A UK Gambling Commission licence buys you three concrete things. The operator has to take part in GamStop. It cannot take your credit card. And it has to tell you what would happen to the money sitting in your account if the company went under — as a published rating, which almost nobody looks at.
What the licence does not do is put your balance out of reach when a business fails, and it does not make anybody’s bonus terms kinder. It also attaches to a specific domain rather than to a brand name. That last point is why a proper licence check takes thirty seconds and starts in your address bar.
Your balance is covered by a rating, not a promise
This is the part of licensing that gets least attention and deserves most. The Commission requires operators holding customer money to disclose a customer-funds protection rating, and it fixes the wording. There are four permitted descriptions.
| Rating, in the Commission’s own words | What it means if the business becomes insolvent |
|---|---|
| Not protected – no segregation | Your money is not protected. It sits with the company’s own funds. |
| Not protected – segregation of customer funds | Held in separate accounts, but those accounts still form part of the business’s assets. |
| Medium protection | The business has made arrangements to protect your money — but the Commission states plainly that getting it back is not assured. |
| High protection | Held separately in an independent trust account. |
Read the middle two again. “Segregated” sounds like safety and is not: on insolvency, segregated customer money still counts among the company’s assets. And “medium protection” is the Commission’s own term for arrangements that may not return your money. That is not our scepticism — it is the regulator’s guidance on customer funds saying so on its player-facing page.
The action here is dull and effective. Do not leave a balance sitting in a casino account because it is convenient. Withdraw what you are not using. The rating tells you how much that habit is worth.
Where to find the rating for the site you use
Every operator holding customer funds has to disclose its rating to customers, so the wording will be somewhere in the terms, the help centre or an account-information page. Search the terms page for “protection” or “insolvency” and you will usually land on it in one go.
We have not checked the rating brand by brand, so we are not going to tell you what any site on this website carries. Saying “medium protection” about a casino we have not read that page for would be exactly the sort of invented detail we exist to avoid. Look it up on the site itself, and if you cannot find it, ask support and treat a vague answer as an answer.
The licence belongs to a company, and it covers a list of domains
Here is the thing most licence-check advice misses. A UKGC licence is issued to a company, not to a website, and the register records which domains that company has declared against it.
We downloaded the Commission’s full register on 27 August 2026 and counted. There are 2,653 licensed businesses. Just 142 companies hold an active remote casino licence, and 67 hold remote bingo. Between them, 2,242 domains are listed.
So the arithmetic of the UK market is not one brand, one licence. It is a small number of licensed companies operating a very large number of sites. Jumpman Gaming Limited lists 229 domains against a single licence — 18 active, 131 white label and 80 inactive. ProgressPlay Limited lists 191. The median licensee lists exactly one.
That is why the brand name is a useless thing to search. The Sun Play carries a newspaper’s name on the door; the licence behind it is Jumpman Gaming Limited’s, account 39175. Crystal Slots, Pirate Slots and Aladdin Slots sit on the same licence as each other and as thirty-odd more. Search the register for “Crystal Slots” as a company and you will find nothing, and you might draw entirely the wrong conclusion from that. The full set of brands on that one licence is on our Jumpman casinos page.
The reliable test is simple: a domain not listed against a licence is not covered by it, whatever the footer says.
The thirty-second check, in the order that catches problems
Two ways to do it. Both start with the exact domain in your browser’s address bar, not the logo at the top of the page.
The public register, for one site.
- Copy the operating company name and account number from the site’s footer.
- Open the Gambling Commission’s public register and search that company name.
- On the company’s page, open its list of domain names and find the exact domain you are on.
- Check the licence status is active and that it covers the right activity — remote casino, remote bingo, or both.
The bulk download, if you check more than one site. The Commission publishes the whole register as four CSVs — businesses, licences, domain names and trading names — joined on the account number. Open the domain-names file, press Ctrl-F, paste the domain. That genuinely is a thirty-second job, and it is what we do before any site gets a page here.
If the domain is absent, stop. A footer stating a licence number is not evidence; the register is.
What “white label” and “inactive” mean on the register
Two labels catch people out.
White label means the domain is operated on someone else’s licence — the licensee carries the regulatory responsibility, and the brand on the front is a partner. It is legitimate, it is common, and 131 of Jumpman’s 229 domains carry that status. It also explains the mismatch when a familiar consumer name fronts a casino: the company you would complain to is not the one in the logo.
Inactive is the one to act on. Across the whole register, 805 of the 2,242 listed domains — 36% — are marked inactive. That status is operator-supplied, and in our own checks inactive domains reliably corresponded to sites that had closed. A live-looking site whose domain is marked inactive on the register is a reason to close the tab rather than deposit.
The three protections the licence definitely does give you
We will only list what we can point at a source for.
No credit cards. Gambling with a credit card has been banned in Great Britain since 14 April 2020, under licence condition 6.1.2 of the LCCP. The Commission’s stated reason was research finding that 22% of online gamblers using credit cards were classed as problem gamblers. The same condition pushes responsibility onto operators for e-wallets: they may accept one only where the provider can assure them it blocks credit-card funding.
GamStop. Every gambling business licensed in Great Britain must take part — a licence requirement since 31 March 2020 — and operators must refresh their self-exclusion lists every 24 hours. Registration is free and you choose six months, one year, five years, or five years with auto-renewal. It cannot be lifted inside the period you picked, and after that there is a minimum 24-hour cooling-off period during which the exclusion stays live. Worth knowing: a GAMSTOP exclusion stays on record for seven years after it expires unless you ask for it to be removed, and the Commission itself warns that minor differences in your registered details “will mean that you can still gamble” — so keep them current.
A published funds rating. Covered above. It is a disclosure duty, not a safety net.
What the licence does not touch: the offer terms
A licence says nothing about whether an offer is any good. The terms still do all the work, and they vary wildly on one licence.
Take the family above. Pirate Slots runs a 100% match up to £200 at 10x wagering. Crystal Slots runs a wheel-based welcome whose segment odds the operator does not publish. Aladdin Slots publishes a no-deposit offer with a £50 conversion cap — and both 10x and 65x wagering figures appear against no-deposit wording on that site. One licence, three quite different propositions.
Two numbers to check yourself. Wagering: £50 of bonus at 10x needs £500 of stakes; the same £50 at 65x needs £3,250. You can run your own figures on our wagering calculator. Conversion cap: several of these sites cap bonus conversion at your lifetime deposits, up to £250. Deposit £10, build the bonus balance to £400, clear the wagering, and you convert £10. No calculator saves you from that one — only reading it does.
While we are at it: UK players do not pay tax on gambling winnings. The duties sit with the operator, charged on its profits from UK customers. We are not quoting a duty rate here, because the rates have changed and we have not verified a current figure.
The gaps we are not filling in
Three, stated plainly. We have not checked which customer-funds protection rating any individual brand carries, so we never state one. We cannot tell you the segment odds on a Mega Reel-style wheel, because no operator running one publishes them. And a register entry tells you a domain is licensed on the date you looked — nothing more. That is why every review in our casino list carries a checked date, and why we re-read the register rather than the footer.
A licence is a floor, not a recommendation. It is worth checking precisely because it is the one claim on a casino homepage you can verify yourself in half a minute.