Last updated 18 September 2026.
Every casino on this site carries a mark out of five and a place in the ranking. This page is where those come from: the five things we check, who checks them, what we refuse to list at any price, and how the commission we earn does and does not touch the order.
The Five Things We Score
Every review, and every row of our comparison tables, scores the same five criteria out of five, to one decimal place. They are not five ways of saying “is it good”; each one is a different question, and a casino can be excellent at one and poor at the next.
- Bonus Value: what the welcome offer is worth once the wagering multiple, the maximum cashout, the expiry and the game weighting are read in full. This is where most offers lose marks.
- Game Range: how many games the casino carries, how many studios they come from, and the RTPs it publishes.
- Payments & Payouts: the methods in both directions, the minimums, the published payout rate and how long the operator says a withdrawal takes.
- Safety & Licence: checked on the Gambling Commission’s public register, not on the badge in the site’s own footer, plus the deposit limits, time-outs and self-exclusion the operator offers.
- Support: which channels exist, whether they are staffed around the clock, and the response time the operator states for each.
A criterion nobody has scored yet is left out of the matrix, not shown as a zero. If a review shows four rows instead of five, that review is unfinished.
Where the Overall Mark Comes From
The mark at the top of a review is not typed into the review. It is held in one place (the ranking table), and the review, the sidebar list and the operator’s position all read it from there. That is deliberate: it keeps the number in the review and the position in the table from drifting apart.
The five criteria are the reviewer’s judgement, not the output of a formula. We do not publish a weighting, because we do not use one: a casino that fails on licence and safety is not rescued by a good app, and no set of weights would express that honestly.
Where the Figures Come From
- The Gambling Commission’s public register: licence number, licensee name and current status. This is the only source we accept for whether an operator is licensed.
- The operator’s own published pages: bonus terms, banking pages, stake and withdrawal limits, game counts. Where the operator and a third party disagree, we say so in the review instead of picking the flattering one.
- The App Store and Google Play: ratings and review counts as the stores publish them, with the date they were read.
- The operator’s help and support pages: the withdrawal times the operator states, the support channels it lists and the response times it gives for each, recorded as the operator’s own figures.
Figures move. A review carries the date it was last checked, and a figure we could not verify is left blank, not filled with a plausible number.
What We Will Not List
Some things are not a scoring question. They are the reason an operator or an offer does not appear here at all:
- Any operator without a current Gambling Commission licence, whatever it pays.
- Any welcome offer with a wagering requirement above 10x, the British maximum.
- Credit cards as deposit methods, which are banned for gambling in Great Britain. Cryptocurrency is not banned, but no UK-licensed casino we list accepts it.
- Language suggesting an outcome is guaranteed, that an offer is free of risk, or that gambling is a way to make money.
- Imagery or wording that would appeal to anyone under 18.
These are the rules we apply to ourselves as well as to the operators. If you find a page of ours that breaks one, it is a mistake rather than a policy, and we would like to know.
How the Commission Works
We are paid by the operators we list when a reader opens an account through one of our links. That is disclosed at the top of every page and again in the footer, and it does not change the terms you get: the offer is the operator’s, not ours.
What it does not buy is the order. No operator has paid for a position, and a commercial arrangement has never moved one up the table. The check on that is published: the five scores are on every review, the overall mark comes from one source, and the licence is one you can verify yourself in under a minute.
Who Writes and Who Checks
Reviews are written by a named person and fact-checked by a second one, and both names are on the page with the date.
- Tom Whitfield, Casino Editor: the reviews, the scoring and the ranking.
- Helen Marsden, Compliance & Responsible Gambling Reviewer: the figures, the bonus terms and everything this site says about safer gambling.
More about both on our about us page.
When We Update
A review is re-checked when the operator changes a welcome offer, when a licence status changes on the register, and on a scheduled pass regardless. The date on the review is the date it was last checked, not the date it was first written.
Telling Us We Are Wrong
If a figure on this site is out of date or simply wrong, tell us through our contact page and name the page and the figure. Corrections are made openly, on the page itself.
See also our responsible gambling page, our terms and conditions and our privacy policy.