Gambling licence check: look up any UK casino on the official register

Why a casino licence check is worth thirty seconds

A gambling licence check answers the single question that separates a regulated site from an unregulated one: whether the Gambling Commission lists it. Everything British players take for granted follows from that listing: the stake cap on online slots, the requirement to offer a deposit limit, the checks operators must run when someone starts losing more than they can afford, and a complaints route that ends somewhere other than the operator's own inbox.

A site licensed by the Gambling Commission owes you all of that. A site outside the register owes you none of it. It can accept a stake of any size, it need not offer you a limit, it is not obliged to intervene when your play changes, and if it declines to pay you there is no British body that can make it. That is the whole practical difference, and it is knowable in advance.

What the register can and cannot tell you

The register is authoritative about one thing: permission. It will not tell you whether an operator treats its customers well. Of the licence holders on the register, 87 have at least one regulatory action against them, and every one of those companies was licensed at the time the failings happened. Use the gambling licence check to rule sites out, then read the record to tell the remainder apart.

See what licensed operators have been fined for

How to run a gambling licence check by hand

If you would rather not rely on this copy of the data, the same casino licence check takes three steps at the source. Open the Commission's public register, choose the businesses search, and enter the domain rather than the brand name, because brands and licence holders frequently differ. The result names the licence holder, its account number and the status of every licence it holds.

Two habits make a casino licence check reliable, and both take seconds. A gambling licence check is only as good as what you type into it, and a UK gambling licence belongs to a company rather than to a brand. Search the domain rather than the brand, because a company licensed by the Gambling Commission often trades under a name that appears nowhere on its licence. And treat a UK gambling licence number printed in a footer as a claim to verify rather than as the verification itself.

Gambling Commission public register

What a British operating licence actually covers

A licence is not one thing. The register records each permission separately, and a company usually holds several, so "licensed" on its own tells you less than people assume. Three types run through the whole register. A remote licence covers gambling offered over the internet, which is the one that matters if you are playing from your sofa. A non-remote licence covers premises: a casino floor, a bingo hall, a betting shop. An ancillary remote licence lets a premises-based operator take a limited amount of business online alongside its physical estate.

Cutting across those is the activity: casino, bingo, general betting, gambling software, society lottery and others. The distinction has a practical edge. A company can hold an active British licence, appear perfectly legitimate on the register, and still have no permission to run an online casino, because what it actually holds is a non-remote bingo licence. That is why the checker reports the licence holder and its permissions rather than a bare yes.

How to read a licence number

Licence numbers look like noise and are not. Take 039544-R-319290-009, which belongs to a real operator on the register. The first block is the company's account number padded to six digits, so this is account 39544. The single letter is the licence type: R for remote, N for non-remote, A for ancillary remote. That mapping holds across every one of the several thousand licences the Commission publishes, which makes the letter the fastest way to tell whether a permission you are looking at covers online play at all.

The two blocks after it identify the specific licence and its sequence within that account. They are of little use to a player, but the account number is worth noting: it is the key that ties a company to its brands, its domains and its enforcement history, and it is what this site joins the register on.

When the brand is not the company

Some sites are run by the company named on the licence. Others are white label: an independent brand trading on somebody else's permission, with the licence holder carrying the regulatory responsibility and holding the money. The Commission marks these separately on the register and the checker passes that through, because the distinction changes who you are actually dealing with.

It matters in three concrete ways. Your funds sit with the licence holder, not the brand, so if the brand disappears your claim is against a company whose name you may never have seen. Your complaint goes to the licence holder's alternative dispute resolution provider. And a self-exclusion or a deposit limit set with the licence holder can reach across every brand running on that permission, which is occasionally to your advantage and frequently a surprise.

Active, surrendered, lapsed, revoked

A licence on the register carries a status, and the four you will meet mean quite different things.

Active is the only one that permits trading. Surrendered means the company handed the licence back. This is overwhelmingly routine housekeeping: consolidating permissions, retiring a product line, restructuring a group. There are hundreds of surrenders across the register and they are not a black mark, which is why this site does not score them as one.

Lapsed means the licence fell away, commonly through an administrative failure such as an unpaid fee. Revoked means the Commission took it away. That is not routine, it is rare, and it is the strongest negative signal the register carries about a company. If a casino you are considering sits behind a licence holder with a revocation on record, that is worth more of your attention than any welcome offer.

Licences that are not British licences

A site can be licensed somewhere and still be unlicensed here. Malta, Gibraltar, Alderney, the Isle of Man and Curaçao all issue gambling licences, and a footer citing one of them is not a claim about Britain at all. Since the point-of-consumption rules came into force in 2014, an operator must hold a British licence to offer gambling to consumers in Great Britain, whatever else it holds elsewhere.

The consequence is not abstract. A site licensed only overseas is not bound by the British stake caps on online slots, has no obligation to offer you a deposit limit, is not required to run customer checks when your play changes, and is not connected to GAMSTOP. If it declines to pay you, the Gambling Commission has no jurisdiction and the free dispute route does not open. Several of those regulators are perfectly real, and none of them helps you as a British player.

