80% of Mecca’s Mainstage Bingo Spend Is Now on Tablets
Nine Mecca clubs shut in the year to June. The forty-one still trading took £143.0m in like-for-like net gaming revenue, and the biggest single line inside that figure was not bingo. Gaming machines accounted for £60.1m of it. Mainstage bingo, the called game itself, accounted for £23.8m.
Rank Group published those numbers on 13 August. They arrive in the middle of an unresolved government consultation built to address that exact imbalance, by drawing a line across the bingo hall floor. A minimum share of floor space would have to be designated a “bingo area”, and cabinet and in-fill gaming machines would be banned from sitting inside it.
The same results document contains the reason that line may achieve less than it looks. Sixty per cent of Mecca visits are now played on a tablet, and electronic customers account for 80% of everything the chain takes on mainstage bingo. Under the consultation’s preferred option, those tablets would keep their gaming machine content inside the bingo area.
At a glance
- Consultation statusClosed 30 January, response still outstanding
- Who is affectedAnyone playing bingo in a licensed British club
- The bottom lineThe proposed rule separates bingo from gaming machines by floor space, pushing cabinet machines out of a designated bingo area. At Mecca, 80% of mainstage bingo spend already runs through tablets, which the preferred option would allow to keep machine content inside that area.
What Rank’s Figures Actually Say
We read the results document rather than the coverage of it, and the table has a trap in it. Rank reports Mecca on two bases. At the top of the year they sit a hair apart: reported revenue £143.1m, like-for-like £143.0m. Nothing in it.
Go back twelve months and the gap opens. Like-for-like puts the prior year at £136.9m. Reported, that same segment was £140.4m. What separates them is the nine clubs that shut, which the like-for-like cut lifts out of both sides so the surviving estate is measured against itself. Nothing has been restated. The distinction matters, because a genuine restatement does sit elsewhere in this document, on lease accounting, and it leaves the revenue lines untouched. Mix the two bases and every growth rate you calculate will be wrong. Every Mecca figure below is like-for-like.
| Mecca venues, like-for-like NGR | FY26 | FY25 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gaming machines | £60.1m | £56.6m | +£3.5m |
| Interval bingo | £39.8m | £39.9m | −£0.1m |
| Mainstage bingo | £23.8m | £21.3m | +£2.5m |
| Other, incl. food and drink | £19.3m | £19.1m | +£0.2m |
| Total | £143.0m | £136.9m | +£6.1m |
Source: Rank Group FY26 results, 13 August 2026. Like-for-like basis throughout; reported net gaming revenue for the segment was £143.1m against £140.4m.
Machines out-earn the mainstage game by two and a half to one. Expect that line to travel. It also misleads, and the correction is sitting two rows above it in the same table.
Interval bingo is still bingo. Add the two bingo lines together and they come to £63.6m, which beats machines by £3.5m. Bingo has not been overtaken at Mecca. It leads, narrowly, and the margin is thinner than it was, because machines added £3.5m over the year while interval bingo went slightly backwards. Of the £6.1m the segment gained, machines supplied roughly 57% of it.
Nor is the called game in retreat. Mainstage was the fastest-growing line Mecca has, up 12% against the 6% machines managed, and Rank calls it “the primary reason for customer visits”. That matters later, because the part of the business growing quickest is also the part that has moved furthest onto a screen.
Set against the wider sector, Mecca looks less machine-dependent than the headline picture suggests. Strip the food, drink and other items out of Rank’s total and machines come to roughly 49% of what the chain earns from gambling. Across all licensed bingo premises the figure is far higher. The consultation was built on a Gambling Commission number putting the sector at 63% of gross gambling yield from machines in the year to March 2024, up from 44% a decade before, and it has moved further since. The most recent figure, which we covered when the regulator put it to the Bingo Association, was roughly two thirds for 2024/25, about £423m of £650m.
Those sector percentages and Mecca’s are not measured the same way, and the difference is big enough to spell out. Rank reports net gaming revenue; the Commission measures gross gambling yield. Two years separate the periods as well. So 49% is the closest the comparison gets, not a like-for-like, and the rawer figure some will reach for is worse still: machines are 42% of Mecca’s segment revenue, but that total has food and drink inside it, and setting 42% against 63% would be comparing two different things.
Even allowing for all of that, the gap is wide, and it points somewhere the consultation does not really go. Mecca is not what the sector figure is describing. Rank publishes a revenue split at this level of detail and the other big chains do not, so the arithmetic can only be run in one direction: if a chain this size sits near half while the sector sits near two thirds, the premises pulling that average up are somewhere other than Mecca. Which ones, the published data does not say.
The Line the Government Wants to Draw
The consultation opened on 15 October 2025. Responses closed at the end of January, and seven months later the page still reads “we are analysing your feedback”. No outcome, no date promised for one.
Its diagnosis is blunt. “Many licensed bingo premises are largely taken up by gaming machines and are difficult to distinguish from adult gaming centres,” it says, and “the distinction between some licensed bingo premises and adult gaming centres is unclear to many consumers.”
The remedy proposed is spatial. Operators would have to designate a continuous “bingo area”, at 30%, 40% or 50% of floor space depending on which option is adopted. A minimum number of distinct bingo positions might be required on top of that, set at thirty or forty, or scaled so that a bingo area under 200 square metres carries one position for every 2.5 square metres and anything larger carries at least eighty. And the rule with teeth: “Licensed bingo premises must not site cabinet or in-fill gaming machines within the bingo area.” The government would rather they were kept a set distance back from its edge as well, with half a metre, one metre and two metres all on the table.
Read as furniture policy it is coherent. Push the cabinets out and a licensing officer has something measurable to stand in and assess. The problem is what the game itself became while the consultation was being drafted.
