What a no-deposit offer looks like after the ten-times cap

On the nineteenth of January 2026 a single licence condition changed the arithmetic of every bonus offered to a player in Great Britain. Nine months later the effects are visible in our own catalogue, and they are not the ones that were predicted.

What the condition says

Two sentences carry the whole of it. A licensee must not apply wagering requirements that require a customer to play through "bonus funds" (credit that is not the customer's own money) more than ten times, and a licensee must not include more than one type of gambling product (betting, casino, bingo, lottery) within a single "incentive", which is the regulator's own word for a bonus.

The first of those is a ceiling on a number that had never had one, while the second closes the arrangement in which a casino bonus had to be cycled through a sports market, which made the requirement far harder to satisfy than the multiplier on the front of it ever suggested.

What it did to the offers we track

The prediction at the time was that no-deposit offers would disappear from the British market, because a capped requirement makes them more expensive to run. That is not what our catalogue shows. Of the twenty operators we list with a Gambling Commission licence, four still run a no-deposit offer of some kind, and one of those (a daily wheel spin rather than a one-off credit) is structurally new.

What did change is the shape. The offers that survived are smaller and more specific: five spins on a named slot rather than twenty on "selected games", a daily starter rather than a lump, a registration that asks for a verified debit card (which is a "KYC" step moved to the front door) before the spins arrive. Each of those is a way of holding the cost down now that the requirement cannot do it.

The comparison that now means something

Before January 2026, comparing a British offer with an offshore one meant setting two unbounded multipliers against each other. It now means setting a bounded one against an unbounded one, and the difference is easy to state: a twenty-pound bonus at the British ceiling asks for two hundred pounds of stakes before you may withdraw a penny of it, while the same bonus at the "35x" common offshore asks for seven hundred.

That is the single most useful thing a reader of this site can carry away, and it is why the licence line on every card here names the regulator rather than a score out of five.

What has not changed

The withdrawal cap has not moved. Nothing in the condition touches the maximum a customer may take out of a no-deposit offer, and that cap is still the line that decides what the offer is worth, while the game restriction, the "max bet rule", the "contribution table" (the percentage of a stake that counts towards the requirement, which on tables is often nothing at all) and the expiry are untouched as well.

An offer at ten times with a twenty-pound cap and a twenty-four-hour expiry is still an offer with three conditions on it, and only one of the three has a ceiling under it!

By the No Deposit Bonus editorial team · Last updated October 2026 · Online since 2014