Looking for the best casino offers available in the UK? Then we are here to help! This page explains how to find the best online casino bonuses available to players in the UK, as well as how to make the most of them.
There are many different kinds of casino welcome offers, and they can be a little confusing, especially if you are new to the world of online casinos. Below we take a look at all the many different types of online casino bonuses, with an example explanation of each type.
Most online casinos will reward you for making an initial deposit at their site. A 100% deposit bonus, for example, will award you the same amount of bonus cash matching the size of that first deposit. A 200% bonus will double it, and a 50% bonus will award you half the size of your deposit in bonus money.
Bonus money cannot be withdrawn and can only be used to play games at the site. Once you have used your bonus money, you will have an amount of winnings in your account. However, those winnings cannot be withdrawn until you’ve met wagering requirements. We explain fully about wagering requirements further down this page.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch, but there is such a thing as a no deposit bonus … or at least there used to be. To claim a no deposit bonus you’d only need to complete your registration at the site offering it – that’s all, no need for a deposit!
However, no deposit bonus deals usually came with very high wagering expectations which you can understand as the online casino offering the bonus was practically giving away money for free! Such bonuses seem to have fallen out of favour at online casinos, so you might find it impossible to locate one.
Free spins offers award you spins on slots that you don’t have to pay for yourself. Such free spins have a value, which is usually set around £0.10. You may be limited to using your free spins on a specific slot, a range of slots, or any slot the site offering the free spins has in its slotting catalogue.
Free spins must be used within a specific time frame when they will be removed from your account. Once you have used up your free spins, any winnings will be paid as bonus money. Bonus money can only be used once you have met wagering requirements.
On some days at an online casino, the slots just won’t spin wins for you, the cards will never fall right, and you’ll end the day in the red. If the casino you are playing at has a cashback offer, then you can at least get back some of those losses!
If a casino has a 20% cashback offer, then it will pay you back 20% of your losses over the previous week. You will have though to meet a ‘minimum loss’ threshold. For this example, if your weekly losses totalled £30, you would get back £6.
Most online casinos offering this deal will pay your cashback as bonus cash, which means that wagering requirements will be attached. Others, however, will pay cashback directly as cash that you can withdraw without hassle.
Online casinos love loyal players who visit their casino time and time again as opposed to those who pop in to claim a welcome bonus and are never seen again. If you become a regular player at an online casino, you can expect rewards for your loyalty.
These are bespoke bonuses that you will learn about in your casino inbox. It could be a deposit bonus, a free spins deal, an exclusive cashback offer – anything really! The best online casinos in the UK are those that like to keep their loyal customers happy.
If you have buddies who are regular online casino players and you uncover a brand new online casino with delicious casino welcome offers, you might want to share the news. Well, online casinos want you to share the news, too, which is why they might also offer a ‘refer a friend’ bonus.
Of course, it takes more than telling a friend to receive such a bonus. To get your bonus, your referred chum must sign up with the casino and make a minimum first deposit. Once they’ve completed those tasks, your refer-a-friend bonus should appear in your casino inbox!
Even new casino offers come with the dreaded wagering, but if you are really fortunate, you may sometimes find a no wager bonus. With such a bonus, any winnings you make from your bonus money are added to your account as cash, without the need for any wagering. You are then free to spend that money however you like at the casino or withdraw it to spend elsewhere.
A deposit bonus, in particular, may come as a multi-part bonus. This will mean that you can claim a bonus on your first two, three, four or even five deposits – it depends upon what the casino offers UK players.
A multi-part bonus could be broken down as follows:
You’ll find that each part of your multi-part bonus is likely to have the same T&Cs in terms of minimum deposit, wagering and expiry dates. It is, though, always best to check the terms of any bonus, just to make sure.
The vast majority of online casino offers come with wagering requirements. Those can be confusing, especially to the online casino newb, so we are going to explain it in full here.
