What a welcome bonus is worth once the wagering is done

A welcome bonus is a sum of money you cannot withdraw until a turnover condition has been met, and the size of that condition, not the size of the headline, decides what the offer is worth. Take the standard shape: a 100% match on a £100 deposit, wagering at 40x the bonus. The turnover is £4,000. Every pound of that turnover runs through games that return roughly 96p in the pound over time, so the expected cost of clearing is about 4p per pound staked. Four thousand pounds of turnover at 4p costs £160 of expected return, which is more than the £100 the bonus put in. Run the same numbers as a decay model and the arithmetic says the same thing with less drama: a bonus worth £100, reduced by 4% for every multiple of itself staked, ends the 40x climb at 100 × 0.96^40, which is about £19.50.

That figure, about £19.50 from a headline of £100, is the number a reader should carry into any opt-in decision. It is not a prediction of what any one session will return; sessions scatter widely around the expected value, and a fortunate hour can finish the ladder early with the balance intact. It is the centre of the distribution, the arithmetic average of all the ways a clearing run can go, and across any volume of claims the realised outcomes converge on it. Offers of this sort are priced by their operators with exactly this model in mind, which is why the multiple sits where it sits.

Three assumptions do the work in that calculation, and each one moves the answer. The first is the 96% return: it fits slots, which contribute 100% of stakes to wagering at nearly every payment desk, and it is close to the published return-to-player of the games a bonus is usually played on. The second is the wagering base: the model charges the multiple against the bonus alone. Where a desk applies the multiple to deposit plus bonus, the £100 claim at 40x becomes £8,000 of turnover rather than £4,000, and the expected cost of clearing doubles while the bonus does not. The third is discipline on the maximum bet: stake more than the printed cap, often £2 to £5 while a bonus is active, and the usual term voids the winnings outright, which turns a modelled £19.50 into a modelled zero.

The decay curve is steep at the top and flattens hard. Twenty multiples leaves roughly £44 of the £100; thirty leaves about £29; forty about £19.50; forty-five about £15.90. Each additional five multiples costs less than the last in pounds, because there is progressively less bonus left to decay, but every one of them costs the same 4% of whatever remains. The figure below plots the model across the range this market actually prints.

Reading the chart is a matter of comparing the drop from one bar to the next with what the bigger multiple buys. Moving from 35x to 40x costs about £4.50 of expected value; moving from 40x to 45x costs about £3.60. The multiples a desk prints are not decoration. They are the price tag, expressed in a unit most readers never convert, and converting them is the whole job of this page.

Anatomy of a welcome package

Every welcome package, from a plain 100% match to a four-stage ladder with spin riders, is built from eight parts. Read them in order and the offer describes itself completely; skip one and the headline will mislead by omission. The guides under this page cover the individual shapes, but the parts are the same everywhere.

Rate. The percentage of the deposit returned as bonus funds: 100% is the market's default, 200% and 400% appear at the offshore end of the market, and anything above that is usually a sticky balance dressed up. The rate is the most visible number and the least decisive, because every other part can take its value away.

Cap. The ceiling on the bonus in pounds. A 400% match capped at £100 pays its maximum at a £25 deposit and pays exactly £100 at a £100 deposit too, which makes the four-figure rate meaningless for anyone staking beyond the cap. The cap, not the rate, sets the largest bonus a package can produce.

Wagering base. What the multiple charges against: the bonus alone, or deposit plus bonus. The difference is a factor of two on the turnover, and a factor of two on the expected cost of clearing. Base plus a steep multiple is where packages like these hide their real price.

Multiple. The x figure: 35x to 45x is the common band on offshore terms, 20x to 30x on some British books, 60x and above where the rate is generous. Applied to the bonus it is survivable; applied to deposit plus bonus it is a second deposit's worth of expected loss.

Maximum bet. The largest single stake allowed while bonus funds are active, typically £2 to £5. Breach it, once, even by accident on a slot whose default stake exceeds the cap, and the standard term voids the winnings. This is the single most common way a clearing run dies with nothing to show for it.

