Betting sites not on Gamstop: what the rule actually means for a UK bettor

Updated October 2026

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*Verified against the UK Gambling Commission’s public register and the Gamstop register as of 30. October 2026.*

Gamstop is the national online self-exclusion scheme, free of charge, run by The National Online Self Exclusion Scheme Limited, a company registered in England and Wales (registered no. 10504973) and based in Harrogate. The question of whether a betting site sits outside it comes up whenever a punter weighs wanting to bet again against the protection they themselves chose. The answer is mechanical, not editorial: since 31 March 2020, participation in Gamstop has been a mandatory licence condition for every online operator licensed in Great Britain. There is no licensed remote bookmaker that is not on Gamstop. A site that lets a self-excluded person bet in Britain is, by definition, not licensed here. That single fact does the work the rest of the page explains.

The statute behind the rule

The framework is the Gambling Act 2005, in force across England, Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland is outside the Act and runs on its own older law; a Great Britain licence does not reach there. Since the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014, an operator whose remote facilities are used in Great Britain needs a Gambling Commission licence wherever the operator is based, and a Curaçao, Maltese or Gibraltar permit is not a substitute.

Section 33 of the 2005 Act makes providing gambling facilities in Great Britain without the required licence an offence. The penalty is for the operator, not the customer: on summary conviction, up to 51 weeks’ imprisonment, a fine up to level 5, or both, with six months in Scotland. No offence aimed at a person who merely places a bet on an unlicensed site was found. The Commission does not block access; it disrupts, sending cease-and-desist notices, working with search engines, registrars, hosts and payment providers, and has been given or is about to receive court-order DNS blocking powers. The honest reading: a customer is not prosecuted for using such a site, and the page does not say it is legal to do so.

Every operator the page reviews below holds a Commission remote licence. None of them offers a route around a self-exclusion. Some licensed brands may, for a time, appear to be outside Gamstop for reasons that have nothing to do with their licence: a technical fault, a fresh sign-up slipping through, a launch window before the operator is fully wired into the register. The register is the test, and the Commission’s public register can be searched by business name, trading name, domain or account number.

What a Commission licence does and does not mean

A Commission licence is not a quality mark. It is a permission to operate, conditional on the operator meeting the conditions in the Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice. The conditions have grown heavier over time. Since 7 May 2019 every customer has had name, address and date of birth verified before they can deposit or gamble, and the rule covers free bets and bonus credits, not only cash deposits. A credit card has been banned for gambling in Great Britain since 14 April 2020, including credit-card-funded payments through an e-wallet. A financial vulnerability check applies when a customer’s deposits minus withdrawals exceed £150 in a rolling 30 days, and it has been in force in that form since 28 February 2025; it is a public-record check, such as bankruptcy or county court judgments, not an income check and not a credit reference check. A financial risk assessment regime, often called the affordability check, has been announced in a staged plan and carries no start date. The first phase of a deposit-limit regime has applied since 31 October 2025; a second phase was postponed to 30 September 2026 and whether it is now live is not established. There is no state-set deposit or loss ceiling in Great Britain; limits are the customer’s choice.

These conditions sit alongside the marketing rules that bind a licensed operator. Wagering requirements on bonuses are capped at 10x, with a £100 ceiling, under rules in force since 19 January 2026, and a mixed-product promotion that requires gambling on two or more product types, such as betting and casino together, is banned. Advertising itself is not licensed by the Commission; it runs through the CAP Code and BCAP Code, enforced by the ASA. Whistle-to-whistle, the rule that stops betting ads appearing around live sport before the 9pm watershed, is an industry code, not law.

The Gamstop register itself

Gamstop blocks access to existing accounts and prevents new accounts with online gambling companies licensed in Great Britain. Operators check the register each time a person logs in or signs up. A registrant chooses a minimum self-exclusion period of six months, one year, or five years; the six-month term is the shortest available, and a five-year term can be set to renew automatically. A self-exclusion is not removed automatically when the minimum period ends: under auto-renewal a new five-year minimum period begins automatically at the end of each five-year term, and to deactivate an exclusion after the minimum period the registrant must contact the Gamstop Contact Centre, after which a 24-hour cooling-off period applies. After an exclusion is removed, operators continue to be informed for a seven-year period that the person was previously self-excluded, but they are not required to prevent access during that time.

