Method
How the Safety Record score works, and what it cannot measure
Published in full so you can disagree with it. Every input is drawn from the Gambling Commission's own register, so anyone can reproduce a score by hand.
The short version
Three inputs, weighted 55, 25 and 20, normalised to a mark out of 100. No operator supplies data, no operator can pay to be listed differently, and there is no commercial input to the formula anywhere. Across the 312 companies we hold records for, the median score is 86.
What the enforcement data covers, and what it cannot
This is the most important limitation on the page, and it is not ours to fix. The Commission publishes a regulatory action for three years and then withdraws it. Its register of regulatory actions is therefore a rolling window rather than an archive: read on 11 August 2026, the earliest decision it carried was 20 September 2023, and it held 95 actions against companies.
So every enforcement count and total on this site — on operator pages, in the ledger and in the figures on the front page — describes decisions published since September 2023. It is not a company's full enforcement history, and some of the largest penalties the Commission has ever issued fall before that line and are no longer on the register to be counted. An operator showing nothing here has nothing published against it today, which is a weaker statement than never having been penalised.
We do not fill the gap from secondary sources. The Commission's news archive reports older penalties in prose but carries no account number, and the account number is the join that makes every other figure on this site checkable. Matching historic press releases to licensees by company name would introduce exactly the kind of unverifiable claim the rest of this method exists to avoid. Where an older decision matters, the Commission's own news archive is the source to read.
Enforcement burden, 55 points
The largest weight, because a published decision is the only hard evidence in the register that an operator has failed the people it is licensed to protect. Every penalty currently published against the company is added up, but not at face value.
Each figure is weighted by how recent it is, on a five-year half-life: a fine from last year counts close to fully, one from three years ago counts about two thirds. In practice the window above means nothing older than that is available to weight at all. The weighted total is then log-scaled, so that a single very large settlement does not flatten every lesser record into the same mark. A weighted total of roughly £10 million takes this component to zero. Outcomes that carry no money, such as warnings and revocations, deduct three points each instead.
Licence standing, 25 points
Revocations count heavily against an operator. Lapsed licences count lightly. Surrendered licences do not count at all, and that is a deliberate choice: there are hundreds of surrenders across the register, and they are overwhelmingly routine housekeeping rather than a signal of anything. Treating them as a negative would have penalised long-established operators for tidying up their licence portfolio.
Licence tenure, 20 points
How long the company has held any British licence, reaching full marks at fifteen years. It is the closest thing the register offers to a track record. It is also the input we are least attached to: a long licence is not a virtue in itself, only weak evidence that a company has operated here without losing its permission.
Two inputs that are usually absent
The score has room for two further inputs: safer gambling tool coverage, worth 20, and RTP disclosure, worth 10. Neither can be read from the register. They come from testing an operator's site directly, and we only apply them where we have actually done that.
Where an operator has not been tested, those weights are excluded and the remaining three are renormalised. The operator page says so plainly rather than quietly scoring a nil. Guessing at an untested input, or defaulting it to zero, would make the number look more complete than it is.
What is deliberately not published
The Commission's register of regulatory actions contains 130 entries. We publish 95 of them. The 35 we leave out are actions against named individuals holding personal management licences, rather than against companies.
They are public, and we could reproduce them. We do not, for two reasons. Naming a private individual carries a different order of risk from naming a company, both under data protection law and in fairness to someone whose name will outrank them in search results for years. And it does not help the person this site is for: if you are deciding whether to open an account, the conduct of the company is the question, not the conduct of a director who may have left.
What this score cannot tell you
Penalties are absolute, not proportional. The register publishes no revenue figures, so a £2 million penalty against a company turning over billions scores identically to the same penalty against a small operator, even though it represents a wholly different level of failure. This is the weakness we would most like to fix and cannot, because the data does not exist publicly.
A clean record may mean a clean operator, or a small one. Enforcement attention is not evenly distributed. A company with no actions may be well run, or may simply never have been examined closely.
Nothing here measures how it feels to be a customer. Withdrawal speed, how bonus terms are enforced, whether support answers: none of it is in the register, so none of it is in the score.
The register is a snapshot. Sanctions remain published for three years from the date of publication, so an older failing may have dropped off the register entirely and therefore out of this score.
Sources and dates
Everything comes from the Gambling Commission's public register of licensees, trading names, domains and operating licences, and from its register of regulatory actions. This copy was retrieved 11 August 2026 and is refreshed weekly. Figures are reproduced as the register states them; where a penalty appears only in the wording of a decision rather than in a structured field, we take it from that wording.
Penalties recorded against companies currently total £40,307,411 across 87 licence holders.
If you believe something here is wrong, tell us and we will check it against the register and correct it.
Questions about the method
Can an operator pay to change its score?
No. Every input is either drawn from the public register or from our own testing. There is no commercial relationship anywhere in the calculation, there is no paid placement on the site, and there is no mechanism by which an operator could alter its figure other than by its conduct changing what the register says.
Why is enforcement weighted so much more heavily than tenure?
Because it is the only input that reflects what an operator actually did rather than how long it has existed. A published decision means the regulator examined the company and found it wanting. Length of licence is weak evidence by comparison, which is why it carries the smallest weight of the three.
Why is a surrendered licence not treated as a bad sign?
There are hundreds of surrenders across the register and they are overwhelmingly administrative: consolidating licences, retiring a product line, restructuring a group. Scoring them negatively would have penalised long-established operators for ordinary housekeeping while telling a reader nothing useful.
Why do most operators not have a complete score?
Because two of the five possible inputs, safer gambling tool coverage and RTP disclosure, can only be established by testing an operator's site directly. Where we have not done that, those weights are excluded and the remaining three are renormalised. The alternative, scoring an untested operator zero on them, would be inventing a result.
Is a score of 100 a recommendation?
No. It means an operator has nothing published against it, has held a licence a long time and has never had one revoked. That is the absence of bad evidence rather than the presence of good evidence, and the difference matters.
Can I reproduce a score myself?
Yes, and that is the point of publishing the formula. Every figure comes from the Gambling Commission's register, the weights and the arithmetic are set out on this page, and each operator page shows the points earned against each component.