UK Sports Betting Market Industry Report

The state of British betting in 2026

The most recent complete official year tells a clear story. Between April 2024 and March 2025, licensed operators earned £16.8 billion in gross gambling yield (GGY) from customers in Great Britain – the amount kept after winnings were paid out – a rise of 7.3% on the year before. Betting on real sporting events sits inside that total in two places: a remote (online) betting sector worth £2.6 billion, up 10.9%, and a non-remote betting sector of £2.5 billion, up just 0.7%, of which £1.2 billion came not from sports wagers at all but from gaming machines inside betting shops. Add the two sectors together and betting accounts for roughly £5.1 billion, about two-fifths of the non-lottery gambling market.

Underneath the headline growth, the direction of travel is unmistakable. Online betting is expanding while the high street contracts: the number of betting shops fell for an eleventh consecutive reporting period to 5,825 by March 2025, and the newest quarterly figures put the count at 5,669 by December 2025. The Gambling Commission’s operator dataset – a separate, partial-coverage series – shows online real-event betting revenue softening slightly across 2025-26 after an exceptionally profitable 2024-25, with bet volumes and betting-active accounts both lower than a year earlier.

The most consequential recent change is fiscal rather than commercial. At the Autumn Budget on 26 November 2025 the government announced the biggest overhaul of gambling taxation in years, including a new 25% duty rate on online betting profits from April 2027, up from today’s 15%. That decision, alongside the statutory levy, stake limits and affordability rules that took effect during 2025, frames everything that follows.

This report explains, in plain English, how large the market is, how it is measured, where the money comes from, who takes part, and what is confirmed – as opposed to merely predicted – about where it is heading. Every figure is traceable to an original official source.

• Remote betting is now clearly the bigger half of the market. Online betting GGY of £2.6bn exceeded the £2.5bn non-remote sector in 2024-25 – and once the £1.2bn of betting-shop machine income is stripped out, online wagers out-earn retail sports wagers by roughly two to one.
• Football and horse racing dominate online betting. Of the £2.6bn taken online, football contributed £1.3bn and horse racing £766.7m – together around 80% of remote betting GGY.
• Growth is coming from margin, not volume. In the Commission’s operator dataset, quarterly online real-event betting GGY repeatedly rose or held up even as the number of bets fell – bets were down 8% year on year in January-March 2026 while GGY edged up 1%.
• 2025-26 has been a softer online betting year. Across the four quarters to March 2026 the operator panel’s real-event betting GGY totalled about £2.21bn, roughly 5% below the £2.32bn of 2024-25 – a year flattered by bookmaker-friendly results.
• The betting shop decline has accelerated. Great Britain lost 106 shops in 2024-25 and a further 156 in the nine months to December 2025, leaving 5,669 – about 26% below the pre-pandemic estate.
• Almost half of shop revenue is machines. Gaming machines produced 48.2% of non-remote betting GGY, so headline “retail betting” figures overstate over-the-counter sports wagering.
• Betting duty receipts hit a record. General Betting Duty raised £714m in 2024-25, up 9.2%, and started 2025-26 another 6% ahead.
• About one adult in ten bets in a typical month. GSGB puts past-four-week betting participation at 9-12% through 2025, with a strong seasonal spike around the spring racing festivals and a four-fold gap between men (16%) and women (4%).
• Regulation tightened decisively in 2025. Financial vulnerability checks (February), the statutory levy (April), online slots stake limits (April/May), marketing opt-ins (May) and deposit-limit prompts (October) all commenced within a single year.
• The confirmed 2027 tax rise is the market’s biggest known headwind. Government costings assume operators will pass up to 90% of the new duty burden to customers through prices and payouts – a direct, dated change, unlike speculative forecasts.

The authoritative measure comes from the Gambling Commission’s annual Industry Statistics, compiled from the regulatory returns every licensed operator must file. In the financial year from April 2024 to March 2025 – the latest complete year, published on 25 November 2025 – the whole regulated gambling industry in Great Britain generated £16.8 billion in gross gambling yield, up 7.3%. Excluding lotteries, GGY was £12.6 billion, up 9.3%.

Betting on real events contributes through two sectors. The remote betting vertical – bets struck online, in apps or by phone – earned £2.6 billion, 10.9% more than the year before. The non-remote betting sector, essentially the high-street bookmaking estate, earned £2.5 billion, barely ahead (+0.7%). Combined, the betting sectors produced about £5.1 billion – some 40% of Great Britain’s non-lottery gambling market.

