Or Try These £10 Offers
£5 Deposit Bingo & Slot Sites
What is a £5 deposit bingo site?
At a £5 deposit bingo site or £5 deposit casino, you can claim a welcome offer on a deposit of just £5.
£5 deposit offers are hard to find, because almost all online bingo sites and slot sites have a minimum deposit of £10. It is such a widely accepted standard that welcome offers are often advertised based on a £10 deposit – e.g. “Deposit £10, play with £40” even when they are actually percentage based offers (300%, in this case) where you could get a much bigger bonus by making a bigger deposit (e.g. deposit £50 to claim £150 bonus).
While many online gambling sites have a minmum deposit of £5 or even less, that does NOT necessarily mean that you will be able to claim the welcome offer on a £5 deposit. To be included in our £5 deposit listings, a bingo site (or casino) MUST have a welcome offer that is valid on a deposit of £5. On this page we feature:
- Bingo and slot sites with a standard welcome offer that is valid on a £5 deposit
- Bingo and slot sites with a £5 deposit offer that is exclusive to us (and is an alternative to the regular £10 offer)
Why choose a £5 deposit site?
£5 deposit bingo is a low cost way to try something new. Maybe you’ve never played online bingo or slots before and feel nervous about depositing £10? Or perhaps you want a cheap and easy way to try out new games, unfamiliar bingo software or a new network with different bingo rooms? Depending on where in the UK you live, £5 can be less than the price of a visit to a coffee shop, so it is not surprising that some people feel more comfortable kicking off their adventures in online real money gaming with this rather modest sum.
£5 deposit offers have been increasing in popularity over the last few years and this is because of what has happened to no deposit offers. A few years ago there were dozens of no deposit bingo sites and no deposit slot sites providing a way for players to venture into the world of online real money gaming with very little commitment in terms of handing over either money or information – all you had to do was give them an email address! Subsequent tax changes for operators have resulted in most of those offers disappearing for good. Furthermore, current account verification rules mean that to take advantage of any of the few no deposit offers that are still available at online gambling sites, you have to supply many more details than previously and then have your age and ID verified before you are allowed to play any games (even free demo versions!). Once you have to jump through all those hoops anyway, depositing £5 to take advantage of a much more generous offer seems like a no-brainer.
How to choose the best £5 deposit site
The same criteria apply for choosing a £5 deposit bingo, casino or slots site to play at as for choosing bingo sites or slot sites in general – software, trust and safety, range of player promotions and so on. As we’ve already mentioned, though, a £5 deposit offer can present a good opportunity to try out new bingo software or different slot games; if it’s being used for that purpose then the sheer size of the bonus becomes the most important factor and wagering requirements and so on are less of an issue. The best £5 deposit bonus, then, is also the biggest!
Some other important factors are:
- What games can the bonus be used on? Bingo? Slots? Slot spins for a specific game only?
- What is the wagering requirement? For those who are new to online bingo and slots, this means that you must complete a certain amount of play before you can withdraw any winnings from your bonus. For example, if you receive a £20 bingo bonus with a 4x wagering requirement, any winnings will be added to the bonus and after you’ve spent £80 on bingo tickets altogether, whatever bonus remains will turn into withdrawable cash.
- Return To Player! Some operators run a higher return to player on popular slot games than others – see our best payout casinos page for more information about this.
- Are there any limits on what you can win with the bonus? Slot spins offers sometimes have a win cap (a limit on initial winnings from free spins) and bonus offers may have a max convertible (the amount of winnings that can be turned into withdrawable cash afer you’ve completed the wagering requirements).
What else do I need to consider?
£5 deposit bingo and slots offers are generally for first deposits only and not for subsequent deposit offers or player promotions; the operators are hoping that once you’ve tried and liked their site, you’ll want to carry on playing with them and feel more confident about depositing £10 or more next time. In fact, the sites with £5 deposit offers often also have the best player reward schemes and ongoing promotions.
Bingo sites (and indeed all betting sites) are required under the terms of their UK Gambling Commission licence to allow players to withdraw their unspent deposit, and any winnings from cash play with their deposit, at any time (albeit at the loss of any remaining bonus) and this means that one thing which used to be a problem at some £5 deposit bingo sites in the past – withdrawal restrictions – is no longer relevant. The minimum withdrawal now cannot be any larger than the minimum deposit so there’s no longer any issues with having to make multiple deposits or play through a required sum before any withdrawals are allowed.