Contribution. The share of each game's stakes that counts toward the turnover. Slots contribute 100% at most desks; a short list of high-return titles contributes nothing; table games contribute 10% or less; live dealer tables often contribute nothing at all. A multiple cleared on blackjack at 10% contribution is really ten times the printed figure in table stakes.

Expiry. The clock. Seven days is the common figure, fourteen to thirty on slower ladders, and spins riders often run on a shorter clock than the cash match they accompany. Anything unturned when the clock stops is forfeit, bonus and winnings alike.

Order of operations. Which balance the game spends first, and what happens if a withdrawal is requested mid-clearance. On non-sticky packages real money is spent first and the bonus can be forfeited by withdrawing; on sticky packages the bonus is spent first or the balances are locked together, and an early withdrawal request usually voids the bonus and anything won with it.

Two offers with identical headlines can differ by a factor of five in expected value once these eight parts are set side by side. The rate tells a reader almost nothing on its own; the base, the multiple and the maximum bet tell them almost everything.

Match size against the cap

The rate and the cap work against each other, and the trade has a precise break-even. Consider two packages of the sort this page costs: one at 400% capped at £100, one at 100% with no practical cap. At a £20 deposit the first produces £80 of bonus and the second £20, so the big rate wins by four to one. At £25 the first hits its ceiling and produces £100 against the second's £25. At £50 the first is still fixed at £100 while the second produces £50. At £100 they finally meet, both paying £100. Above £100 the 100% offer pulls away for good, and by £250 it is paying £250 against a rival still stuck at its cap.

Rate, in other words, is an advantage only below the break-even deposit, and the break-even deposit is simply the cap divided by the rate. A 400% capped £100 offer stops improving at £25. A 200% capped £200 offer stops improving at £100. A reader who deposits £10 a time is served perfectly well by the big rate; a reader who deposits £100 or more is being shown a number that has already stopped meaning anything.

The multiple usually moves the other way. High-rate packages tend to carry steeper multiples, on the reasonable commercial logic that a desk giving away four times the deposit wants more of it back. Price the two packages above with the page's model, both producing a £100 bonus but the 400% offer at 45x and the 100% offer at 40x, and the flatter package wins: about £19.50 of expected value against about £15.90. The £3.60 difference is the price of the extra five multiples, and it is paid on every claim, not only the ones that go badly.

There is also a cashflow difference the model does not capture. A capped offer reached at a small deposit leaves most of the deposit unspent: £25 extracts the full £100 bonus from the 400% package, so £75 stays in the reader's pocket or funds a second, differently structured claim. The uncapped match spends the whole deposit to produce the same bonus. Expected value per pound of bonus is one lens; expected value per pound deposited is another, and a reader who cares about it should divide the modelled figure by the deposit actually required. On that measure the 400% package at £25 returns about 64p of modelled value per pound deposited, against about 19.5p from the 100% package at £100, and the steep multiple has to be very steep before the gap closes.

Sticky and non-sticky balances

A sticky bonus is bonus money that can never be withdrawn. It sits in the balance, lets the reader wager with it, absorbs losses and displays wins on screen, and disappears the moment a withdrawal is made, taking itself and its trace with it. A non-sticky bonus, sometimes called a parachute, behaves like two wallets: the reader's own deposit is spent first, the bonus waits underneath, and if the deposit runs out the bonus takes over with its wagering attached. The distinction changes the arithmetic more than the rate does.

Take a £100 deposit with a 100% match and run the same £100 of stakes on each structure. On the non-sticky version, the first £100 staked is the reader's own money at a 96% return; the expected position after it is £96 withdrawable, and because the balance is real money the reader can simply withdraw the £96 and forfeit the bonus untouched. The right to walk away is worth real money: it truncates the downside of the clearing run, and it converts the bonus into an option rather than an obligation.

On the sticky version, the same £100 of stakes is charged against the combined balance, and there is no exit before the wagering is done. The bonus cannot be forfeited because it was never withdrawable in the first place, and a withdrawal request mid-run typically voids it along with any winnings it produced. The sticky structure therefore forces the full decay: the reader owns the expected cost of every multiple, with no truncation, in exchange for a headline rate that is usually two or three times the non-sticky norm.

