UK gambling tax rises to 40%: what it could mean for RTP and bonuses
Remote Gaming Duty doubled to 40% in April 2026. Players pay nothing directly — but the levers operators have to absorb it are the ones players feel.
Remote Gaming Duty doubled to 40% in April 2026. Players pay nothing directly — but the levers operators have to absorb it are the ones players feel.
The duty charged on the gross gaming yield of online casino play in Great Britain rose from 21% to 40% in April 2026, close to a doubling of the tax operators pay on every pound they keep. Nothing is charged to players directly. The question worth asking is what a change of that size does to the offers, the game mix and the return-to-player settings on the sites you use.
What actually changed
Remote Gaming Duty is levied on operator gross gaming yield — broadly, stakes received less winnings paid out — for remote casino games offered to customers in the UK. From April 2026 the rate is 40%, up from 21%.
It is an operator tax collected by HMRC. There is no player-side charge, no deduction from your withdrawal and no reporting duty on you. Gambling winnings remain untaxed for individuals in the UK.
Why players may still notice
When the tax on retained revenue roughly doubles, operators have a limited set of levers: marketing and bonus spend, the cost of the game portfolio, staffing, and the return-to-player configurations they choose from suppliers who ship the same title in several RTP versions.
Bonus budgets are the most elastic of those, and they were already under pressure from the January 2026 rules capping wagering at 10x and banning mixed casino-and-sports offers. A smaller pot of promotional spend, spent under stricter rules, is the change most likely to show up in your inbox.
RTP is the more contested one. Suppliers do offer multiple RTP builds of popular slots, and which build an operator licenses is a commercial decision. We are not going to claim that any named operator has cut RTP — we have not verified that. What we will do is record the published RTP of the titles we test and flag movement when we see it.
What we are watching
Three concrete, checkable things: the size and shape of welcome offers at the brands we track, the published RTP figures inside the game info panels of the most-played slots, and whether smaller operators consolidate or exit as margin compresses.
Each of those is verifiable from the outside. Speculation about internal operator strategy is not, so it stays out of this article.
Source: HM Revenue & Customs / gov.uk
Related
Primary source: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/hm-revenue-customs
