UK regulator puts 2025–26 gambling GGY at £17.5bn

Release and scope

The Gambling Commission published its annual industry statistics on 17 September 2026, covering April 2025 through March 2026. The regulator describes the series as a picture of the size and shape of Great Britain’s customer-facing gambling industry, based on regulatory returns from operators it licenses.[1][2]

The geographic scope is Great Britain, so the headline should not be expanded to the whole UK or to global iGaming. The series counts activity reported by licensed operators. Jurisdiction, licensing perimeter and measurement definitions matter when readers compare it with other market datasets.[1][2]

Gross gambling yield is the regulator’s measure in this release. It is not interchangeable with stakes, company revenue, profit, tax receipts or player spending. The headline industry total includes reported lotteries, while the Commission also publishes a separate figure excluding them.[1][2]

Independent trade coverage from Casino.com the following day also led with £17.5bn and 4.4% annual growth, identifying online casino as one source of expansion. That provides a second account of the release; the Commission’s tables remain the source of record for the figures.[1][2]

Growth, with the denominator intact

The official total is £17.5bn, 4.4% higher than in 2024–25. Excluding all reported lotteries, the total is £13.2bn, up 4.7%. These figures use different perimeters; one growth rate should not be carried over to the other denominator.[1][2]

Remote Casino, Betting and Bingo, abbreviated RCBB, generated £8.3bn, an increase of 6.9%. That combined category includes online casino, remote betting and remote bingo. It is not a standalone online casino market measure or a complete classification of every online product.[1][2]

Casino.com describes RCBB as the largest combined channel in the non-lottery market, at roughly 63% of that perimeter. The comparison depends on excluding lotteries and grouping three activities together, so any market-share statement should identify its denominator.[1][2]

The Commission reports financial yield separately from premises and licensing counts. A rise in customer-facing GGY does not imply that the number of licensed businesses or land-based locations also increased. Each series has its own unit and observation period, so a single total cannot describe every part of the market.[1][2]

Online casino within remote activity

Within the £8.3bn RCBB total, online casino games generated £5.7bn, including £4.8bn from slots, according to the regulator’s breakdown. The other components were £2.4bn from remote betting and £147.8m from remote bingo. The totals distinguish products within one remote sector.[1][2]

Casino.com also reports £5.7bn for online casino and £4.8bn for slots, while separating remote betting and bingo. That distinction matters: “online” is not one product moving in one direction. Combining every remote activity would conceal differences within the channel.[1][2]

Football (£1.2bn) and horse racing (£769.3m) were the leading components listed for remote betting; remote bingo stood at £147.8m. Growth in the combined RCBB total does not establish growth in every remote activity. The component figures give a more precise account.[1][2]

Casino.com places online casino alongside land-based machine activity and a decline in betting shops. These channel movements can be observed together, but the statistics alone do not explain why consumers changed their behavior. Causal claims require evidence beyond this annual dataset.[1][2]

Accounts are a separate measure

New account registrations with RCBB operators fell 3% to 32.4m during the financial year. Active accounts numbered 25.7m at the end of the final reporting quarter. One is a flow during the year and the other a point-in-time measure; they are not counts of distinct people to add together.[1][2]

The Commission also reports £886.6m held in customer accounts at the end of the final reporting quarter, 13.9% below the same point a year earlier. This is a balance at a specified date, not annual spending, and it does not by itself demonstrate consumer losses or a sector-wide deposit trend.[1][2]

Casino.com also keeps new registrations and active accounts as separate metrics. Accounts do not necessarily map one-to-one to individuals, and a person may use multiple services. Estimating participation requires a method designed to identify people rather than treating account totals as a population count.[1][2]

Yield, accounts and premises answer different questions. Yield covers reported GGY; account measures describe operator records; premises figures count licensed physical locations. Reading them together can describe the market, but it cannot establish causal links that the underlying data did not test.[1][2]

What the annual series can and cannot say

The Commission defines the series as regulatory returns from licensed operators and supplies historical data tables. It is not a census of unlicensed or offshore websites and is not a survey of consumer behavior. The dataset should answer questions within its reporting perimeter only.[1][2]

A separate dataset built from larger online operators can have a different perimeter and treatment of free bets. The Commission warns against direct comparison with the annual industry statistics. This report therefore keeps its headline measures within one annual series rather than combining unlike datasets.[1][2]

This release describes the 2025–26 financial year, not a live October 2026 operating snapshot. The Commission says the next annual industry statistics are expected in autumn 2027 and that updated quarterly core statistics will also be published. Trends should be checked again against those releases.[1][2]

Anyone citing the £17.5bn headline should state the geography, financial year, GGY measure and lottery treatment. The £5.7bn online casino figure is a component within RCBB. Putting period and perimeter beside a number helps prevent misleading comparisons across markets.[1][2]

Updates and comparison boundaries

The Commission says operator reporting periods were aligned and some return questions removed from July 2024. Before comparing years, check whether the relevant fields changed. Historical series are useful, but they do not guarantee that every category was collected on an identical basis throughout.[1][2]

A common mistake is to join the annual industry returns to market-monitoring data from larger operators as one continuous series. Their respondents, coverage and measures differ. Any side-by-side use needs an explicit caveat; the figures cannot simply be added or substituted for one another.[1][2]

To understand consumer participation as well as industry yield, readers need the Commission’s separate participation surveys. Annual GGY is an operator-reported measure, while surveys describe respondents’ experiences and behavior. The sources can complement each other, but rising yield does not establish that more people participated.[1][2]

The regulator expects its next annual industry statistics in autumn 2027 and says it will also update core quarterly data. When a new release appears, check its tables, period and definitions before updating later trends; do not carry an old forecast forward as a current result.[1][2]

Checked on 14 October 2026 against the release, its notes and independent trade coverage. If a later release revises historical values, categories or dates, record a substantive update while preserving which financial year and information were available when this report was first published.[1][2]