Matched deposit offers
The classic structure: the casino matches your first deposit by a percentage up to a cap — "100% up to £100" means deposit £100, receive £100 in bonus funds. Two things decide whether that's generous or hollow. First, the wagering requirement attached to the bonus (more on that below). Second, whether your own deposited money gets locked into the wagering too — offers that ring-fence your cash from the bonus are meaningfully fairer, and UK rules have pushed most operators in that direction.
Free spins
A set number of spins on a specific slot the operator chooses, at a fixed stake per spin. Whatever the spins win usually arrives as bonus funds with their own wagering requirement, not as withdrawable cash. The practical questions: which game, how many spins, what stake, and is there a cap on what the spins can generate? Fifty spins with winnings capped at £20 and 40x wagering is a very different offer from fifty spins with no cap and 10x — and both get advertised with the same headline number.
Cashback
A percentage of your net losses over a period returned to you, either as cash or as bonus funds. Cash-form cashback with no wagering attached is the most honest promotion in the industry; bonus-fund cashback with wagering is just a smaller matched offer wearing a different name. The distinction sits in one line of the terms, so find it.
No-deposit offers
A small amount of bonus funds or spins for registering, no payment needed. These are rare in the UK market, small when they appear, and typically carry the strictest terms of any offer type — high wagering, low maximum withdrawal, short expiry. Reasonable as a way to look around a site; not a route to meaningful winnings, whatever the advert implies.
Wagering requirements: the term that decides everything
A wagering requirement is the number of times bonus funds must be staked before winnings from them can be withdrawn. The arithmetic is worth doing once, slowly: a £50 bonus at 35x wagering means £1,750 in total stakes before anything unlocks. Whether the bonus survives that staking depends entirely on luck — the requirement doesn't make winning impossible, but it makes the bonus worth far less than its face value.
Four more terms travel with the wagering number, and each can quietly change an offer's value:
- Game weighting
- Slots usually contribute 100% of each stake towards wagering; table games and live casino often contribute 10% or nothing. If you play blackjack, a "slots-weighted" bonus may be near-worthless to you.
- Maximum bet while wagering
- Most offers cap stakes (commonly around £5) while a bonus is active. Exceeding it — even accidentally — can void the bonus and its winnings.
- Expiry
- Bonuses lapse, sometimes in as little as 48 hours for spins, more commonly 7 to 30 days. An offer you can't realistically wager in time was never really available to you.
- Maximum win caps
- Some offers cap what bonus play can ever pay out. A cap isn't automatically unfair, but it belongs in your mental value calculation, not in a footnote you skipped.
How this feeds our scores
On the scorecards we grade offer type and clarity, not size. A modest offer with readable terms and fair weighting scores above a headline-grabbing one buried in conditions. UK advertising rules require significant terms to be shown with the offer — an operator that does this well is telling you something about how it treats customers generally.