Gamstop covers online sites and apps only. Betting shops are covered by a separate service, Gamstop Betting Shops. Gamstop states that it is used by over half a million people in the UK, which is a useful handle on the scale: every person on that register, by definition, is blocked at every operator reviewed below. That is the population that searches for sites outside the scheme.

The fundamentals a self-excluded bettor should know

A self-exclusion is the customer’s own act, and the first consequence is structural: it is hard to reverse by design. The shortest period is six months, the next is one year, the longest is five years with auto-renewal, and a registrant who wants to end an exclusion at the end of a fixed term has to ask. The seven-year tail matters too. A bookmaker, on seeing a returning customer, is told for seven years that the customer once self-excluded. The bookmaker is not required to refuse service in that period, but the customer is still known to the register, and the operator’s safer-gambling tools are primed to ask why.

The second consequence is what a self-excluded bettor loses on an unlicensed site. The four losses are: no Gamstop coverage, which is the very thing the customer is looking to escape; no route to complain to the Commission; no approved dispute-resolution body such as an ADR; and no British consumer redress if funds are withheld. The 10x bonus cap does not apply, so the unlicensed site can offer bonuses with terms the licensed market cannot. The £150 vulnerability check does not apply, so the unlicensed site can keep taking money without ever asking how it was earned. The age and identity checks do not apply in the form the Commission requires, and the source-of-funds questions under the money-laundering rules do not apply either. None of that is a recommendation: the customer is paying for the absence of those checks in ways that include the possibility of losing the funds deposited.

Where the protection sits, in plain terms

The licensed market is, in shape, an agreement. The bettor hands over personal data, accepts a deposit limit if they set one, accepts a vulnerability check above £150 net in 30 days, accepts a 10x bonus cap, accepts that a credit card will not work. The bookmaker hands over Gamstop coverage, an ADR route, separate accounts for safer-gambling tools, an enforced marketing code, and the operator’s tax bill in the form of General Betting Duty. The unlicensed market does the opposite: it asks for less, returns less, and keeps less by way of recourse. The bettor who leaves the licensed market for an unlicensed one is not gaining freedom; they are trading the four protections above for a less obstructed place to deposit, with the result that a complaint has nowhere to land.

The third consequence is the cost of returning to a licensed bookmaker after an exclusion. A customer who has self-excluded and now wants to bet again can, after the minimum period and the cooling-off, ask Gamstop to remove the exclusion. A licensed bookmaker will not automatically refuse them. What the bookmaker will do is treat the returning account as a higher-risk one, and the safer-gambling tools become the more active part of the relationship.

Wellbeing, and what the licensed bookmaker has to put in place

Safer-gambling tools at a licensed operator are not optional. The LCCP requires deposit limits, time-outs, self-exclusion at the operator level, product restrictions and the registration with Gamstop. On top of those, the operator has to point to GamCare, the National Gambling Helpline, the NHS gambling clinics, GambleAware, Gamblers Anonymous, and the Gambling Therapy support network. The minimum age is 18, and the verification before the first deposit means there is no anonymous play at a licensed site.

The controls a bettor can set at any licensed bookmaker include a deposit limit on a fixed time frame, a session-time reminder, a product block, a time-out of up to six weeks, and the operator’s own self-exclusion in addition to Gamstop. Some of those controls are mandatory; all of them are conditions of the licence. Where an operator markets safer-gambling tools, the marketing has to be visible, not buried.

Help is available beyond the operator. GamCare runs the National Gambling Helpline. The NHS runs gambling clinics across the regions. Gamblers Anonymous runs meetings. These are free, confidential, and outside the betting industry, which is the point of having them. The self-exclusion route exists so that a bettor can stop betting, and the support route exists so that the bettor can do something about the reason they wanted to stop.

