Wagering requirements are a regulatory perimeter, not a marketing device

A wagering requirement is usually set by a marketing team. It is chosen to control the cost of an acquisition offer, written into promotional terms next to the maximum bet size and the expiry date, and revisited when the offer underperforms. Nothing in that process suggests it is a regulatory instrument.

Then read the definition the Gambling Commission put into its own rulebook, in force in Great Britain since 19 January 2026: a wagering requirement "is where a customer is required to make wagers totalling a particular value for funds to become withdrawable".

The regulator defines it by reference to withdrawability. Which is the same test that decides, elsewhere in the same rulebook, whether the money is the operator's or the customer's.

What does a wagering requirement actually decide?

Licence condition 4.1.1 requires remote licensees holding customer funds to keep them in a separate client bank account. It defines customer funds to include deposits, unpaid winnings, and "any crystallised but as yet unpaid loyalty or other bonuses".

The Commission's guidance supplies the test for crystallisation: bonuses a customer has earned "and which are not subject to any further terms before the customer can redeem the bonus would also be considered customer funds".

A playthrough multiplier is such a term. So the number chosen for a promotion determines how much of the balance a player sees on screen is money the operator must segregate, disclose under a published protection rating, and report — and how much of it is a contingent promotional liability sitting on the operator's side of the line.

Two caveats, because this is an inference rather than a stated Commission position, and the difference matters. First, the guidance never uses the words "wagering requirement" or "playthrough" anywhere — we checked every section. Second, the guidance does list situations where money is not customer funds, running from money staked on an undecided event through to unallocated lottery subscriptions, and bonuses under an outstanding requirement are not among them. But that list is expressly a list of examples rather than an exhaustive one, so it is weaker support than a carve-out would be. The Commission has stated the positive test and left the rest to follow from it.

Why does the cap matter more than the multiplier?

Because since January the operator no longer picks the number alone.

Social responsibility code provision 5.1.1, as amended with effect from 19 January 2026, prohibits licensees from applying wagering requirements "over a maximum of 10 times", and separately bans including more than one type of gambling product — betting, casino, bingo, lottery — within a single incentive.

The Commission's consultation response records that some licensees were applying multipliers of up to 60 times before the cap, and that a limit of ten "will take out extreme levels".

Is the perimeter really the wagering requirement?

Here is the strongest argument against everything above, and it comes from the Commission itself.

It considered banning wagering requirements outright and decided not to. One of its stated reasons: licensees "are highly likely to introduce terms and conditions that prevent customers from cashing out bonuses, particularly in large and organised groups", and those potential practices "may have a worse impact on both customers and licensees, than having low wagering requirements".

Read that as a perimeter argument and it undercuts the tidy version. The line is not drawn by the wagering requirement as such. It is drawn by whichever term in the promotional conditions stops the customer taking the money out. A playthrough multiplier is the most visible and now the most regulated of those terms, but it is not the only one, and capping it moves pressure onto the others — maximum conversion caps, game weightings, time limits, maximum bet rules during a bonus.

The Commission saw that coming and named its backstop. In the same response it points to licence condition 7.1.1 on fair and open terms, and reserves the option to go further: if it sees "the emergence of particularly onerous terms and conditions attached to wagering requirements, particularly if the Games Weighting Contributions are changed to have a considerable impact on customers", it "could take action and consider consulting on further changes, including the option to ban".

So the honest statement is narrower than the headline. Wagering requirements are the load-bearing example of a class of terms that determine when bonus value crystallises. Cap them and you have regulated the largest single lever — and left the rest of the class to a general fairness condition rather than a specific one.

Where do other regulators draw the line?

In four different places, and in a fifth, nowhere at all. Comparing them is the fastest way to see the question is genuinely unsettled.

Denmark got to the multiplier first. The executive orders on online casino and online betting, in force since 1 July 2025, cap playthrough at ten times, require every eligible game to contribute in full, give the player at least sixty days to satisfy the condition, and — the provision with no British equivalent — prohibit attaching any playthrough requirement to winnings won through a promotion. The Danish cap is calculated differently from the British one: ten times the deposit or stake plus the awarded amount, rather than ten times the incentive alone. On a hundred-euro deposit matched by a hundred-euro bonus, that is twice the turnover. A separate and lower rule applies to commission-based games, where the requirement may not exceed half the commission the player has paid.

The Netherlands approaches it from the opposite end. The gambling authority's guidance states that applying wagering requirements to funds the player has deposited is "verboden" — prohibited — subject to narrow exceptions for source-of-funds checks under anti-money laundering law, reasonable suspicion of fraud, and false registration data. The guidance says nothing about bonuses at all; the implication that bonus value may carry a condition while the player's own money may not is ours, not the regulator's. It is not merely theoretical, though: in August 2024 the authority summoned nine licensees and warned four more over minimum withdrawal thresholds and playthrough requirements obstructing payouts.