One caveat matters before treating £5.1 billion as “sports betting”: nearly half of the retail figure is not sports wagering at all.

Geography matters too. The Gambling Commission regulates Great Britain – England, Scotland and Wales – so its figures exclude Northern Ireland, which has its own regime. HMRC’s duty receipts, by contrast, cover the whole United Kingdom. The two scopes are labelled throughout this report and never mixed within a single series.

*Calculated values – see the workbook’s Annual_Market_Size sheet for the formulas. FY2022-23 total derived from the Commission’s stated 3.5% growth to FY2023-24; FY2023-24 betting splits back-derived from the reported +10.9% (remote) and +0.7% (non-remote) changes. Sources: Gambling Commission Industry Statistics FY2024-25, FY2023-24 (revised), FY2022-23 (revised).

The crossover happened quietly during the early 2020s, but by 2024-25 it was decisive. Online betting’s £2.6 billion GGY not only exceeded the whole non-remote betting sector (£2.5 billion): measured against genuine retail sports wagering of about £1.3 billion, the online channel is now roughly twice the size of the counter trade.

The channels behave differently, too. Remote betting is growing on the back of rising operator margins and in-play products; the retail estate is defending a shrinking but stubborn core. Inside the shops, the Commission’s operator dataset for January-March 2026 shows the split of activity among the largest premises: over-the-counter wagering took 125 million bets for £125 million of GGY – down 18% year on year – while self-service betting terminals (SSBTs) processed 42.9 million bets for £126 million, edging up 0.6%. Terminals now out-earn the counter. Machines contributed a further £276 million in the quarter at an average session spend of £12.48.

In other words, even within the surviving shops, betting behaviour is migrating from the till to the touchscreen. The full channel comparison, including the retail panel detail, is on the workbook’s Remote_vs_Retail sheet.

Two official series track the short-term pulse of the market, and they must be read separately. The Commission’s quarterly Industry Statistics cover the whole licensed market but currently publish sector totals; its operator dataset (“market overview” data) gives a sharper product-level view – online real-event betting on its own – but covers only the largest operators, roughly 70% of the online market and 85% of retail betting, and can include free bets and bonuses.

The shape of the two years says as much as the totals. 2024-25 was flattered by results: its October-December quarter produced £647 million, which the Commission noted was the panel’s best real-event quarter since mid-2021, driven by bookmaker-friendly outcomes rather than a surge in punting. Against those comparators, 2025-26 was always likely to look soft: GGY fell 9% in Q1 (against the Euro 2024 quarter) and 18% in Q3, before January-March 2026 came in 1% ahead at £600 million.

Crucially, volumes tell a gloomier story than revenue. Bets placed were down in every quarter of 2025-26 – by 8% year on year in the final quarter – and accounts active in real-event betting fell between 5% and 14% depending on the quarter. When revenue holds up while stakes and customers fall, the difference is margin: operators kept a larger slice of each pound wagered.

On the official whole-market series, the first nine months of 2025-26 produced £1,827 million of non-remote betting GGY, with remote casino, betting and bingo running at £2.0-2.1 billion a quarter. The remaining quarter of the year (January-March 2026) will be published in September 2026 – this report presents no nine-month figure as a full-year total.

Machines share is the machines proportion of non-remote betting GGY in each quarter. Full detail including premises and machine counts: workbook sheet Quarterly_Betting.

How much actual betting sits behind £2.6 billion of online GGY? The operator dataset gives a sense of scale: in April 2025 alone, the panel of largest operators processed 325.7 million online real-event bets, followed by 290.0 million in May and 237.6 million in June – about 853 million bets in a single quarter, 7.4% fewer than the same quarter of 2024. Virtual-event betting added a further 23 million bets across those three months. Across all online verticals (betting plus gaming), the panel handled 26.8 billion bets and spins in January-March 2026.

Source: Gambling Commission, Gambling business data on gambling to June 2025. Quarter change: −7.4% (calculated – workbook sheet Bets_and_Accounts).

Account numbers point the same way. Average monthly active accounts across all online verticals stood at 13.4 million in January-March 2026, 1% lower than a year earlier, after dipping to 12.0 million in the July-September quarter; accounts active specifically in real-event betting fell in every quarter of 2025-26, by as much as 14%. On the whole-market Industry Statistics side, operators reported 34.0 million new account registrations in 2024-25 (down 4.1%) and 24.4 million accounts with funds or activity at the end of the final quarter, while customer funds held on account fell 6.9% to £1.0 billion.