Wagering is added to bonuses so that online casinos don’t go bankrupt! Without wagering, online casinos would be handing out free money, potentially to thousands of people, and no online gambling site has the funds to do that.
Wagering is usually set as a multiple of the bonus and/or deposit. Let’s say, for example, a £100 deposit bonus has a wagering requirement of 35x for the bonus only. This would mean a wagering value of £3,500. If the wagering was for the bonus and deposit, the wagering expectation would rise to £7,000 (35 x £100 deposit plus 35 x £100 bonus).
Game weightings or contributions run in tandem with wagering. For slots and scratchcards, the contribution is typically 100 per cent. That means if you have £100 of wagering and you spin a slot for £1, then you have £99 of wagering remaining.
Casino table games may only make a 10 per cent contribution to wagering. So, if you play a hand of blackjack for £1, only £0.10 (10 per cent of £1) will be taken from your wagering necessity. Note that legally, casinos MUST have at least one type of game that contributes 100% to wagering.
Let’s now look through a real-world example of wagering using a typical casino deposit bonus scenario:
Let’s say we deposited £1,000 and obtained a £2,000 bonus for a total of £3,000. The bonus terms state that a quarter of our bonus will be released for every 15x wager of our deposit, so as soon as we wager £15,000, we will get a £500 bonus.
The terms might also say that only slots contribute 100% to the wagering requirements for this bonus. We could, therefore, play 3,000 spins at £5 per spin. At the end of our session, we might be up to £17,000 and could now add that £500 bonus to our winnings!
We would only have to repeat the process another three times to completely unlock the full value of the first deposit bonus.
One aspect of any bonus that you will need to check is if any payment methods are excluded. Some online casinos do this to prevent the unscrupulous from claiming the same welcome bonus time and time again, opening numerous accounts at their sites. Common exclusions include eWallets and cryptocurrencies. Debit cards and bank accounts and not normally excluded as no one is likely to go to the trouble of opening several bank accounts (to which debit cards are attached) just to claim the same casino welcome bonus multiple times.
When you make your qualifying deposit at a casino to claim their welcome bonus always make sure you are using a qualifying payment method, else you won’t get your bonus.
Some bonuses are worth more than others, and indeed, some bonuses have such terrible terms and conditions attached that they are completely worthless. How do you distinguish a valuable casino offer from a worthless casino bonus? Here are our tips …
How much value can you get out of a bonus? If the maximum value is too small (say £20 or less), then it’s probably not worth your time. If it’s something outlandish (400 per cent bonus up to £25,000!!!), then it’s probably swathed in unfair terms and conditions, as online casinos simply cannot afford to repeatedly give away so much money. You’ll soon learn how to spot value in online casino bonus deals.
This factor really boils down to personal choice. Just because a bonus is big, it doesn’t shouldn’t mean your piggy bank has to go on a fast. If you just want a tight bonus (say, £20), but that bonus you are considering has a minimum deposit requirement of £50, then it’s just not the right bonus for you.
Nobody likes wagering requirements, but there wouldn’t be very many casino deposit bonus deals if there weren’t any. We’ve already explained about wagering requirements, but what wagering requirements are attached to valuable bonuses? We think ideal wagering requirements sit around 20x for your bonus and deposit, and 40x for a bonus or deposit. The further a bonus diverges from these terms, the less valuable it becomes.
Online casino offers can be brilliant, but only if you are not restricted on the games you can use them on, and the games you can use for wagering. Because slots are usually the only games that contribute 100 per cent to wagering, it makes sense to only play slots while working through a bonus, but as most sites have 1,000+ slots, that’s not a problem. However, it does become a problem if you are restricted to a handful of slots or – even worse – a single slot. The best casino bonuses have as few restrictions as possible.
