How We Review Online Casinos

A rating is only worth as much as the work behind it. This page sets out exactly what we do before a casino gets a score, so you can judge whether our numbers mean anything. There is no secret formula and no panel of anonymous experts. There is a repeatable process, run on real accounts with our own money, and it is the same for all six operators on this site.

We score each casino across five weighted areas: licence verification, payout-speed testing, bonus-terms reading, support probing, and game breadth. Each area is documented in the full review before a single number is set, so you can trace any score back to the evidence. Here is what each step actually involves.

Licence verification

We start with the licence because it decides which rules an operator must follow and where you can complain if a payout goes wrong. We take the licence number from the site footer and look it up in the issuing regulator’s public register rather than trusting a badge image, which rogue sites copy freely. All six operators here hold a licence from the UK Gambling Commission (UKGC), which we confirm in the Commission’s public register. We also record the corporate owner, because the company behind the brand is who actually holds your money. An operator whose licence we cannot confirm in a public register does not get reviewed at all.

Payout-speed testing

This is the step most comparison sites skip, and it is the one we weight most heavily. We deposit, play, request a withdrawal, and time it from approval to arrival on the payment rails each operator offers. The figures you see, from near-instant e-wallet cashouts at Ladbrokes and Coral to one to three business days for card and bank withdrawals, come from cashouts we actually made. Payout speed cannot be marketed, only measured, which is why we trust it more than any promotional claim. The method-by-method detail lives on our casino payment methods guide.

Bonus-terms reading

We read the full terms of every welcome offer, not the banner. That means finding the wagering multiplier, the game weighting, the maximum bet during playthrough, the expiry window and any maximum-cashout cap, then working a realistic example to show what the offer is worth after the conditions bite. A wager-free spins offer can beat a larger match locked behind 40x, and we say so. Where an operator’s terms are ambiguous, we ask support directly and quote the answer we received. The worked comparisons sit on our casino bonuses page.

Support probing

We open live chat and send real questions at different times of day, including outside business hours, and we time the responses. We ask something specific enough that a canned reply will not cover it, such as a detail buried in the bonus terms, to see whether the agent actually knows the product. Ladbrokes answered us in under two minutes around the clock; slower or scripted responses cost points. Support quality rarely matters until something goes wrong, and then it is the only thing that matters.

Game breadth and software providers

We record the size of the library and, more importantly, which studios supply it. A catalogue of several thousand titles from names like NetEnt, Pragmatic Play, Evolution, Play’n GO and Playtech is worth more than a bigger number padded with unknown clones. We check that the games are the genuine provider builds, since rogue sites run counterfeit copies with altered payout behaviour, and we note where independent testing labs such as eCOGRA or GLI have certified the RNG, so payout behaviour is verified by a third party.

What the scores mean

Our ratings run on a ten-point scale, and the gaps between them are deliberate. A 9.4, our highest current score, means an operator was excellent in every area we test, with only a minor, clearly stated caveat, such as the 40x wagering on the top welcome package. An 8.3, our lowest listed score, still means a solid, recommendable casino that fell short on specific points, in that case a short brand track record since 2020 and higher wagering. A one-point gap is not a rounding difference; it reflects measurable shortfalls in payout speed, bonus fairness or transparency. We do not publish anything we would not use ourselves, which is why the lowest score on the site is still well above the midpoint. The best online casinos comparison shows how the six rank against each other by category.

Re-verification and “last verified” stamps

Testing is not a one-off. Bonus terms change, payment processors get swapped, and support teams shrink. Each review carries a “last verified” date so you can see how current the data is, and we re-check operators on a rolling basis and whenever a reader or our own monitoring flags a change. When something moves a score, we update the full review and every comparison table on the site together, so the figure in a table row always matches the figure in the review it links to. Scores are never frozen at their launch-day values.

That disclosure matters to the method. Because our income does not depend on which casino you choose, we are free to publish the unflattering parts: long restricted-market lists, slow weekend fiat payouts, opaque VIP terms. If a review anywhere never prints a negative sentence about its top pick, treat that silence as data. You can hold our numbers to the same standard, and our responsible gambling page sets out the player-protection tools we require before any operator is listed.