Jurnii: What has happened to casino bonuses since remote gaming duty hit 40%?
Six months after remote gaming duty almost doubled, the clearest response on UK casino sites is not fewer promotions but smaller ones, as marketing intelligence platform Jurnii 360 explores
On 1 April 2026, remote gaming duty rose from 21% to 40%. For casino operators, that nearly doubles the tax on every pound of margin, and bonus budgets were the obvious place to look for savings.
Jurnii 360 tracks every promotion and price boost across all UK operators each day. We compared March, the last month before the rise, with the eight weeks that followed, and with the period from late May to mid-October. The pattern is consistent: casino operators rationed value, not volume.
A natural experiment
The sportsbook gives us a control group. General betting duty stays at 15% until April 2027, when it moves to 25% for everything except UK racing. The same operators, on the same sites and in the same months, had no new tax reason to change their sports promotions.
So, where casino moved and sports did not, the duty is the likeliest cause. Where both moved together, it is more likely the calendar: the end of the football season, the World Cup and the summer Flat season.
In the eight weeks after the rise, the average casino brand ran 26% more existing-customer bonus offers on-site each day than in March. Sports betting, on the same sites, slipped 2%.
The lift has faded but is not gone: from late May to October, casino was still 17% above March, sport 1%. Almost all of the extra casino offers were drops worth £1 or less, or loyalty-coin offers with no stated value. Offers worth more than £1 did not increase.
Each one worth less
Measured brand by brand, the typical casino operator’s existing-customer offer was worth 16% less in the eight weeks after the rise, and 19% less from late May. Across the eight casino brands with enough valued offers, the average fell from £5.66 in March to £4.25, and it has stayed there.
The mix explains much of it. In April and May, 53% of existing-customer casino offers were worth £1 or less, up from 42%, and the median offer halved from £2 to £1 before returning to £2. Sport’s median stayed at £5 throughout. Five of the eight casino brands cut value in the first eight weeks; six were below March from late May.
What didn’t move
None of this touched acquisition. Every casino welcome ‘free spins’ offer live in March was still live from late May onwards, including bet365’s £50, BetMGM’s £40, Sky Bet’s £25 and Unibet’s £20. The median welcome free spins offer fell to £10 later in the year only because more brands added new £10 offers, not because existing ones were cut.
The control group behaved as a control group should. Across the 10 sportsbooks Jurnii tracked for daily price boosts, the average margin conceded on a single boost edged up from 2.98 to 3.13 percentage points in the eight weeks after 1 April. The typical boost rose from 17.9% to 18.7%, and singles were boosted more often, not less.
Only bet365, Betfred and William Hill gave away less margin on singles in that window. From late May, the average eased to 2.65 points as Coral and Ladbrokes moved to narrower boosts.
Jackpots gained ground at the expense of prize draws. Their share of live casino offers rose from 2.4% in March to 4.7% from late May, and the number of brands promoting a casino jackpot went from four to seven by May. Together with draws and drops they held at about a quarter of the shelf. Many of these are pooled or network jackpots, such as Unibet’s £1m Hot Drops, rather than operator-funded bonuses.
One apparent signal does not survive scrutiny. New casino launches fell 22% in the eight weeks after 1 April, but sportsbook launches fell 43% over the same period. That points to the calendar, with March carrying Cheltenham, not to the duty.
What it means
The casino response isn’t entirely unexpected. Headline value that attracts new players was protected; the everyday drip to existing players got cheaper. Many small offers keep a brand visible in the lobby, but they shift cost from the size of each offer to how many players take one up.
Mitch Vidler is chief commercial officer at Jurnii, bringing extensive experience across marketing effectiveness, commercial growth, data and analytics.
He leads several products at Jurnii, including 360, Jurnii’s promotional intelligence platform for global sports betting and casino markets.