That is the trade, stated plainly. Sticky packages buy their big percentages with the removal of the exit, and the 300% headline that looks generous beside a 100% match is often the same product with the walk-away right taken out. Packages like these are not secretive about it; the term is printed in the bonus conditions, usually under a heading such as bonus balance or phantom bonus. It is simply written in a dialect most readers do not read, and the page's model prices the dialect: where a desk structures its welcome as sticky, the modelled value of the bonus is the decay figure alone, with no option premium, and the deposit side of the ledger should be assumed gone.

One hybrid deserves naming. Some desks let the reader decline the bonus entirely when depositing, which on a non-sticky package is the same as playing with cash. Where that box exists, the arithmetic of a no-bonus session is just the house edge, and setting it beside the modelled bonus value tells the reader exactly what the package adds.

Spin riders and their own locks

Most welcome packages now carry a spins rider: a batch of free spins bolted onto the cash match and advertised as a second headline number. The rider ships with its own terms, its own clock and its own locks, and the locks are usually tighter than the ones around the money. A rider is not a smaller version of the match; it is a different instrument that happens to arrive in the same box.

The first lock is value. A 100-spin batch means 100 spins at a printed value, and 10p is the common setting, which makes the face value £10 whatever the surrounding package suggests. Twenty-pence spins appear on premium riders and five-pence spins on the fat batches behind the biggest headline counts. A reader multiplying the spin count by anything other than the printed value is counting a currency that does not exist.

The second lock is the game. Riders are pinned to one title or one studio's range, usually a current release the operator is promoting, and they expire unused if the game is never opened. Two delivery patterns dominate: the full batch up front, and a drip such as twenty spins a day across five days, where a missed day forfeits that day's spins in most terms.

The third lock is wagering on the winnings. The spins cost nothing, but what they win is credited as bonus funds carrying their own multiple, commonly 35x to 45x, and the multiple charges the winnings rather than the face value. Run the page's model on a 100-spin rider at 10p: £10 of face value returns about £9.60 of winnings at a 96% setting, those winnings then face the same climb as any bonus balance, and 40x on £9.60 leaves about £1.90. A rider that headlines 100 spins is therefore worth about £1.90 on the model, which is the number to set against the excitement of the count.

Many terms add a conversion ceiling, commonly £50 to £100, above which the rider's winnings stop converting regardless of how the spins run. On a 10p rider that ceiling is almost never reached, which tells the reader who the clause is written for: it exists for the high-value riders on deposit-matched deals of this shape, where a fortunate session could otherwise outgrow the printed terms.

Small deposits against the ladder

The minimum deposit is where the welcome ladder meets the reader's actual budget, and the arithmetic at the bottom of the ladder is unforgiving in both directions. A £1 deposit at a 100% match produces a £1 bonus; at 40x that is £40 of turnover and, on the model, about 19.5p of expected value. A £5 deposit produces about 98p of modelled value on the same terms. The absolute sums are tiny, which is the point: the small-deposit guides under this page exist because the floors themselves, £5, £3, £1, are the product being bought, and the bonus is almost beside it.

The direction the arithmetic does turn in the reader's favour is completion. Small floors usually come with proportionally small maxima on what the match will pay, and short ladders clear fast: a £5 bonus at 30x is £150 of turnover, an evening at 20p stakes rather than a week at £2. The share of claims that actually finish is higher on small bonuses for the plain reason that less has to go right before the clock runs out.

Two terms bite hardest at the small end. The first is method exclusion: promotions in this bracket commonly bar particular deposit rails from welcome eligibility, e-wallets most often, and a reader arriving by an excluded rail funds the deposit and receives no match. The second is the maximum bet interacting with stake size: a £2 cap on a £5 bonus is workable, but a reader with a £1 bonus and a 20p habit should check the cap before assuming the ladder is climbable at their usual stakes.

There is also a proportionality trap worth naming. A 400% match on £5 is £20 of bonus, a headline that reads like real money, at a multiple that applies to the whole twenty. Twenty pounds at 45x is £900 of turnover for a modelled £3.19, a worse rate than the £1 bonus at 40x managed on its own ladder. The rate inflates; the decay follows the bonus, not the rate.

