Since April 2025, no online slot in Great Britain can take more than £5 from you in one go. If you’re 18 to 24, the ceiling is £2. That much most players have heard. What the rule actually measures, and what it quietly leaves alone, is less well known.
The £5 limit went live on 9 April 2025 and the £2 limit on 21 May 2025. Both come from a statutory instrument, approved in draft by each House of Parliament, which attaches a new condition to every remote casino operating licence.
It isn’t really a limit per spin
The law never mentions spins. It caps the total you can stake in a “game cycle”, which starts when you start a game and ends when everything you staked has been lost, or everything you won has been paid out to you.
So the free spins round you triggered, the cascades, the respins: all one cycle, and all inside the cap. And “stake” is defined broadly, as paying or risking an amount in connection with the game.
An “online slots game” is a reel-based casino game played online. Reel-based covers moving or changing images shown “by the use of visual representations of reels or other means”. A game doesn’t escape the rule by drawing its symbols as something other than reels.
What’s not covered? The Commission is plain about it: the limits are for online slots only and do not apply to other casino games, such as roulette or blackjack.
Bonus buys, ante bets and gamble features
Careful here: the guidance does not name bonus buys or ante bets at all. What it gives is worked examples, and they settle more than you might expect.
A 27-year-old who stakes £5 cannot be offered any other chance to stake until the cycle ends. One who stakes £2 can be offered further staking within the same cycle, up to £3 more. For a 19-year-old staking £2, nothing more is allowed.
So whatever a feature is called, if it asks for more money inside the same cycle, it counts towards the same £5 or £2. The total is what is measured, not the name on the button.
Gamble features get an example of their own. A player stakes £5, wins, and is offered the choice of taking the prize or risking it for a bigger one. That is allowed, because no additional money is being asked for. They gamble, lose, and end the cycle £5 down, exactly as they started it.
Playing several games at once? The guidance doesn’t address it, and we won’t guess. It does repeat an older rule: at least 2.5 seconds must pass between the start of one game cycle and the next.
How does the casino know you’re under 25?
The stake guidance doesn’t spell it out, but it doesn’t need to. Since 2019 a licensed operator has had to verify your name, address and date of birth before you can deposit or gamble at all. Your age band follows from a date it already holds.
Which is also the catch. The limit is a condition of a British licence, so it only protects you at UK-licensed casinos. An offshore site with no Commission licence is under no such obligation, and is also under no obligation to pay you.
Why a review might show £100 a spin
Studios build games for many markets, and plenty of our older reviews quote the international range, written years before the cap. Rather than rewrite each one, we added a short note to the end of those pages giving the British limit. Newer reviews state it directly; our Book of Dead review gives the UK range as 10p to £5.
If a game’s own information screen at a licensed casino lets you bet more than £5 a cycle, or more than £2 at 24, that is worth a complaint to the operator.
What it doesn’t change
The house edge. A cap on stakes changes how much you can put through a game, not the maths inside it. Nothing in the rule touches a game’s return to player, so every pound you do stake faces the same edge it always did.
And £5 is not small. At one cycle every 2.5 seconds, the fastest the rules allow, that is still up to £7,200 an hour in stakes. Slower losses are still losses. Our guide to gambling safely covers the limits you can set yourself, which are the ones that matter.
The government has to review the rule and report within five years of it coming into force. Until then, long term the house wins, just in smaller instalments.
Image: the Palace of Westminster seen across the Thames, by Julian Herzog, CC BY 4.0.
18+. Gambling should be entertainment, not income. Long term the house wins. Free and confidential help is at BeGambleAware.org.