You may have to thoroughly read through the T&Cs of online casino offers to find this one. Some online casinos will reduce the value of their bonuses by limiting the maximum bet you can place while pursuing wagering – even if the bet you place was not placed to help meet your wagering! If you have £10,000 wagering to get through in three days, then you could play 2,000 slot spins at £5 each. But what if the T&Cs of the bonus stipulate a maximum bet of £0.10? 2,000 spins become 100,000 spins, which is almost impossible to achieve within that three-day limit.
This is another aspect of casino welcome offers that can sometimes be buried deep within T&Cs. An ‘excluded bet’ could be doubling down in blackjack, bet on red/black on roulette or playing any kind of live casino game. The rule with low-value casino free bonus offers is that if you place an ‘excluded bet’ – even by accident, then your bonus is voided and removed from your account! Always take care when reading the T&Cs of any bonus just in case an unsavoury condition such as this has been snuck in!
Even the best casino bonus UK sites put maximum winnings caps on their bonuses – it’s just a question of the cap. Maximum winnings terms are placed on bonus deals to protect the casino – they don’t want someone to win £100,000 using bonus money as the online casino would suffer a substantial loss. We feel that 10 times the bonus amount is a satisfactory cap on winnings, so for a £1,000 bonus, that would be £10,000. If you do win above the maximum winnings cap then your excess winnings are voided and ‘donated’ back to the casino.
Time waits for no man, and neither do casino welcome bonus expiry dates. You will have three time limits to contend with – the time from registration to claiming your bonus, the time from receiving your bonus and using it in full, and the time required to meet wagering. Poor-value casinos will insist on tight time limits (sometimes 24 hours or even less), but we think seven days is about right for using your bonus and for meeting wagering. We think a shorter time limit is acceptable for completing your registration and claiming your bonus.
Want tips on how to make the most of your welcome bonus or any bonus you might take from a casino site? Then we got them for you!
Welcome bonuses are designed for player acquisition, but what about player retention? You will find that the best online casino sites take as much care of their current player base as they do new players. Such sites offer reload bonuses which have similar conditions to welcome bonuses except that they can be claimed at any time. Other bonuses may include loyalty bonuses, where you can claim a bonus or free spins if you’ve wagered enough of your own cash during a qualifying period.
Another common bonus is cashback, where a site pays you back a percentage of your weekly or even daily casino losses, usually as bonus cash (with wagering attached). It is always worth looking for online casinos that offer decent bonuses for regular customers.
One thing you should not use casino offers for is the expectation of becoming super rich! People have won decent amounts of money via bonuses, but you should never take on a casino bonus with the expectation of that happening to you. So, why else would you use a casino bonus? We’ve picked out three reasons why using a casino bonus makes perfect sense.
You can play games for free at some online casinos, but the real meat in the sandwich comes from the idea of playing for cash. Why use your cash at a new online casino you’ve discovered when you can use the casino’s money instead? Once you’ve used your new casino bonus cash, you should have a firm idea of whether you want to continue playing there or not.
Why start your career off at a new online casino with £20 when you can play with £60 instead or even more? If a new casino offers you a bonus for signing up, then you may as well take advantage of it, even if you have no intention of meeting wagering or claiming your bonus winnings. The more money you have to play with, the more you can play!
There are many thousands of slots available and a few hundred table games. We’re willing to bet that you’ve not played all of them! You may be reluctant to try out a new game using your own money in case it doesn’t live up to your expectations. Why not use casino deposit bonus money instead? That way, if the game sucks, you haven’t lost anything. And if it thrills you, you can then go on to splash your own cash on it.
Claiming casino offers is not difficult, but just in case you have not claimed one before, here is how you go about it.
This page should really have educated you about casino offers UK players are able to claim. We’ve outlined how various bonuses work and explained how to check out online casino welcome offers yourself so you can see if they add value to your casino experience or not. We’ve also told you how to claim a bonus and why you might want to claim one. But we hope the key takeaway is to always examine the T&Cs of any bonus so that you understand them thoroughly before jumping in.
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