How We Rate Bookmakers
Licence first, terms second, price third — and the order of a table is never for sale. This is the method, in full, so you can check our work.
On this page
What we check before a bookmaker goes on the list
Every bookmaker on this site holds a current operating licence from the Gambling Commission for Great Britain. We open the public register, find the account number and the trading name used on the site, and confirm that remote betting is on the licence before the brand appears anywhere in a table. A brand whose entry lapses comes off the list the same week.
- Licence. Account number and trading name matched in the public register.
- Offer terms. Read from the bookmaker’s own terms page, not from the banner.
- Price. Compared on a fixed sample of markets, taken at the same time of day.
- Payouts. Methods and timescales taken from the published payments page.
- Support. Hours, channels and whether a human answers outside office hours.
How the price comparison is taken
A sign-up offer is the smallest part of what a bookmaker costs you. The bigger number is the margin built into the odds, so we compare the same markets across the list rather than reading the promotion. Prices are recorded at the same time of day, on the same fixtures, and the comparison is repeated rather than published once and left to age.
Where a bookmaker is better on one sport and worse on another, we say so on the page for that sport instead of averaging the difference away.
What we do with the terms
Bonus terms are where the money quietly goes. For every offer we record the qualifying stake, the minimum odds, whether the free bet returns the stake, the expiry, the wagering requirement and the excluded payment methods. Those are the numbers printed in our tables. If a term is missing from the operator’s own page, the offer is not listed.
How we are paid, and what that does not buy
We are an independent comparison site, not a bookmaker. When a reader opens an account through a link on this site, the bookmaker may pay us a commission. That is how the site is funded, and it changes nothing about the order of a table: the ranking rules are fixed in advance and applied to every brand, and a position cannot be bought.
We do not publish invented user scores, we do not run fake reviews, and we do not describe a bookmaker as number one for everything. Where we have not tested something ourselves, the page says where the information came from.
When a page was last checked
Every page carries the date it was last reviewed, at the top. Offers change without notice, so the date matters more than the wording: if the date is old, treat the figures as a starting point and check them against the bookmaker’s own terms before you deposit.
Found something wrong? Tell us on the contact page and we will correct the page rather than delete it.