Playing on a budget
But what if the reason you wanted to deposit £5 rather than £10 is not caution, but restricted budget? In that case, something to consider is how far your deposit and bonus will actually go – and that is when bingo ticket prices become an important consideration. It’s not just bingo ticket prices either, it’s the number of tickets that can be bought per game; even if tickets are just 10p, if the room limit is 96 tickets it costs nearly £10 to max out, and some players will do just that. Of course you could buy fewer tickets but if other players buy many more tickets than you do, your chance of winning is reduced. For an enjoyable bingo experience on a budget we suggest investigating the availability of:
- Penny bingo rooms or penny bingo events in regular rooms, with tickets priced at 1p or 2p each. Don’t forget to check that the penny bingo games run at the times of day when you want to play. You may still want to avoid penny rooms at very busy times as there can be tens of thousands of tickets in play.
- Bingo games with a low maximum number of players e.g. BOB at Mecca Bingo and Spirit Twister Bingo at Playtech bingo sites
- Single ticket bingo games – in these games, which are generally multi-stake (with bigger prizes for bigger stakes) each player has just one ticket so everyone has an equal chance of winning. At Buzz Bingo, for instance, you can play the single ticket multi stake game Buzz Bingo Blast and if you pick the lowest stake each game costs just 4p. Or try Paper at tombola, a multi stake game where you can buy 1-5 tickets with minimum wager 1p. That’s certainly one way to turn a £5 deposit into a massive amount of entertainment value!
- Free bingo. Many bingo sites also have free bingo rooms for newbies or free bingo events at pre announced times. Paddy Power Bingo for example has several hours of free bingo every day. The number of players means that the chance of winning is always extremely small but hey, it’s free!
The cost of playing slot games is also a factor – to get the most entertainment value out of a £5 deposit slots offer you’ll want a good choice of games that can be played and enjoyed for 10p a spin rather than 25p or more. Perhaps the lowest cost slot games for UK players are the Spin games at tombola arcade; as well as having a minimum spin value of just 5p, they have an unusually high RTP.
What about £5 deposit slots?
Many of our exclusive £5 deposit bingo offers also double as slots offers, as they include a slot bonus and/or slot spins. We have found this type of everything-but-the-kitchen-sink £5 deposit offer to be particularly popular as they allow players to try a bit of everything – and of course, modern bingo sites are pretty hot on slot machines and casino games and include as good a selection of slot games as you’d find at many an online casino. Unfortunately this type of mixed product offer is under threat as the Gambling Commission have recently carried out a consultation (which ended in February 2024 but is yet to report) which could result in their no longer being allowed.
If you’re looking for a £5 deposit casino bonus offer at a pure slot or casino site, these are much harder to find. Occasionally we do manage to track them down and our small but perfectly formed list of exclusive £5 deposit slots offers appear here also.
Deposit £5, play with….?
“Deposit £5, Play With….” is a clever (and rather sneaky) way of making a £5 deposit offer sound bigger and better than it really is, while removing the need for players to do a calculation involving percentages and at the same time glossing over the fact that what you are getting is a bonus (with a wagering requirement) and not cash. For example:
- Deposit £5, Play with £40 = deposit £5, get £35 bonus
- Deposit £5, Play with £50 = deposit £5, get £45 bonus (you’re very unlikely to find a bonus this size nowadays)
- Deposit 5, Play with 100 = really??? If you ever see an offer that looks this much too good to be true, it almost certainly is – look closer and we think you’ll find this offer is for 100 slot spins not £95 bonus!
These offers are not as misleading as some offers that have been advertised in the past; they aren’t even in the same ballpark as the “900%” offer that turned out to be three 300% bonuses on three separate deposits. Nevertheless, describing a bonus in this way is potentially confusing for players and we would not be surprised to see UK online gambling sites banned from using this form of wording to advertise welcome offers in the future, possibly in 2025.
£5 deposit bonus offers – the future
Operators have to pay tax on any bonuses they give out, and also the whole process of account verification is getting more arduous for them (as well as for players!). This means it’s more expensive to give out £5 deposit offers than it used to be and this in turn makes operators more reluctant to run a £5 offer. There’s also the issue for operators that less of an initial commitment from the player means they may be less inclined to continue playing and make further deposits (the same applies to no deposit offers, only more so).
The result is there are considerably fewer £5 offers about than there used to be and unfortunately even the big operators are now shying away from doing them – right when they seem set to be more popular than ever!
