The four locks on a no deposit bonus

A no deposit bonus is a balance a desk credits before any of your money has moved. The grant lands in the account, the account behaves like any other, and the pounds on the screen look spendable. They are not, not yet. The free balance sits behind four locks, and the terms of the offer exist to describe them: a balance lock that keeps the money in the bonus wallet, a wagering lock that sets the turnover, a cap that trims the withdrawal and a clock that ends the arrangement if you are slow.

The balance lock comes first because the other three depend on it. Bonus money almost never sits in the same wallet as deposited cash. The desk keeps two balances, sometimes three, and the bonus balance is the restricted one: it can be staked, but it cannot be withdrawn. Stake order matters as well. Some desks spend bonus funds first and real money second, some do the reverse, and a few treat winnings from a bonus stake as bonus money too, which extends the lock without the headline saying a word about it.

What the lock means in practice is simple to state and easy to forget. While the balance is locked, a winning session changes the number on the screen and nothing else. The withdrawable figure stays at zero, or at whatever the deposited balance happens to be. Conversion is the unlock: when the wagering condition is met, bonus money becomes real money, and only then does a withdrawal request mean anything at all.

The remaining three locks attach to that conversion. The wagering lock sets how much has to be staked before the balance unlocks. The cap sets how much of the unlocked balance survives the withdrawal. The clock sets how long you have to do any of it, and it is the lock most often forgotten between signup and the first session. Each gets a section of its own below, because each behaves differently in the terms, and the differences are where the money goes.

A £10 grant at 40x, worked

Start with the grant this bracket prints most often: £10, credited against nothing but a registered account. Wagering at 40x puts the turnover at £400, and that is the number to carry out of this section: forty pounds of stakes for every pound of free balance, all of it logged before the balance changes character. Against a typical bet limit of £2 to £5 a spin, that is a long relationship with one offer, not an evening.

The model then asks what survives the climb. It assumes a 96% return game, the ordinary published setting for online slots, and compresses that return into a single conversion term: 0.96 raised to the power of the wagering multiple. 0.96 to the power 40 works out at about 0.195. Two assumptions do the rest of the work. The model recycles winnings back into play rather than banking them, so the float it tracks across the ladder is larger than the grant alone. And it prices the accounts that finish the ladder rather than every attempt, which is why the modelled figure can sit above the grant: most attempts never convert at all. Run the example through and the balance at conversion comes to about £19.50 before the cap trims anything above its ceiling. At that figure the common caps of £50 to £100 leave the balance standing, and the trim reaches only a run that finishes hotter than the model expects.

The chart plots the conversion term across the multiples this bracket tends to ask, with the 40x bar highlighted. The table under it runs the same assumptions across the grant sizes desks commonly print. The turnover column is the four-locks arithmetic in its plainest form, and the conversion factor is the share of the balance the model expects to survive the full ladder.

Read the pair as a shape, not a promise. Turnover scales with the grant. The conversion factor falls as the multiple rises. Between them they explain why a headline grant and a real withdrawal are different numbers, and why two offers with the same face value can cost out differently. The model is deliberately crude: it carries no variance, no game weighting and no deposit-to-release rule, and a payment desk's own terms can move the answer in either direction.

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

The wagering lock: base and multiple

The wagering lock is the heavy one, and the first question is the base: forty times what? The base varies more than the headline suggests. Most desks in this bracket apply the multiple to the bonus balance alone, so a £10 grant at 40x is £400 of turnover. Some apply it to the bonus plus anything deposited into the account, which can double the workload without changing the headline. Spins offers usually apply the multiple to winnings rather than to the value of the spins, a quieter base that reads better than it behaves.

The multiple itself runs from the low twenties to the high forties in promotions of this bracket, with 35x to 45x the common ground and the figure this page's model uses. The difference is not cosmetic. At a 96% return, the modelled conversion factor falls from about 0.44 at 20x to about 0.20 at 40x and about 0.16 at 45x. Every extra multiple steepens the climb, and none of it is hidden: the number is printed in the bonus terms, a line or two below the grant.

Weighting comes next, and it is where quiet losses live. Slots usually count in full against the turnover. Table games, live dealer tables and a growing list of crash-style titles count at 10%, or not at all. A player who takes a locked balance to blackjack discovers the wagering meter barely moves, and the terms listed the exclusion all along. Feature buys, jackpot titles and some high-volatility games carry their own exclusions in the same paragraph.

The last piece is the maximum bet while the lock is on. Desks at this end of the market tend to print a ceiling of £2 to £5 a spin or hand while wagering is live. Breach it, deliberately or by accident on a feature buy priced above the line, and the usual remedy is forfeiture of the balance and anything won with it. It is the most common way a convertible bonus dies, and checking it costs less than any other line in the terms.