Largest operators only; may include free bets and bonuses; dashes indicate values not reported in the release. Sources: Gambling Commission operator data releases 2024-2026 (workbook Sources S07-S11). Full series: workbook sheet Bets_and_Accounts, range A4:L12.

Two sports have dominated British betting for a century, and still do. In 2024-25, football generated £1.3 billion of the £2.6 billion remote betting GGY – half of everything wagered online – while horse racing contributed £766.7 million, a little under 30%. Everything else – tennis, cricket, golf, darts, esports, American sports, politics and novelty markets – shared the remaining £533 million or so.

Survey data adds the seasonal texture the annual totals hide. In the Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB), betting participation jumped from 9% of adults in early 2025 to 12% in the April-July wave – the period covering the Grand National – before settling back to 10%. Horse-race betting itself rose from 4% to 7% and back to 4% across the same three waves, a near-doubling driven almost entirely by once-a-year festival punters. Racing remains Britain’s great occasional bet: for one week each spring, millions of people who never otherwise enter a bookmaker’s have a flutter.

Online, betting on sports and racing via a website or app was reported by 8% of adults in early 2025 – the third most common online gambling activity after National Lottery and other lottery draws. In the shops, football coupons and racing multiples still anchor the over-the-counter trade, while SSBTs skew heavily to in-play football.

The GSGB – a push-to-web survey of 20,775 adults whose 2025 annual report was published on 16 July 2026 – is the official record of who takes part. Overall, 47% of adults in Great Britain gambled in some form in the previous four weeks, but that figure is dominated by lottery draws; exclude people who only entered lottery draws and participation falls to 27%.

Betting proper is a minority pursuit with a sharp profile. Around one adult in ten placed a bet of any kind in a typical four-week period during 2025, and the gender gap is the widest of any major gambling activity: 16% of men bet, against 4% of women. Scratchcards (12%) were the only non-lottery-draw activity more widespread than betting (10%), with online instant-win games third at 7%.

Age patterns cut two ways. Overall gambling peaks in later middle age – in the newest wave (September 2025-January 2026), 56% of 55-to-64-year-olds had gambled, against just 31% of 18-to-24-year-olds – because lottery play climbs with age. But engagement runs the other way: the youngest adults who do gamble average 3.6 different activities a month, tapering to 1.7 among the over-75s. Non-lottery participation peaks among men aged 25-34 (43% in the spring 2025 wave) and women aged 35-44 (33%). The bettor most typical of the market remains a man in his late twenties or thirties with a football app on his phone.

Sources: GSGB participation releases, Waves 2-4 2025 (workbook Sources S14-S16). Full splits: workbook sheet Demographics.

The British high street held 5,669 betting shops in December 2025. That is 106 fewer than closed the 2024-25 financial year (5,825, itself the eleventh consecutive reported decline) and a further 156 lost in just nine months of 2025-26 – a marked acceleration on the drip-drip closures of recent years. Set against the pre-pandemic estate, which the Commission’s own comparisons imply numbered around 7,680 shops in March 2020, roughly one betting shop in four has gone.

Betting shops still account for the great majority of Great Britain’s 8,148 licensed gambling premises. And the estate that remains is working its assets harder: as the channel section showed, terminal betting and machine income now carry the shops, with over-the-counter GGY falling 18% year on year in the most recent operator-panel quarter. Machine numbers across all premises actually rose during 2025, from 188,559 in June to 191,325 in December – decline in doors, not in hardware.

The commercial logic is unforgiving. A shop’s fixed costs – rent, rates, staff, security – are constant, while its most profitable customers migrate to the app the operator would rather serve them on anyway. Closures concentrate where footfall is weakest, which is why the fall accelerates during soft trading years like 2025-26 rather than smoothing out.

Betting is taxed on operators’ gross profits, not on punters’ winnings – bettors in the UK pay no tax on what they win. General Betting Duty (GBD), charged at 15% of gross profits on fixed-odds betting (3% on financial spread bets and 10% on other spread bets), raised a record £714 million across the UK in 2024-25, up 9.2% on the year. The much smaller Pool Betting Duty added £8.1 million. Receipts kept climbing into 2025-26: GBD collected £188 million in the April-June quarter, 6% ahead of the year before, and all seven betting and gaming duties together raised £1,786 million in April-August 2025, up 9%. For the full 2025-26 year, the Office for Budget Responsibility’s November 2025 forecast put total betting and gaming duties at around £4 billion – a forecast, not yet an outturn.