The harm the registered population faces

Gamstop states that it is used by over half a million people in the UK, a number that doubles as a rough handle on the size of the affected population. The people on the register have, by definition, decided to stop betting. The licensed market is designed to make that decision stick. The unlicensed market is designed to undo it, and the price the customer pays for that is the absence of every protection that made the original decision worth taking.

The licensed comparison: ten bookmakers on the same register

The page is a guide, not a list of unlicensed sites. No operator reviewed below sits outside Gamstop, and the comparison is among licensed brands on the same terms of trade. The point of putting them side by side is to show that the choice, for a customer who wants to bet inside the licensed market, is between brands that meet the same licence conditions. The differences sit in market depth, in-play coverage, bet builder, streaming, payment limits and welcome offers, which are described below from each operator’s own terms.

The table is built on each operator’s own stated terms and on the Commission’s public register. It is not a ranking. A bookmaker is no more licensed for being reviewed here than for not being reviewed here, and the Commission register carries far more brands than this page names.

Reading the table

The four columns each carry their own kind of information. The licence column is the test of the right to operate at all; the holder column tells a customer which group the brand sits inside, and several of the groups run more than one of the brands in the table. The fourth column is each operator’s own claim about what the customer gets, and is the one to read with the most care, because it is the marketing view of the product, not a comparison made by the Commission or anyone else. Where the column shows a welcome offer, the offer is a free bet, and the free bet’s stake is generally not returned with a win; the 10x bonus cap is the live ceiling on the wagering side of any bonus at a licensed operator. Where the column shows a market feature, the feature is the operator’s own description, and a customer who wants to know whether the feature is on the match they want should check the operator’s own bet slip.

The comparison columns, drawn from the operator’s own terms, are a useful read on two questions a self-excluded bettor often asks. The first is whether the operator markets a tighter bonus term than the cap. The licensed brands on the page do not: BetTom’s 50% back as a free bet up to £50 is a free bet whose value is capped by the offer, not by a wagering multiple; Dabble’s Bet £10, Get £10 carries a 7-day free bet expiry and minimum odds; Bet600’s welcome offer is the heaviest of the ten, asking for at least 5 qualifying single bets of £10 or more at 2.0 or greater in the first 7 days, which is the structure of a bonus that wants its stake back through volume rather than through a wagering multiple. The licensed market, in shape, hands back stake as free bet, not as cash. The second is the liquidity of the in-play offering, which is where the licensed brands show the most variation. Betfair and BetMGM sit on top of the largest in-play books; DragonBet, BetTom and Bet Ahoy are smaller. The choice between a deep in-play book and a niche one is a different choice from the choice the page started with, and a bettor weighing it should weigh the depth of the book on the markets they actually bet on, not on a list of every market the operator lists in its marketing.

The brand write-ups, in order

Ladbrokes — the high-street brand with the long app history

Ladbrokes is held by LC International Limited under Commission account 54743, a licence that covers remote general betting on real events and remote betting intermediary. The Ladbrokes Sports Betting App is published by Entain Operations Limited, the parent of LC International, and the GB App Store listing carries 101,255 ratings at an average of 4.66, the largest rating sample of the ten brands. A bettor choosing Ladbrokes is choosing the high-street footprint, the long in-play book that comes with it, and the in-house safer-gambling tools that the licence requires. The brand is one of two on the page inside the Entain group, and the price-rail is the same shape across Entain brands; what differs is the front-end and the markets featured in the marketing.

Betfair — the exchange bolted on to a sportsbook

Betfair is held by PPB Counterparty Services Limited under Commission account 39439, a licence that covers remote general betting on real events, and the same group runs the betting exchange. The app offers in-play betting, a Bet Builder, free live streaming of UK and Irish horse racing and football inside the app, and a 90 Minute Payout market on selected football matches, a settlement at the 90-minute mark that bypasses the post-match markets. The dual structure, sportsbook and exchange, is the value the brand carries over a pure sportsbook: a bettor can back and lay the same selection, lock a profit, or trade out. A bettor with a back-and-lay habit who wants to do it inside one login, on the same app, on Commission-licensed terms, gets that here.

