UK online casinos compared: every licence checked

Every casino in this comparison was matched to a live record in the UK Gambling Commission’s public register. Not to a badge on the operator’s own footer — to the register itself, by domain, with the account number printed in the table so the check can be repeated in about a minute.

What the register actually tells you

Three fields do most of the work.

The account number. It identifies the licensee, not the brand. Two sites can share one — Coral and Ladbrokes both sit under LC International Limited, along with bwin and Foxy Bingo.

The licensee name. This is the company the Commission regulates and the party a complaint ultimately reaches. It is frequently not the name on the website. BetMGM’s UK licensee is LeoVegas Gaming PLC; 247Bet operates under White Hat Gaming Limited.

The domain status. Active means the licensee runs the site itself. White label means the brand trades on somebody else’s licence. Both are lawful; only one of them is obvious from the site.

Why the ranking looks the way it does

The order comes from three published facts — how long the casino licence has been held, whether it is held directly, and how many active licensed domains sit under the account. The formula is written out in full on the how-we-rate page, with the weights.

The reason for building it that way is practical. Under UK rules almost everything else is fixed:

Slot stake cap	£5 per spin, £2 for players aged 18–24
Bonus wagering cap	10x
Credit cards	banned for gambling since April 2020
Self-exclusion	GAMSTOP, mandatory at every licensed site
Age	18+, no exceptions

An operator cannot compete on any of those. What is left to distinguish licensed sites is payments, verification practice and track record — and only the last of the three is documented somewhere public.

A note on what tenure means here

Several operators in the table show a licence date of 1 November 2014. That is not a coincidence and not a founding date: it is the day the remote licensing regime came into force under the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014. Anyone licensed on that date had been operating before it under a different arrangement.

So the tenure figure measures time under the current regime, not company age. It is still the best available proxy for a documented compliance record — it just should not be read as a history of the business.

What this page does not claim

It does not say which site is most enjoyable, which has the best interface, or which pays fastest. The first two are taste. The third depends on the payment method, the verification status of the account and the day of the week, which is why no hour figure appears anywhere on this site.