Ways a site can look licensed without being licensed

The most common is simply a licence number in the footer. Numbers are text and text is copied; unlicensed sites routinely display real ones belonging to other companies. Checking the number against the register takes longer than checking the domain, and the domain is the thing that either appears or does not.

Watch for a near-miss address. An operator with a legitimate British licence for one domain does not automatically cover another, and a site on a lookalike address can be an entirely different business. Watch for the word "regulated" used without a regulator, and for badges rendered as images rather than as links to the register. A licensed operator has no reason to be vague about which licence it holds.

If you have already deposited somewhere unlicensed

First, stop adding money. Then request a withdrawal of the full balance in writing and keep the record, because a written request with a date is the only thing you will have to point at later. If a card was used, contact your bank: a chargeback is not guaranteed and it is not quick, but it is a genuine route where a licensed one does not exist.

Reporting it to the Gambling Commission will not recover your money, since it has no power over a company it does not license. It is still worth ten minutes, because the Commission works with payment providers and search and advertising platforms to disrupt unlicensed operators reaching British consumers, and reports are what direct that work.

If the site turns out to be licensed after all, you have a much better position than you thought. The formal complaints route is free, it does not end with the operator, and it is binding on them if you accept the outcome.

A lookup, worked through

Two real addresses show why the answer is rarely the one you expect. Both are read from the register as it stood on 11 August 2026.

Put 21.co.uk in and the register returns account 39198, LeoVegas Gaming PLC. Nothing on that website carries the company's name, and the same licence holder covers 11 registered addresses in total. If you held accounts at several of them believing you had spread your play across different businesses, you had not: one company, one set of deposit limits, one compliance record.

Put virginbet.com in and the status comes back as white label, against Virgin Bet Limited. The brand is not the licence holder. Your money and your complaint route sit with the company on the licence, which is a fact you would have no way of discovering from the site itself.

Neither result says anything is wrong. Multi-brand operation is normal and white labelling is legitimate. The point is that the register answers a question the website does not, and the answer takes a few seconds to get.

What holding a British licence actually obliges an operator to do

The licence is a contract with conditions attached, and the conditions are where the protection lives. They run to a substantial document, but the parts a player feels divide into a handful of areas.

Money and identity. The operator must verify who you are before you gamble, must keep customer funds separated from its own to a level it has to disclose to you, and must run anti-money-laundering controls. Failures here are the single most heavily penalised category on the enforcement register.

Watching for harm. The operator has to monitor play for signs of trouble and act on them, offer deposit limits and time-outs, honour self-exclusion, and take part in the national scheme. This is the other category that produces the largest penalties, and the failures tend to read the same way each time: the signals were there in the account data and nobody acted on them.

The games themselves. Games must meet technical standards and be tested by an approved house. That covers the random number generator, but also product rules such as the minimum two and a half seconds between slot spins and the ban on autoplay. Operators have been penalised for breaching the timing rule alone.

Telling the regulator things. Operators must file returns and report key events. These breaches produce small fines and a great many of them, which is why the count of published actions runs well ahead of the money involved.

One habit is worth more than the rest: check the address you are actually on, at the moment you are on it, rather than the brand you meant to visit. Lookalike addresses are the cheapest trick in this market and the register answers them in seconds.

The order to do things in

Checking the licence first rather than last saves the most time, because it is the only question whose answer makes the others pointless. If the address is not on the register, nothing about the bonus, the game library or the payout speed matters, since none of it is enforceable and none of it is your money's problem until you deposit.

Once the address checks out, the useful order runs roughly like this. Look at what the licence holder has on its enforcement record and what the failings were about, because a company penalised for ignoring signs of harm is telling you something different from one fined for a late return. Find out which other brands sit behind the same permission, so you know whether opening a second account actually changes anything. Then set your deposit limit before you play rather than after, because the cooling-off period on increases exists precisely to stop you raising it in the moment you most want to.

None of that takes long, and it is roughly the reverse of the order most comparison sites present. They lead with the offer because the offer is what they are paid for. The licence, the record and the ownership are the three facts that survive the first week of playing, and all three are public.

What the register will not tell you

It is a record of permission and of enforcement, and it stops there. It does not record how quickly an operator pays out, whether its bonus terms are enforced reasonably, whether support answers, or whether the limits it offers are easy to find. Those are real questions and the register is silent on all of them.

It is also a snapshot rather than a history. Sanctions and settlements stay published for three years from the date of publication and then leave, so an operator showing nothing today may have had a very different record four years ago. Read a clean record as "nothing published in the current window", which is what it means, rather than as a clean history.

How current any copy of the register is

The Commission's own register is the live one. Licences are granted, surrendered and revoked continually, and a domain can be added to a licence the week after any copy was taken. This site re-reads all of it weekly and states the date it last did so at the foot of every page, which is the honest way to publish a mirror.

For an everyday check, a copy that is days old is fine: companies do not lose licences often, and the great majority of what you will look up has been stable for years. For a decision that involves real money, confirm against the Commission's own register as well. Where our copy and the source disagree, the source is right, and we would rather say so than imply a currency we cannot guarantee.