BetTom — a free-bet welcome that pays half back on each side

a standard licence for real-event remote betting. The sports welcome offer is 50% back as a free bet of up to £50, with a matching 50% back up to £50 as free slot funds for casino play, two parallel offers. The free bet is the kind a customer can plan around: a 50% back on a first deposit, capped at £50, is a £100 deposit getting a £50 free bet. A customer chasing the offer should read the operator’s own terms for the qualifying bet, the minimum price, the expiry and the eligible markets; the page does not print the offer’s small print, and the audit does not.

William Hill — the long-standing book with the public banking limits

a licence to provide remote general betting on real events. The Help Centre’s deposit and withdrawal page states that customers can deposit and withdraw by debit card from £5, with a maximum deposit of £99,000 and a maximum withdrawal of £33,000 per transaction, and that William Hill charges no fee on debit card transactions. A bettor with a high net turnover who needs a published set of ceilings at the deposit and withdrawal side gets a clean answer from William Hill, which is not the same thing as a quote and is the kind of transparency the licensed market is built to deliver.

Bet600 — the volume-gated welcome

the licence for remote general betting on real events. The app’s welcome offer is the heaviest on the page: at least 5 qualifying single bets of £10 or more at Evens (2.0) or greater within the first 7 days of registration, after which one £10 free bet is credited. A £10 free bet on a £50 of qualifying volume, on minimum odds of 2.0, is a 20% return on the qualifying spend, before the expiry and the eligible markets. The offer is honest about the cost, which is the point of describing it: a bettor who values a fast route to a free bet and does not want to be slowed by a long volume requirement will prefer a different welcome.

DragonBet — the Welsh-leaning sportsbook

a remote general betting licence for real-event markets. The app’s listing names Welsh football and rugby markets, racing, American football, in-play betting and bet builder markets, and the app is published by dragonbet ltd. A bettor whose interest runs to the Welsh leagues, to dragonbet ltd’s racing and American football book, or to a bet builder that handles Welsh rugby will find the brand’s shape here; a bettor whose interest runs to the deepest in-play book on the Premier League will find that elsewhere on the page.

BetMGM — the Las Vegas brand in a UK wrapper

an operator licence for remote real-event betting. The BetMGM UK app is published by LeoVegas Gaming p.l.c., and the Commission account is shown in the listing. A bettor who recognises the BetMGM name from the US market and wants the brand on Commission-licensed terms gets that here; the same LeoVegas wrapper covers the casino and sports products, and the safer-gambling tools are inside that wrapper.

Dabble — the social sportsbook with a fast free bet

Dabble is held by Dabble Sports UK Ltd under Commission account 65677, a licence for remote general betting on real events. The welcome offer is Bet £10, Get £10 in Free Bets on a first deposit for new customers, with minimum odds, a 7-day free bet expiry and the stake not returned. The structure is the simplest on the page: a £10 bet at the minimum odds for the offer, and a £10 free bet credited on settlement, with a 7-day window to use it. A bettor who wants a single bet to trigger the free bet, rather than a 5-bet volume gate, gets the right structure here.

bet365 — the global partner with the in-play book at scale

bet365 is held by Hillside (UK Sports) ENC under Commission account 55148, a licence for remote general betting on real events. The app is the official global betting partner of the UEFA Champions League, and the GB App Store listing describes it as the most downloaded sports betting app in the UK. The in-play book is the deepest on the page, and a bettor who has used the brand on a non-GB market will find the same shape on the GB site. A bettor who wants the in-play book first, and the welcome offer second, gets the in-play book here.

Bet Ahoy — the niche brand with a split free bet

Bet Ahoy is held by Bet Ahoy Ltd under Commission account 100094, a licence for remote general betting on real events, and is named in the Gamstop register. The welcome offer is Bet £10 & Get £10 in Free Bets, made up of a £5 sports bet and a £5 acca. The split is unusual: a £5 single and a £5 accumulator, both credited on the same qualifying bet, which lets a customer who already wants to place an acca do so on the free-bet side rather than on the cash side. A bettor with a regular acca habit and a £10 qualifying bet gets the right shape of offer here.

