UKGC Licence Fees Rise 25% From October: Who Actually Pays
A Gambling Commission licence gets 25% dearer this October. That, at least, is the figure every trade write-up ran with once the Department for Culture, Media and Sport published its decision on 30 June, and it is technically true. Read the consultation response, though, and the picture bends. More than 1,100 smaller operators will actually pay less in cash terms, while the largest remote brands, the companies running most of the bingo sites players use every day, absorb nearly all of the increase.
At a glance
- In force1 October 2026
- Headline rise25% on most operating licences
- Paying moreLarge remote brands, from roughly 0.1% to 0.15% of GGY
- Paying less1,100+ operators under £10m GGY, in cash terms
Where the 25% came from
DCMS consulted between 27 January and 30 March and put three options on the table: 30%, 20%, or 20% with a further 10% ringfenced for tackling illegal gambling. It received 47 responses, almost all from operators, suppliers and trade bodies. Two respondents supported the 30% option and four backed 20%. The ringfenced version found no takers at all. The overwhelming majority wanted no increase whatsoever.
The government rejected all three and settled on 25%, with no ringfence. Its reasoning is blunt. The Commission is running annual budget deficits of around £4 million, and even with the extra fee income it will need to find at least £8 million in efficiency savings over the next five years. The £26 million earmarked for fighting unlicensed operators comes separately from the Treasury, not from licence fees.
Operators asked for the rise to be phased in. DCMS refused, pointing out that fees remain a small fraction of what operators keep after paying out winnings. The changes go through as secondary legislation and take effect on 1 October.
What a remote bingo licence will cost
Coverage of the consultation has treated the industry as one block. It isn’t, and the annexes to the DCMS response set out precisely what a bingo operator will pay. From October, annual fees for a remote bingo licence run like this:
| Annual gross gambling yield | Annual fee from 1 October 2026 |
|---|---|
| Under £250,000 | £7,000 |
| £250,000 to £875,000 | £12,375 |
| £875,000 to £3m | £19,569 |
| £3m to £10.5m | £27,337 |
| £10.5m to £36.75m | £51,975 |
| £36.75m to £130m | £112,556 |
| £130m to £455m | £394,875 |
| £455m to £1.6bn | £1,181,625 |
A new application starts at £8,185 for the smallest band. And because nearly every UK bingo brand also offers slots, many hold a combined bingo and casino licence, which carries a flat £6,250 annual supplement on top of the figures above.
The tilt toward the top
The headlines miss this. That 25% is an average, not a flat rate, and DCMS has loaded it deliberately onto the biggest operators. A group above £100 million in annual GGY currently pays fees worth roughly 0.1% of that yield, which becomes 0.15% from October. The middle of the market, anyone between £10 million and £100 million, shifts from 0.18% to 0.22%. And the 1,100-plus operators under £10 million? A cash-terms cut.
Small brands shouldn’t read that as relief, though. The government’s own document notes that a remote operator generating £3 million to £5 million a year still hands over around 0.6% of its GGY in licence fees, four times the rate of a £100 million operator, and the restructure leaves that gap intact. Getting into the market is pricier too, since application fees and first-year fees rise by the full 25%. A brand launching from scratch pays more from day one, whatever size it hopes to become.
The fee rise on its own will not close anybody. Set against the rest of the cost stack it barely registers. The statutory levy landed in September 2025. Remote Gaming Duty then jumped from 21% to 40% in April, and bonus economics have been squeezed since January by the 10x wagering cap. Fees are the smallest line on that list. They just happen to arrive after everything else has already started to bite, and they land heaviest on the operators paying the most duty. The pressure shows in the deals already moving through the market, most visibly Bally’s takeover of Evoke, which was priced against exactly this backdrop.
What players should take from it
Players won’t notice anything different in the bingo lobby on 1 October. The arithmetic behind which brands survive the next two years is another matter. When the biggest operators carry heavier regulatory bills alongside a doubled gaming duty, portfolio pruning follows, and the brands that go first tend to be the small overlapping ones nobody notices until a favourite room disappears.
There is also a detail in the consultation response worth sitting with. Operators argued the Commission should scale back its compliance work because industry standards have improved. DCMS answered with a number. In 2025/26, around a quarter of compliance assessments covering crime prevention and consumer protection found significant failings or put the operator into special measures. That is the regulator’s case for why the money is needed, and it is a hard one to argue with. Anyone wanting the fuller picture of how the rules protecting players fit together can start with our guide to UK gambling laws.
Fees were last reviewed in 2021. On DCMS’s figures, the Commission’s reserves would have run out without this rise. Whatever operators make of the bill, the alternative was a regulator able to afford fewer of those assessments, and the assessment results suggest this is the wrong moment for that.