Where the Rule Stops
Electronic bingo terminals are tablets. Players use them to mark tickets during the mainstage session, and the consultation notes “the presence of gaming machine content on many EBTs today”. So the document knows exactly what these devices are, and it addresses them directly. The easy version of this story would be that nobody thought about the tablets. Somebody did, at length.
Three options were put out. Ban gaming machine content from tablets inside the bingo area altogether. Allow only Category C and D content. Or leave the tablets as they are. The government’s stated preference is the third: “The government’s preferred option is to permit the use of EBTs in the bingo area with the same gaming content that is currently allowed on EBTs in bingo premises.” The reasoning is operational rather than principled. Prohibiting machine play on tablets in the bingo area “could impose significant operational burdens on many bingo venues”, because operators would have to police which device a customer was holding, or strip the games off the tablets entirely.
Two real constraints sit alongside it, and this piece would be dishonest without them. Cabinet and in-fill machines still stay out of the bingo area, and at a distance from it. A terminal may also offer only one gambling activity at a time, which the document says should stop a tablet running bingo and a gaming machine simultaneously and would help keep the area “primarily dedicated to the playing of bingo, especially during bingo sessions”. The limit is real. It is also not the same as one activity per session, because a customer can switch.
Now put Rank’s sentence beside it. “Over time, customers continue to migrate to electronic bingo via tablet-based play: 60% of customer visits were played on tablets and electronic customers now account for 80% of mainstage bingo spend.”
Eighty per cent. Across forty-one clubs, four pounds in every five spent on the traditional called game already passes through a device that the preferred option would let carry on holding machine content inside the protected zone.
There is a real caveat on that, though. Rank publishes no breakdown of its £60.1m machine line between cabinets and tablets, so nothing here shows machine money moving onto the terminals, and this post is not claiming it does. The point is narrower than that, and harder to get around for a rule about where things sit in a room. A bingo area is defined by what is inside it. The proposal pushes the cabinets out and leaves, in the hands of four fifths of the mainstage players sitting in it, a device the government’s own document says commonly carries the same sort of content.
And the migration is not finished. Rank’s plans for the coming year: “we will further develop the tablet software and pilot self-serve kiosks for electronic play, with the intention of rolling out further once the proposition has been refined.” A new Mecca app went live in five venues and reaches the rest of the estate by the end of the first quarter. Single membership arrives in the first half, unifying a customer’s account whether they play in a club or at home.
Why the Floor Plan Is the Wrong Unit
The consultation is trying to answer a real question. What makes a bingo premises a bingo premises, rather than an arcade with a caller attached? Its answer is that you should be able to see it. Stand in the room, look at the proportion of the floor given to the game, count the positions.
That test worked when the two activities lived in different pieces of furniture. A bingo book is not a slot cabinet, and no one confuses them. It works less well when the game and the machine are two tabs on the same seven-inch screen, held by the same person, in the same seat, inside whatever percentage of the floor ends up being designated.
Rank’s own reporting shows where the line now falls. It counts “electronic customers” as a category of bingo player, because from an operator’s point of view that is what they are. The Commission’s statistics, and the consultation built on them, still sort revenue by whether it came from bingo or from a gaming machine. Those two ways of cutting the same room are drifting apart, and the floor-space rule sits on the older one.
None of which makes the proposal worthless. A 40% bingo area with no cabinets in it is a meaningful constraint on a small premises running a bank of machines and a token bingo session, and that is plainly the kind of venue the phrase about adult gaming centres was written for. It is just that the measure lands hardest on the operators furthest from the tablet, and barely touches the ones already through it.
The Money Underneath
The closures give some sense of the pressure. We wrote about the estate coming down to forty-one clubs when the summer closure list appeared, and the results document now puts a price on that year: nine clubs went, and between them they generated £12.6m of revenue in 2025/26. Visitor numbers across the clubs still trading fell 2%, while spend per visit rose 6%. Fewer people, each spending more. That is the shape of the business now.
Two tax changes pull in opposite directions. Bingo duty abolition was worth £1.6m to Mecca in year, and Rank expects around £6.4m annualised in the coming year, which is real money against a segment turning over £143.0m. The venues business is, in Rank’s words, “well on track to deliver double digit operating profit in 2026/27”. That means pounds, not a margin: underlying like-for-like operating profit at Mecca was £8.9m this year, more than double the £4.3m before it, so the phrase points at £10m or better.
Online is the other way round. Remote Gaming Duty went from 21% to 40% on 1 April 2026, and Rank is blunt about what follows: “Digital profitability will inevitably step down in 2026/27, however, due to the annualised impact of RGD at 40%, despite the decisive mitigating actions we have taken in 2025/26.” Mecca’s digital arm grew 6% to £103.0m, and the group cut marketing, supplier costs and headcount to absorb the hit. The duty rise, and what operators do to absorb it, is part of the wider picture of how UK gambling law now shapes what players are offered.
So the club estate gets a tax cut while the online business takes one on the chin, at the same moment the in-club game is migrating onto a screen. Whatever the consultation concludes about floor space, that is the direction of travel underneath it.
What This Means If You Play in a Club
Know what is on your tablet. If you play mainstage bingo at a club, the device in front of you may also offer gaming machine content, and under the government’s preferred option it would continue to do so inside the designated bingo area. Those are two different products. The stakes differ, so do the prizes, and so does the maths underneath. Sharing a screen does not make them the same game.
Nothing changes today. The consultation closed in January, the response has not been published, and any new rules would need time to reach the floor after that. One more thing to watch, if you play the same brand online as well as in a club: single membership is about to join those two accounts into one, and it is easier to know that before it happens than after. But the larger point is the one the consultation will have to answer. A rule written about the layout of a room is arriving at a moment when four fifths of the money in the main game is already being taken on a handheld screen.