The cap and what it trims

The cap is the lock that acts at the end. A conversion ceiling of £50 to £100 is common in this bracket, printed as a maximum withdrawal from no-deposit winnings or a maximum conversion of the bonus balance. Everything above the line disappears at the point of conversion: a balance that finishes at £140 under a £100 cap pays out £100, and the remaining £40 is removed rather than held for later.

Desks frame the same cut in different words. Some cap the winnings from the bonus, some cap the withdrawal, some cap the bonus at conversion, and a few cap per week rather than per offer. The mechanics land in the same place. The cap does not care how the balance was built, whether by a long grind at the bet limit or by one feature round; it cuts at the same figure either way.

Reading the cap is a two-minute job. Look for the words maximum conversion, maximum withdrawal or winnings cap in the bonus terms, then note whether the figure applies per bonus, per account or per calendar week. The three versions read alike and behave differently, and the difference shows up exactly when a balance has cleared the line for the first time.

The cap also has a neighbour worth naming. Plenty of desks require a deposit before any withdrawal at all, capped or otherwise, even when the bonus itself needed no deposit. That rule sits outside the cap's wording and catches players who read only the headline. Where a deposit is needed to release no-deposit winnings, the lock count quietly becomes five, and the fifth lock is the one that asks for your own money. Set against the worked example, the cap is silent at £19.50 and loud above £100: it trims the accounts that beat the model, which is worth knowing before the run rather than after it.

Expiry clocks and tranche splits

The expiry is the quietest lock and the one that wastes the most grants. Seven days is the typical window in this bracket; some desks print three, some print thirty, and a few start the clock at registration rather than at the moment the bonus is claimed, which shortens the useful window without changing the printed number. A clock that begins at signup has already taken a day or two by the time a new account has verified an email, found the games and worked out what the wagering meter is asking.

Tranche splits add a second clock to the first. Offers of this sort sometimes divide the grant: £5 today, £5 in three days, each piece carrying its own wagering and its own deadline. The split reads as generosity and behaves as a retention device. Miss the second tranche's claim window and the second half is gone, and in some sets of terms the turnover already logged against the full grant goes with it.

The endgame matters more than the start. A clock that runs out mid-wagering usually forfeits the remaining bonus balance and, in most sets of terms, the winnings generated with it. Partial progress rarely pays anything, which is why the expiry paragraph deserves a slower read than the grant paragraph above it. The same paragraph usually names the games that remain eligible as the deadline nears, and it is the one place the terms admit what the offer is worth when time runs out: nothing.

Against the worked example, the clock is what turns £400 of turnover from an amount into a schedule. Inside a seven-day window the stakes have to fit around work, sleep and the bet limit, and a desk that starts the clock early has quietly shortened the schedule before the first spin. A longer window is worth real money on packages like these, and it never appears in the headline.

How the wider market lines up

The table below lines up category-typical ranges from two licence classes: British-licensed operations first, as the domestic baseline, then offshore desks of the sort this page discusses. The British rows show matched offers rather than free grants, because that is what the licensed market tends to print. Read every column as a range compiled from published terms, never as a quote of one live promotion, and treat the operator's own page as the only version that counts.

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 columns do most of the work. The wagering column shows the domestic baseline sitting lower, and the payment rails column shows credit cards present offshore and absent at home, which is the ban of April 2020 doing its job. The payout window column is where expectations most often need resetting: a British desk publishing one to two days is ordinary, and an offshore desk's published window is a promise with no regulator behind it.

What a UK licence would have bought you

A British licence does not promise good terms, and this page is not an argument for claiming more bonuses. It is a measure of the gap. A desk holding a UK Gambling Commission licence operates inside protections the offshore end of the market does not carry, and the differences are concrete enough to list.

Gamstop comes first. Registration is free, covers every British-licensed operator at once, and is the self-exclusion route most people mean when they want out. An offshore desk sits outside that register: closing an account there closes nothing elsewhere, and the site has no obligation to check the register at all. For anyone managing their gambling, that single difference outweighs every term on this page.

IBAS is the second difference. A licensed operator belongs to an independent adjudication service, so a disputed withdrawal has somewhere to go that is neither the operator's own support queue nor a regulator's mailbox. The Commission's complaint route runs alongside it, and behind both sit verified games, audited returns and affordability checks designed to catch harm early.

The credit card ban is the third. Gambling on credit cards has been banned in Britain since 14 April 2020, so a licensed desk cannot take the one rail that turns a loss into a debt. The offshore rows in the table above list credit cards without comment, and that one line is the licence gap in miniature.

There is a fiscal marker too. The Remote Gambling Duty paid by British operators is set to rise from 21% to 22% in April 2027, a small change in itself, and a reminder that the licensed market is taxed, supervised and amended in public. The offshore end of the market answers to none of that, which is precisely what makes its offers cheap to print and slow to police.

The calculator runs the same arithmetic on your own numbers: the grant in front of you, the multiple it carries, the cap it prints and the days it allows. Change any prefill and the turnover, the modelled conversion and the capped figure move with it. It prices one offer at a time, which is the only honest way to price any of them.