The model table

The table below runs the page's decay model across six claim sizes, holding the assumptions in one place: a 100% match, wagering charged on the bonus alone, slots contributing at 100%, a 96% return, and no maximum bet breached. Turnover is the multiple applied to the bonus. The modelled value is what the decay leaves at the end of the climb, and the share kept is that value as a percentage of the bonus won.

Figures are category-typical and modelled; a payment desk's own terms govern.

The share kept is the useful column, because it is size-independent: at a given multiple the model keeps the same fraction whether the bonus is £20 or £500, and only the multiple moves it. That is why a desk's multiple is the one number to check first, before the rate, the cap or the rider.

The market, ranges by licence

The table below sets out the welcome landscape a British reader shops in: rows from UK-licensed operators as the baseline, then rows from desks that hold no UK licence, which is the bracket this page costs. Every figure is a range compiled from operator-published terms at the time of writing, because a single promotion would be stale before it was proofread. Read the ranges as the shape of each category, not as a promise from any one desk.

Figures are category-typical ranges compiled from operator-published terms at the time of writing, not quotes of any single promotion. Rows carrying a UK licence are the British baseline shown for comparison; none of them are claimable at the offshore offers this page discusses.

Two patterns carry the comparison. The British rows buy their lighter terms with a licensed framework: lower multiples, smaller headline sums, and rails that stop at debit cards and approved wallets. The offshore rows buy bigger rates and bigger caps with everything that framework would have provided, and credit cards reappearing among the rails is the visible sign of it. The page's model exists to price that trade, not to pretend it is not there.

What a UK licence would have bought you

Every row above labelled No UK licence marks the same gap, and the gap is best described not as a list of rules but as a set of protections a British licence would have put around the reader. Name them one at a time.

Gamstop comes first. A licence means the operator participates in the national self-exclusion scheme, so a reader who excludes themselves is excluded across every British-licensed site in one action, and the operator is obliged to enforce it. Desks outside the scheme run their own exclusion tools or none; a self-exclusion there binds that desk alone, if it binds at all, and does not follow the reader anywhere else.

IBAS comes second. Disputes with a licensed operator that cannot be settled directly go to the Independent Betting Adjudication Service, which examines the terms and issues a binding ruling the operator must honour. A reader at an unlicensed desk has the operator's own complaints process and nothing beyond it; the terms are interpreted by the party that wrote them.

The credit card ban is the third, in force since 14 April 2020: licensed operators may not accept credit cards for gambling, a rule aimed at the specific harm of borrowing to bet. The rails columns above show the ban at work in the British rows and its absence in the offshore ones. A credit card funding an offshore deposit is a loan funding a wager, with interest accruing from the day it is spent.

Tax is the fourth, and it is less visible. Remote Gaming Duty takes 21% of a licensed operator's gross gaming yield, rising to 22% from April 2027, and that cost is priced into the lighter offers the British rows advertise. A desk outside the duty pays none of it, which is part of how the 200% and 400% headlines are funded. The reader is not taxed directly, but the reader is buying from a business that contributes nothing to the British system whose costs the comparison rests on.

Affordability checks are the fifth. Licensed operators must intervene where spending patterns suggest harm, from signposted limits up to frictionless checks that can pause play, and the obligation is enforceable. An unlicensed desk may offer deposit limits as a courtesy; nothing requires it to notice, and nothing requires it to act on what it notices.

None of this is an accusation that an offshore offer breaks a rule; without a licence there is no rule to break, which is precisely the problem stated plainly. The protections are purchased with the licence, and a reader opting into deals of this shape is declining the purchase.

Cost it yourself

The calculator below runs the page's decay model on any claim the reader is weighing: enter the deposit, the rate, the cap, the multiple and the return setting, and it returns the turnover and the modelled value left. Change the return setting to test a games mix with a lower contribution, and change the multiple to see what each extra x costs in pounds.

Two inputs deserve care. The wagering base should match the terms exactly, because deposit plus bonus doubles the turnover against the same decay, and the cap should be checked against the deposit entered: where the rate times the deposit exceeds the cap, the bonus is the cap, not the product. The model is deliberately simple; its job is to turn a printed multiple into a pound figure a reader can weigh against the deposit they were about to make.