
• Ignite/Joy Of Bingo
• Pragmatic Play
• Entain
• Others

Virtue Fusion

The network runs many penny games (with very worthwhile prizes due to the extremely large number of players participating) but it is down to the individual sites to decide whether or not to run free games and most do.  The prizes in Virtue Fusion powered free rooms are usually bingo bonus, often with larger cash prizes available via Superbooks.  Dedicated free bingo rooms for new players are a feature of some, but not all Virtue Fusion sites and again, the prizes in these are almost always bingo bonus.

Many free bingo rooms at Virtue Fusion sites run Superbooks games (in which you can pay to upgrade from free tickets for a bigger prize) so be careful not to select Superbooks by mistake when claiming tickets.

At Paddy Power Bingo there’s 6 hours of free bingo in the Platinum Room, every single day from noon until 6pm.  There’s £10 of cash prizes in each 90 ball game; in order to see or enter the room you’ll need to visit the promotions page to find the code that needs to be entered in the bingo lobby.

At Mecca Bingo the Lucky For Some room gives out more than £1000 in free games every day.  They alternate with pay games from 8pm until 10pm.

Sun Bingo run a massive 60 free bingo games every day, in the Cabaret Room, all with the Roll On feature.  Prizes vary and the promotion will run until further notice.

Gamesys

Free bingo at Gamesys sites occasionally runs as part of special promotions.  To participate you usually need to have played £2 or more real cash in the preceding 7 days.

Dragonfish

The Dragonfish main network made changes a few years back that involved getting rid of most of the free bingo and restricting it to players who had made a deposit in the previous 7 days.  They later added back one free room with small bonus prizes and a weekly jackpot room (as well as various premium rooms requiring a recent deposit), both shared with other networks.  In 2025, only one free game a week remains that can be accessed without having made a recent deposit.  Newbie free bingo is available for three days after registering and making a deposit.

United Bingo

United Bingo/Netboost (Gossip Bingo, Loony Bingo and sister sites) were firmly in the free bingo for depositors only camp.  They had 4 free rooms all of which were unlocked for just 2 days following a deposit (£10 for the entry level room, £50 for the top level room). Currently, however, all 4 rooms are open access – but have switched to sliding jackpot games with very small baseline prizes.  This could all change now that the United sites have been brought back in house by Broadway.

Ignite/Joy of Bingo

These sites including Wink Bingo and Costa Bingo have hardly any free bingo now.

Pragmatic Play

The Pragmatic Play newbie room is open for a couple of hours a day and is accessible for a week after making a cash wager on bingo.  Some Pragmatic Play bingo sites have an exclusive newbie room.

Entain

At Gala Bingo there’s free bingo tournaments. The best points scorers win free bingo tickets for use in their regular bingo rooms.  Other Entain sites run some free bingo games in the penny bingo room.

Others

tombola does not have any free bingo as such but they usually have a free daily game with tens of thousands of pounds to be won each week.

Relax Gaming have a few free bingo games every day in between the pay games.

But Is it Really Free?

In the wake of the UK licensing regime and the POC Tax, free bingo is not as easy to find as it once was, but there is still quite a bit of it out there.  Play for free and win for real – sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?  We’ve talked above about some of the ways in which it might turn out to be too good to be true. But even in the case of a free to play bingo game with genuine prizes – who pays for the prizes? When it comes down to it, the cost of the prizes comes out of the bingo site’s profits – and therefore, ultimately, is paid for by you, the players.