Wagering requirements

A wagering requirement is the number that decides whether a bonus is worth an evening, and it is almost never the number on the banner, which is why the trade’s other word for it, "playthrough", is the more honest of the two. What follows is the arithmetic (the multiplier, the base it applies to, and the games that "count" towards it), done slowly enough to be done afterwards in anyone’s head.

The calculation, in one line

The calculation is one multiplication. Bonus times multiplier gives the amount to be staked before the bonus "converts" into withdrawable money (and the whole of it can be done standing up): twenty at thirty-five times is seven hundred, twenty at ten times is two hundred, ten at sixty times is six hundred (a small bonus with a large multiplier being the worse offer of the two, however the pair look side by side).

Staking is not spending, and the difference is the part most often got wrong: each stake returns most of itself on average, so nobody is required to lose seven hundred pounds, only to cycle it. What the "house edge" takes out of seven hundred pounds of cycled stakes, over the hours the cycling takes, is the real cost (not the headline, and not the multiplier by itself). The multiplier is a measure of time as much as of money, and the time is the part nobody budgets for.

The phrase to watch is “deposit plus bonus”

Some operators apply the multiplier to the bonus alone and others to the deposit and the bonus together, which sounds like a technicality until the two are worked out side by side. A player who deposits a hundred pounds and takes a hundred-pound bonus at thirty-five times has three and a half thousand to stake under the first rule and seven thousand under the second (the same offer, twice the work), and the whole difference is one preposition, the "plus" of "deposit plus bonus", in a sentence nobody reads twice, sitting between a clause about eligible countries and a clause about bonus abuse.

For a no-deposit offer the distinction cannot arise, since nothing is paid in for the multiplier to attach itself to (no deposit, no "deposit plus bonus"), and that is one of the few respects in which such an offer is simpler than a deposit one rather than merely smaller.

Game contribution, where the arithmetic quietly doubles

The "game contribution" is the condition that does the quiet damage. Slots usually count one hundred per cent towards the requirement, table games commonly ten per cent and sometimes five, and some games nothing whatever, all of it set out in a "contribution table" kept where almost nobody looks. If roulette counts ten per cent, every pound staked on roulette advances the requirement by ten pence (not by a pound), so a seven-hundred-pound requirement becomes seven thousand pounds of roulette, which is why no roulette system rescues a bonus, whatever it does to the variance.

An offer restricted to a single slot is therefore sometimes the better offer, despite looking the meaner one: the restriction is printed where it can be seen (and on the banner), whereas the "contribution table" sits elsewhere and is written for somebody else. An offer that shows its limit on the banner is doing something that table has never once done!

What the British cap changed

Since the nineteenth of January 2026 an operator licensed by the Gambling Commission may not require a customer to play through "bonus funds" more than ten times, which is the "playthrough" cap in the language of the trade, and may not put more than one kind of gambling product inside a single "incentive" (one incentive, one product). That is the only hard ceiling any regulator on this site imposes, and in our view it changes the shape of an offer more than any other rule we know of.

The rule also makes a useful test. Where a British-licensed operator is shown with a "wagering requirement" above ten times, the page has not been read since January 2026, whatever date sits in its footer (a date in a footer is set by a template, not by a reading). We measured what the cap did to our own catalogue nine months on, in a separate piece, and the result was not the one predicted.

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