Source: HMRC, UK Betting and Gaming Statistics (30 September 2025 release). Full duty table including all seven duties, rates and the OBR forecast: workbook sheet Betting_Duties.

Note what duty receipts are and are not. They are collected UK-wide (so include Northern Ireland, unlike Gambling Commission figures), they lag activity, and £714 million of GBD is a tax take on betting profits – it is neither the market’s size nor the industry’s margin. The workbook keeps duty data on its own sheet for exactly this reason.

The fiscal landscape is about to shift sharply. At the Autumn Budget on 26 November 2025 the Chancellor announced that Remote Gaming Duty rises from 21% to 40% for accounting periods beginning on or after 1 April 2026 (that change has now commenced – it mainly hits online casino rather than betting), that bingo duty is abolished, and – most important for this market – that a new 25% rate on remote betting within General Betting Duty takes effect from April 2027, up from 15% today. That last change is enacted but not yet in force at this report’s cut-off.

The Gambling Act review’s implementation phase landed almost entirely within a single year, making 2025 the most consequential regulatory year for British betting since the point-of-consumption reforms of 2014. The table separates what is in force, what is enacted but pending, and what remains proposal – the three are not interchangeable.

Sources: Gambling Commission implementation announcements and OBR, betting and gaming duties in depth (November 2025 EFO). Full timeline with sources per row: workbook sheet Regulation_Timeline.

The GSGB’s 2025 annual report measures harm with the Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI), scored across all gambling rather than betting alone. Among adults who gambled in the past year, 2.4% scored 8 or above – the threshold usually described as problem gambling – with a further 3.5% scoring 3-7 (moderate risk) and 7.8% scoring 1-2 (low risk). Separately, 2.7% of past-12-month gamblers reported experiencing at least one severe consequence from their own gambling, such as relationship breakdown or unmanageable debt.

Three cautions apply. First, these are survey estimates with confidence intervals, and the GSGB’s push-to-web methodology is a new baseline – its figures cannot be compared with older telephone or health-survey estimates, which produced lower headline rates. Second, PGSI rates describe gamblers as a whole, not sports bettors specifically; the survey does not publish a betting-only problem-gambling rate in these releases. Third, association is not causation: the data does not establish that any given product caused the harm reported. What can be said is that harm indicators were broadly stable across the GSGB’s first three annual reports, and that the statutory levy now channels roughly £100 million a year into research, prevention and treatment.

Help is free and confidential: the National Gambling Helpline (0808 8020 133) operates around the clock, and GambleAware and GamCare provide support and self-exclusion tools.

This report deliberately publishes no revenue forecast of its own, and none of the commercial “market projections” circulating online meets the sourcing standard applied here. What follows is confined to scheduled facts and clearly labelled interpretation.

Confirmed: the 25% remote betting duty rate arrives in April 2027; the 40% Remote Gaming Duty is already in force; the statutory levy, stake limits, affordability checks and deposit-limit prompts are operating; the FY2025-26 annual Industry Statistics land in autumn 2026, with the January-March 2026 quarter due in September 2026; and the operator dataset has been discontinued, so the quarterly product-level view used in this report will not be updated again in its current form.

Interpretation, flagged as such: the direction of the last two years – flat-to-falling bet volumes, margin-led revenue, accelerating shop closures and a rising tax and compliance burden – points to a market that grows in money terms while shrinking in almost every physical and volume measure. The government’s own costing assumption that up to 90% of the 2027 duty rise is passed to customers implies poorer odds or thinner promotions for bettors, and the OBR expects the higher rates themselves to dampen demand. Whether 2026-27 extends the £16.8 billion record depends chiefly on sporting results and how operators reprice ahead of April 2027 – neither of which any honest analyst can put a number on today.

Primary sources, all free to access: the Gambling Commission’s annual and quarterly Industry Statistics, its operator dataset (final release, May 2026), the Gambling Survey for Great Britain annual report 2025 and its 2025 participation waves, HMRC’s UK Betting and Gaming Statistics, and the OBR’s betting and gaming duties analysis. The workbook’s Sources sheet lists all nineteen references with publication dates, periods covered, methodology notes and known limitations.

Reuse: figures may be quoted with attribution to the original official sources and a link to this page. The workbook is provided for verification and further analysis.