Online Bingo Down 13.8% as UK Bingo Halls Grow 8%: UKGC Data

Online bingo brought in £147.8m in gross gambling yield from British players in the year to March 2026. A year earlier it was £171.4m, on the Gambling Commission’s revised numbers. Down 13.8%, then. And the halls? Up 8.2%, to £703.8m.

Those numbers come from the regulator’s annual industry statistics, published on 17 September. The coverage we read led on the £17.5bn market total and gave online bingo a single line, so we went through the data file behind the report and ran the bingo numbers ourselves. Quarter by quarter, nearly all of the online fall comes from one period, and outside it online bingo was down less than 2%. Every bingo line on the hall side grew.

The timing matters. The year covered ends on 31 March 2026, the day before remote gaming duty on online bingo nearly doubled and bingo duty in halls was scrapped. None of what follows reflects the new rates yet.

The Bingo Lines Side by Side

The Commission reports online bingo as one figure inside its remote sector. Hall bingo gets two: the games themselves, and the gaming machines on the club floor. Here they are against the year before.

GGY. 2024-25 revised, 2025-26 provisional. Our percentages.

Online, bingo is now a small corner of a much bigger business. The remote sector as a whole grew 6.9% to £8.3bn, carried by online casino at £5.7bn. Bingo’s share of that is under 2p in every pound.

One Quarter Did Most of the Damage

The annual total hides a lopsided comparison. In the Commission’s data file, online bingo took £57.0m between April and June 2024. None of the seven quarters since has come close: all of them sit between £35.3m and £38.7m.

Set April to June 2025 against that high quarter and it’s down 38%. The other nine months tell a different story. July to March brought in £112.5m, against £114.4m a year earlier.

So roughly nine-tenths of the £23.6m fall comes from one quarter. The file doesn’t say why April to June 2024 ran so high, and we’re not going to guess. It’s also a reason to be careful with the long view. Look back to 2021-22 and it’s a zigzag, not a slide. £150.8m in 2023-24. Then £171.4m. Then this year’s drop.

Club Bingo Games Out-Earn Online Bingo by 64%

None of the coverage we read ran this comparison. Take the machines out and look only at bingo played in clubs, the called games on paper and on tablets. That line took £242.1m. Online bingo, across every licensed site in the country, took £147.8m.

A year earlier club bingo games were ahead by 32%. Now the gap is 64%. Put the whole hall figure against online and the ratio has gone from under four to one to nearly five to one.

Machines Still Carry the Halls

None of this means clubs are living on bingo alone. Gaming machines made up 65.6% of hall revenue over the year, a touch up from 65.2%, and they grew faster than the games did. When the Commission said in May that two-thirds of bingo hall revenue now comes from gaming machines, it was describing a split the full-year figures have now confirmed.

For the clubs themselves, our guide to UK bingo halls and who runs them goes through the chains and independents still trading.

The Tax Split Arrives After These Figures

On 1 April 2026 two things happened at once. Bingo duty, the 10% tax on bingo played in licensed premises, was abolished. Remote gaming duty rose to 40%, up from 21%.

Online bingo sits on the far side of that line and has done for years. It has been taxed as remote gaming rather than as bingo since July 2009, under section 115 of the Finance Act 2009. So the relief the Treasury justified by calling bingo a lower-risk activity reaches only the version played in a club. The version played on a phone now carries the same rate as online slots.

We looked at how one chain is handling both changes when Rank published its results in August. At sector level the point is simpler: the next annual report, due in autumn 2027, will be the first annual report to show online bingo taxed at 40% for twelve months. For one brand’s first months under the new rate, see what Playtech’s half-year numbers showed for Sun Bingo. The rules behind both duties sit in our guide to UK gambling law.

What to Check If You Play Online

Separate from the revenue figures, one basic check is worth making if you play online. Bingo brands do close. BOGOF Bingo shut in July after seventeen years, and because it held a UKGC licence, its players kept a way to withdraw their balances.

Before you leave money sitting on a bingo site, check how it protects customer funds. UKGC-licensed operators have to tell you whether your balance is protected if the company goes bust, and at what level. Look for it in the terms.