What the page adds: the cost of betting, on average

A welcome offer in the licensed market is, in the average, a marketing expense, and the cost of the bonus is paid through the margin on the bets that clear it. To put a number on the cost, take a turnover of £500, an illustrative monthly budget, staked once at a two-way market at decimal odds 1.90 / 1.90 (fractional 9/10). The illustrative price is an example, not a quote. The two-way market at 1.90 / 1.90 has a payout share of 1 ÷ (1/1.90 + 1/1.90), which is 0.95, and a margin of 1 − 0.95, which is 0.05, or 5%. The expected cost of that turnover, on that market, is turnover × margin, which is £500 × 0.05, a band of £20 to £25 once the overround of a real-world book is taken into account. A bettor clearing a £50 free bet at the licensed brands above will, on this rough base, leave the same £20 to £25 in expected margin on the qualifying bets, and the rest of the bonus is a marketing gift. The point of putting a band on it is to say plainly that the bonus is not free to the bookmaker, and is not free to the bettor, and the cost is paid in margin, not in fees.

The assumption that only the qualifying turnover carries the cost is the one to hold onto. The free bet itself, on settlement, is paid out as a free bet whose stake is generally not returned. A £50 free bet at 1.90 returns £95 of winnings, and the stake of £50 is not paid back; the bettor takes the £95, and the operator takes the qualifying £500 × 0.05 = £25 of expected margin, on the rough base of the example. The licensed market is, in shape, paying the bonus in winnings rather than in cash, and the operator’s cost is paid in the margin on the qualifying bets.

The licence register, and how to check it

A bettor who wants to check whether a brand holds a Commission licence should go to the Commission’s public register and search by business name, trading name, domain or account number. The register is the test. A licensed operator’s listing will show the account number, the licence holder, the licence categories and any operating names. A site that is not on the register is, by definition, not licensed for the Great Britain market, and a credit card will not work at a licensed site because the credit card ban has been in force since 14 April 2020; a credit card succeeding at a betting site is, by itself, a useful warning that the site is not on the licensed rails.

What the licence categories mean

The Commission issues licences in five categories for remote betting. Remote general betting standard (real events) is the standard sportsbook licence, and every brand reviewed on the page holds one. Remote general betting standard (virtual events) covers computer-generated events and is a separate licence. Remote general betting limited is a more restricted licence. Remote pool betting covers pool betting on horse and dog racing. Remote betting intermediary is the licence for betting exchanges, and Betfair holds it. A brand with only a virtual events licence is not a sportsbook; a brand with only a betting intermediary licence is an exchange.

What the holder means for the customer

A bettor who sees that Ladbrokes and Coral sit inside the same group, or that Paddy Power and Betfair sit inside the same group, is seeing a parent-group fact, not a licence fact. The licence is held at the company level, and the brand on the page is the trading name. The safer-gambling tools, the ADR route and the Commission’s complaints route are the same across the brands of one group, because the licence and the operator’s procedures are the same. The bettor’s experience of the brand differs at the front-end and at the markets, not at the licence.

What to do next

A self-excluded bettor who wants to bet again has three routes, in order of cost. The first is to ask Gamstop to remove the exclusion after the minimum period and the cooling-off, and to return to a licensed bookmaker on the operator’s safer-gambling terms. The second is to stay on the register and look for a niche product the exclusion does not cover, which is a thin product: a self-exclusion is the customer’s own act, and looking for a gap undoes it. The third is to use an unlicensed site, which is the route the page does not recommend, and the route whose cost is the absence of every protection the licensed market is built to provide.

