Low Wagering Slot & Casino Sites
A few slot and casino sites have stopped short of going full no wagering, but have reduced their wagering requirements to below the usual minimum of 35x. Here’s some of our favourite low wagering offers. We can expect to see many more of these in the course of 2025 as operators get ready for the new rules to come in at the end of the year capping wagering requirements to 10x.
No Wagering Slots Sites & Casinos
Slot and casino players generally love bonuses (who wouldn’t want apparently free money?) but hate wagering requirements, and historically casino and slot sites have dealt with this by hiding the wagering requirements in the small print. Now that they can’t get away with that any more, No Wagering slots offers are on the rise, with no wagering free spins offers by far the most common type.
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. You’ll probably have to play through your first deposit in order to qualify for the offer in the first place.
The number of No Wagering slots sites is still quite small and we don’t expect it to increase significantly during 2025, but they remain very popular with players.
A new breed of casino & slot site
No Bonus casinos have been around for many years as a niche product for players who prefer no-frills cash play, but back in 2017 a new breed of slot and casino sites started to appear; these are aimed at players who still want to participate in promotions and rewards but are fed up with wagering requirements whereby their winnings have to be played through many times before they can be withdrawn. These no wagering slots and casino sites do not offer traditional bonuses but instead incentivise and reward their players in new and innovative ways which enable them to have zero wagering requirements.
Bad years for casino bonus
There are a couple of very good reasons why casino and slot sites have had to move away from the huge bonuses of the past:
The crackdown on gambling advertising in the UK – this means that wagering requirements and other restrictive terms and conditions must be made explicit when a bonus is offered, making bonuses 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 changed way back in 2017 (and no, it’s not a coincidence that the first No Wagering sites appeared on the market that year). Previously, free bets and bonuses at online gambling sites weren’t within the scope of the 15% point of consumption tax, but since then they have been. This made it suddenly a whole lot more expensive for casinos to give out any bonus, especially a welcome bonus. Before the tax, 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.
“Free Spins” – or are they?
Many slot sites and bingo sites responded to the above issues by switching their bonus offers to “free spins” offers but as most players are aware these days, they are often not all they seem. Most so-called “free spins” offers pay any winnings from the spins as a slot bonus with a big fat wagering requirement and sometimes a maximum convertible (a cap on what can be won from bonus play). With all these strings attached plus the necessity of making a deposit to receive the spins, this is not what most people would understand by the word “free”. Indeed many 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”.
The type of “free spins” offers found on No Wagering slot, casino and bingo sites 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 slot 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: a better deal 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 – resulting in a full schedule of promotions and exciting new slots to play (at the best sites anyway).
- At a No Wagering site, when players choose a game to play (as opposed to using preset 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 gamble responsibly and moderate their play.
- At a No Wagering site, there is generally a tendency towards greater transparency and simplicity – and one 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 covering such matters as 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.
No Wagering Slots; the future
As we go into 2025, we’re seeing fewer new No Wagering slot site launches, but there are still plenty of No Wagering slots offers coming in from existing operators. Some of them simply run a no wagering spins offer as an alternative to their regular welcome offer but keep the wagering requirements on offers for existing players, but others – particularly some of the biggest and best known operators – have transitioned to a fully No Wagering model, with all winnings from all promotions paid in withdrawable cash.
Why is it only the biggest operators that are doing this?
- Because they have the highest profile with the regulator, they 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 the big operators now very firmly in the No Wagering camp, no wagering slots offers look very much here to stay.
And that’s not all! The Gambling Commission had the opportunity to introduce a massive curveball in 2025; there was a consultation on wagering requirements last year which has now reported back. One possible outcome was for wagering requirements to be banned outright and another was for them to be restricted to 1x, 5x or 10x bonus. In the event, they have gone for the least draconian option of restricting to 10x (but that’s still a massive change from the 50x and 65x that are common today). As the implementation date of 19th December gets closer, we expect this to hugely change the landscape and result in there being many more no wagering and/or low wagering offers available – so watch this space!