Ireland has the newest regime and the widest gap between the two halves of the question. The segregated customer account obligation in section 135 of the Gambling Regulation Act 2024 commenced on 5 February 2026, and defines the protected "relevant funds" in three limbs: money held with a licensee by an account holder or by a person gambling on premises in the State, payments made in connection with an uncompleted gambling activity, and winnings not paid out. No limb mentions bonuses.

That is not because Ireland ignores them. The Act regulates them under a different word and in a different place: section 157 bans offering an "inducement" to a person or specific group, and lets the Minister prohibit whole classes of inducement. What it does not do is connect inducements to the section 135 definition of protected funds — and section 157 was expressly left out of the February 2026 commencement order, so it was not in force as at September 2026.

Malta has the strongest proprietary protection and draws no boundary around bonuses. The Player Protection Directive records that the Gaming Act and the regulations made under it establish player funds as "the separate and distinct patrimony of the players", and requires the licensee to ensure that the credit, financial or payment institution holding them understands that "the creditors of a licensee have no claim or right of action on or against the player funds". The Directive does draw one perimeter expressly: fees and charges properly deducted from a player's account cease to be player funds once deducted. It draws none around bonus value. The word "bonus" appears twice in the whole Directive and neither instance is in the player funds part.

Germany leaves a question half-open in the text. The Interstate Treaty ring-fences player account funds as entrusted funds on a non-offsettable account, and requires that balance to correspond at all times to the total on players' gaming accounts. It keys the ring-fence to the funds the player can dispose of on the account — a disposal test that runs close to the British withdrawability test, but stops short of saying whether a locked bonus is inside or outside it. No published position from the joint gambling authority resolves it.

The same question, outside gambling

Any business that issues a stored balance to customers faces a version of this, and the answer is drawn by different regulators using different words.

Under EU law, electronic money is electronically stored monetary value, representing a claim on the issuer, issued on receipt of funds for the purpose of making payment transactions, and accepted by a person other than the issuer. All four limbs have to be met, and each of them does real work: loyalty points awarded rather than sold fail the "on receipt of funds" limb, and a balance spendable only with the issuer fails the acceptance limb.

Between those two lies the limited network exclusion, which offers three routes out: instruments usable only in the issuer's premises, instruments usable within a limited network of providers under direct commercial agreement, and instruments usable for a very limited range of goods or services. A fourth sub-point covers social and tax-purpose instruments and is not discussed here.

Three things about that exclusion are worth knowing before a rewards programme is designed around it.

• Firms relying on the first two routes must notify their regulator once payment transactions pass one million euro over the preceding twelve months. Under the European Banking Authority's guidelines that is measured per member state and per issuer, and also bites for any shorter period in which the threshold is crossed.
• The same guidelines tell competent authorities to read the exclusion restrictively, and specifically not to allow the same instrument to be used across different limited networks.
• The agreed text of the payment services package now in the final stages of the EU legislative process hard-codes that into law, narrowing the exclusion to "a single limited network" — while widening "premises" to include online stores, which reverses the Authority's own guidance that the premises route covers physical locations only.

The directive half of that package also repeals the E-Money Directive and folds e-money institutions into the payment institution regime. It is not adopted, so it has no application date; the agreed text expresses everything as offsets from an entry into force that has not happened.

One number for scale, taken from the European Banking Authority's central register on 8 September 2026: German notifications under the limited network exclusion stand at 789 entries, out of 1,419 such notifications across the EEA — roughly 56%. The register's own description field puts public transport cards at about 48% of the German entries and fuel and service cards at about 28%. That description field has no value for loyalty schemes at all, which means the register cannot tell you how many have notified. Only that its vocabulary has never needed a word for them.

What we could not establish

We looked for enforcement action since 2023 by the FCA, the Central Bank of Ireland, BaFin, De Nederlandsche Bank, the MFSA and the Banque de France against a loyalty, gift card or closed-loop scheme for issuing e-money without authorisation, and found none. That is a not-found rather than a nil: three of those six publish their measures in formats that resist systematic searching, and the more likely supervisory route is a determination under the notification provision requiring a firm to seek authorisation. Those determinations are not published anywhere we could find.

Which points at the real exposure. It is not a fine. It is being told your programme sits inside a perimeter you designed it to sit outside, and having to restructure a live scheme with customer balances on it.

What to check

• Whether your promotional terms state a wagering requirement above ten times the incentive, if you hold a British licence. That has been non-compliant since 19 January 2026.
• Whether any single incentive spans more than one product type. Same provision, same date.
• Which specific term in your terms and conditions is the one that prevents a cash-out, and whether your finance team and your marketing team would name the same one.
• Whether your customer funds figure is calculated from the crystallisation test or from the whole on-screen balance, and whether anybody has written down which.
• For a rewards or voucher programme outside gambling: whether the balance is issued on receipt of funds, whether it represents a claim on you, whether anyone other than you accepts it, and whether the route out of the perimeter you rely on survives being narrowed to a single network.

If you run a loyalty or bonus programme and your legal team has taken a documented position on when bonus value becomes customer funds, we would be glad to hear how it was reasoned. We could not find a single published example, in any of the five gambling regimes above.