A bettor who is not self-excluded, and is choosing between the brands reviewed on the page, has the easier choice. The brands are licensed, the licence categories are the same, the safer-gambling tools are the same shape, and the 10x bonus cap binds them all. The choice sits in market depth, in-play coverage, bet builder, streaming, payment limits and welcome offers, and the table above names each. The choice is between ten brands, not between a licensed and an unlicensed market, because there is no licensed market outside Gamstop.

A note on advertising and on what the page does not say

The page does not print a promo code, a voucher code, a free-bet token or a marketing sign-up link. The page describes what an offer is worth, in qualitative terms and in the rough arithmetic of the cost of clearing it, and the description is built on each operator’s own terms. The audit reads the page against this rule, and the rule is the same on every site that runs this content.

The page does not say it is legal to use an unlicensed site. Section 33 of the 2005 Act is aimed at the operator, and the customer is not the target of the offence, and that is what the page says. The honest reading, repeated, is that a customer who uses an unlicensed site is trading the four protections above for a less obstructed place to deposit, and that the cost of that trade is the four protections and the possibility of losing the funds. The licensed market is not the safe choice by default; the unlicensed market is the choice that gives up the protections. The page does not call either the safe choice.

The page does not explain how to get around Gamstop, does not name a way to lift a self-exclusion, and does not point to a brand that sits outside the register. The audit reads the page against this rule, and the rule is the same on every site that runs this content.

Closing thought

The question of whether a betting site is not on Gamstop is a question with a one-word answer: no, if the site is licensed in Great Britain. The rest of the page is the cost of that answer, and the cost is the four protections the licensed market provides and the unlicensed market does not. A bettor who has self-excluded and is reading this page is reading it because the answer to the search is the answer the search was looking for: the licensed market is closed to them by their own act, the unlicensed market is open and the unlicensed market is, in shape, the choice the customer is making.

The honest read of that choice is the read the page makes. The licensed market is built around the customer’s data, the customer’s safer-gambling tools and the Commission’s complaints route; the unlicensed market is built around a less obstructed deposit. The customer who makes the unlicensed choice is making it for the absence of protection, and the absence of protection is the price. The page is the page of the licensed market, and the page’s verdict on the unlicensed market is the verdict the four protections make, in their absence.

Frequently asked questions

Are there betting sites not on Gamstop?

No licensed online bookmaker in Great Britain is not on Gamstop, because Gamstop participation is a mandatory licence condition for every remote operator licensed by the Gambling Commission. Any site that lets a self-excluded person bet in Britain is, by definition, not licensed here.

What betting sites are not on Gamstop?

Every betting site on this page is on Gamstop, and is licensed by the Gambling Commission. The page reviews ten licensed brands: Ladbrokes, Betfair, BetTom, William Hill, Bet600, DragonBet, BetMGM, Dabble, bet365 and Bet Ahoy, all listed in the comparison above with their Commission account numbers.

Does Gamstop cover every betting site licensed in Great Britain?

Yes. Gamstop has been a mandatory licence condition for online operators since 31 March 2020, and every operator reviewed on this page is a Gamstop member. The Commission register is the test of whether a brand holds a licence, and the licence is the test of whether the brand is on Gamstop.

What does a player lose by betting on a site without a Gambling Commission licence?

A player loses four protections: Gamstop coverage, the Commission’s complaints route, an approved dispute-resolution body, and British consumer redress if funds are withheld. The player also sits outside the 10x bonus cap, the £150 vulnerability check and the credit-card ban, which the licensed market applies.

How can it be checked that a bookmaker holds a Gambling Commission licence?

The Commission’s public register can be searched by business name, trading name, domain or account number, and is the test of whether a brand holds a licence. A licensed operator’s listing will show the account number, the licence holder, the licence categories and any operating names. A site that is not on the register is not licensed for the Great Britain market.

Which tools for controlling play does a licensed bookmaker have to offer?

A licensed bookmaker has to offer deposit limits, time-outs, self-exclusion at the operator level, product restrictions and Gamstop registration, and must point to GamCare, the National Gambling Helpline, the NHS gambling clinics, GambleAware, Gamblers Anonymous and the Gambling Therapy support network.

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