Two documents sit on GOV.UK, neither of them new. The first is HMRC’s duty guidance, which puts the Remote Gaming Duty rate at 40% on or after 1 April 2026 and carries an update stamp of that same date. The second is the guidance on calculating the duty on freeplays, which per its own note applies to accounting periods beginning after 31 July 2017 and was last updated in August 2017. The rate moved this April; the freeplay mechanics did not. That gap is the story, and it is a Great Britain story only.
Freeplays go in as stakes
Per the published guidance, the value of freeplays counts for Remote Gaming Duty as stakes on their first use, added to the operator’s cash stakes. The same page defines freeplays broadly enough to swallow this publication’s entire beat: offers to gamble at reduced or zero cost, including free games, introductory bonuses and matched deposits.
The exit is where the wagering clause turns up
Freeplay winnings may be deducted, the guidance says, when they are actually paid out or made available to the customer to withdraw. Winnings from freeplays that have to be re-wagered, or that cannot be freely withdrawn, cannot be deducted.
Read the two rules together. The wagering requirement — the clause that prices a bonus for the player — also determines whether the operator may net the resulting winnings off its duty base.
Round numbers for illustration, not anyone’s data: leave £100 of freeplay winnings locked behind a re-wagering clause and that £100 stays in the base. At the 21% rate that ran from April 2019, per the same HMRC table, the arithmetic on it was £21. At 40% it is £40. The clause did not change; the cost of it landing on the wrong side of the deduction test did.
Caution is owed: nothing published says any operator has repriced a bonus because of the duty, and we are not suggesting one has. The pressure is arithmetic, not motive. The freeplay guidance has stood since 2017 and HMRC treatment can be revised, so this is the file as of this writing.
None of it is a player’s tax bill; the duty falls on operators’ gaming profits. And it changes nothing about the only number that has ever mattered at the reader’s end — what the current terms say a bonus costs to clear. Our audit of the standard welcome match works that figure out the slow way. Treat a bonus as a discount on play you had already decided to buy, never as a reason to buy more of it — and look to the clause, not the headline, for what that discount actually costs.