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No Wagering Slots Sites & Casinos
Goodbye Wagering Requirements?
Casino and slot bonuses normally come with a wagering requirement. This means that after collecting your bonus, you need to play it through a set number of times within a time limit before you can withdraw any winnings. The sting in the tail is that typically, if you withdraw any cash (such as winnings from your deposit) without first completing the wagering requirement your bonus will disappear.
It comes as no surprise that many players don’t like this, and over the last few years we have seen the rise of a new type of casino offer, the No Wagering type of offer. Almost all No Wagering offers come in the form of free spins. Many of the best No Wagering offers are not from new casinos, but from existing ones trialling a no wagering free spins offer as an alternative to their regular welcome offer.
What is a No Wagering Offer?
At a No Wagering slots site, anything you win as a result of the welcome offer is yours to keep and withdraw, with no further playthrough requirements.
But what if you have to complete a play requirement to claim the offer? The Best New Bingo Sites view is that if you have to play through your first deposit in order to qualify for the offer in the first place, it’s still No Wagering – but only if you just have to do it the once.
For example:
- Deposit & Spend £10, Get 100 Free Spins = No Wagering
- Deposit £10 & Play 10x, Get 100 Free Spins = Not No Wagering
Why No Wagering offers?
Online casinos started to introduce No Wagering offers back in 2017 as a direct result of two things that happened in the industry that year:
One of the many crackdowns on gambling advertising in the UK – casinos used to hide wagering requirements in the small print but following an 8 month investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority working with the Gambling Commission, operators were told that they must make wagering requirements and other restrictive terms and conditions explicit when a bonus is advertised. Stating the significant terms and conditions under the offer makes conventional bonuses with high wagering requirements look a lot less attractive to players (and alternative reward schemes more attractive by comparison).
The taxation of bonuses – the rules for taxation of bonuses were changed. Previously, free bets and bonuses at online gambling sites weren’t within the scope of the gambling point of consumption tax, but since then they have been. This rule change made it suddenly a whole lot more expensive for casinos to give out any bonus, especially a welcome bonus. Before the change, if a casino or slot site gave out a big welcome bonus and a player used it up and then left in search of better luck elsewhere, it didn’t cost the operator anything, and now it does.
Despite being much smaller than conventional bonus offers, No Wagering offers were an instant hit with many players due to the lack of restrictive terms and conditions and have remained so ever since.
No Wagering Offers – what’s in it for players?
The No Wagering model has a number of advantages for players over and above just getting rid of the wagering requirement itself.
- At a No Wagering site, a player has the opportunity to cash out everything in their account at any time and go play somewhere else. Without wagering requirements to bind the player, the site has to try quite a bit harder than normal to please players so they won’t want to leave. That will usually result in a full schedule of promotions and exciting new slots to play.
- At a No Wagering site, when players choose a game to play (as opposed to using free spins) they will always be playing with their own withdrawable cash and this will never expire. There will therefore be no pressure to complete any specific amount of play within any time limit (as there would be if working down a wagering requirement on a bonus before it expires). Without such pressure, players may find it easier to stay within sensible limits.
- At a No Wagering site, there is generally a tendency towards greater transparency and simplicity. Indeed, the No Wagering site MrQ has made it one of their main selling points. A site with a traditional bonus offer and associated wagering requirements will often have all sorts of restrictions in the small print on which games players with an active bonus can play, what bet size they are allowed, how much of their winnings they would actually be able to keep and whether they are barred from any promotions. No Wagering slots sites do not have any of this annoying small print so playing at one is hassle free.
- Many of the No Wagering sites including Betfred, bet365 and MrQ (again) are also amongst the best payout casinos because (again in the interests of transparency) they have the best Return to Player on slot games. They can afford to keep the RTP high because they aren’t spending money on giving out massive bonuses.
TLDR – a better player experience all round!
No Wagering Offers – what’s in it for the casino?
Some of the biggest and best known UK operators have moved to a fully No Wagering model, with all winnings from all promotions paid in withdrawable cash. A bold move certainly, and there are reasons why it makes sense for big name operators but not so much for smaller operators and white label sites.
- Big name operators have the highest profile with the regulator and are keen to demonstrate that they treat players fairly and don’t induce them to spend more than they can afford or prevent them from withdrawing their winnings.
- Without wagering requirements, the operator needs to be confident that the player will like their site well enough to keep on playing there for many months or years. Household name operators have the resources to put on all manner of extra entertainment for their players. For example, at Gamesys sites there’s a lively, hosted chat room for slots players plus free daily games and free Slot Masters tournaments and at Betfred, there’s an array of free spins promotions. Smaller operators just wouldn’t be able to compete with this, so rely on wagering requirements to dissuade players from going elsewhere. Perhaps the clearest illustration of this is all of the extras the no wagering casino PlayOJO has as compared with other sites on the Skill On Net platform which have conventional welcome offers complete with wagering requirements.
- Household name operators also have the resources to detect and deal with large scale, organised bonus abuse (which has been a major cause of no wagering offers being withdrawn in the past) whereas small operators don’t.
With several of these big operators now very firmly in the No Wagering camp, no wagering slots offers look very much here to stay.
Free Spins – or are they?
Not every free spins offer is a No Wagering offer. Unfortunately many so-called “free spins” offers pay any winnings from the spins as a slot bonus with a big fat wagering requirement and sometimes also a maximum conversion (which places a limit on what you can win from bonus play). With all these strings attached as well as having to make a deposit to receive the spins, this is not what most people would understand by the word “free”. This is why some operators have stopped calling them free spins and replaced the wording with something that is less likely to get them in trouble with the Advertising Standards Authority and the Gambling Commission – such as “bonus spins”, “extra spins” or just “slot spins”.
No Wagering free spins are only “not free” in that they require a deposit to be made and/or an amount of cash play to be completed before the player can claim them. Any winnings from the spins themselves are paid in withdrawable cash. Even so, many of them have a win cap on “free spins” winnings, which means that the amount you can win from wager free spins can vary drastically from site to site – and we do mean drastically, from £1 to an unlimited amount. Always check the terms and conditions to see if there’s a win cap.
Free spins are probably the most common type of reward given out to players at No Wagering sites when they deposit or play, but they are by no means the only type of reward – raffle tickets, the opportunity to play a bonus game to win slot spins or cash, and cold hard cash have all been in the mix at some point. What you won’t normally find on a no wagering site, however, is a no wagering casino bonus offer that can be spent on any game you like (that really would be too good to be true!)
No Wagering Slots – The Future
It could be all change for No Wagering slots offers in 2026 as some huge rule changes are being implemented.
The Gambling Commission ran a consultation on wagering requirements last year, looking at making them more fair for players. In the end, the idea of an outright ban was rejected and they went for the least radical of the options – imposing a ceiling of 10x on wagering requirements. This is still a massive change from the 50x and 65x wagering requirements that have been common at UK online casinos until now.
The new regime takes effect from 19th January 2026 and we expect it to hugely change the landscape. As a wagering requirement of 10x is very low by previous standards, it’s not at all clear how operators will respond. Will they simply switch to smaller welcome bonuses with 10x wagering? Will at least some of them make the change to No Wagering offers? Or will there be a spate of some other kind of offer involving cash rewards?
Watch this space for new No Wagering offers!
