How We Rate Bookmakers
The licence is checked on the public register before anything else, and every offer we print is dated.
On this page
Not the padlock icon in the footer. Not the line of small print claiming regulation. That is the order of operations, and it is deliberate. Everything else, the welcome offer, the bet builder, the withdrawal times, is downstream of a question that takes two minutes to answer and that a surprising number of comparison sites skip.
Licence first, because it is the gatekeeper
The Gambling Commission publishes registers of licensed businesses, licensed individuals, licensed premises and regulatory action. Its own guidance points readers to the public register as the place to search for licensed individuals and premises, which is a polite way of saying: stop taking the operator's word for it. The business register carries a detail most casual users never look at. Domain names are listed with a status: "Active", "Inactive" or "White label". The downloadable business-licence register, published as a spreadsheet, shows the same treatment, with entries marked "Active" and "White Label". Individual domain-name pages do the same thing, one domain at a time, each with its own status field.
There is also a machine-readable route. A dataset on data.gov.uk called "Operator licence register" describes itself as "a register of all gambling operators licensed by the Commission" and states that it is updated daily. That matters for anyone maintaining a table of dozens of brands: a licence that lapsed last month will not announce itself on the operator's homepage. So the check is simple. Find the domain, not just the company. If the domain is not listed as active, the brand does not go in the table, however generous the sign-up offer looks. White label is where people get sloppy.
Reading the welcome offer line by line
Qualifying stake, minimum odds, the expiry window on any free bet, and whether the stake comes back with a winning free bet: those four things decide whether a headline number is worth anything.
Product, banking and safer gambling
Sports coverage, market depth, bet builder, in-play, cash out and app performance all sit in the scoring, as do deposit and withdrawal methods and how long a payout actually takes. None of that is published here as a fixed weighting until the methodology is pinned to a source. Safer-gambling tools are the section most often written on autopilot. Deposit limits, time-outs, reality checks and self-exclusion are not identical across operators, and the search material reviewed on 18 September 2026 did not produce a primary-source Gambling Commission page setting out those requirements.
Commission, and what it does not change
Operators pay commission when a reader signs up through a link here. That is revenue, paid by the operator. It does not change the price the reader pays, and it does not reorder the table. Offer terms come second, and only for operators already verified there.