How we review casino bonuses

Where the numbers come from

The primary source is always the operator's own page: the promotions listing for the headline offer, and the bonus terms or general terms and conditions for the conditions attached to it. Nothing is copied from another comparison site — if a figure cannot be traced back to the operator, it does not go in the table.

Where the promotions page and the terms page disagree — which happens more often than it should — the terms page wins, because that is the document that actually governs your account once the money is in it. The banner is marketing; the terms are the contract. Where a figure is not stated anywhere, we record it as not stated rather than filling it in from a competitor's listing or a plausible guess.

Each offer is recorded as 9 fields: match percentage, maximum bonus, free spins, the wagering multiplier, what that multiplier applies to, free-spin wagering, minimum deposit, maximum bet while wagering, and the time limit. Those are the fields that decide what an offer is worth; everything else is presentation.

The one field that decides most of it

A wagering requirement of 35× can mean two very different things, and which one it means turns on a single word in the terms. Applied to the bonus alone, a €100 bonus needs €3,500 of turnover before you can withdraw. Applied to deposit plus bonus, the same 35× on a €100 deposit matched to €100 works on a €200 base — €7,000 of turnover, double the first, for an offer that prints the identical headline.

Scaled up, that is what catches people out. A “100% up to €500” bonus taken in full is a €500 deposit matched to €500; on a deposit-plus-bonus basis that is a €1,000 base, and 35× on it is €35,000 of turnover to clear the bonus in full. The Calculator lets you put your own numbers in.

This is why we record what the multiplier applies to as its own field, and why it carries more weight in the score than the size of the bonus. In our 52-casino study, of the 48 offers that stated a basis at all, 13 — about 27% — applied wagering to deposit plus bonus, and almost none of them said so on the promotions page. Converted to a common yardstick, the average offer in that sample really costs about 45.8× the bonus, against the 36.4× the multipliers advertise — roughly a quarter more turnover than the headline number admits to.

How the score out of 10 is built

The score out of 10 is an editorial judgement, not a formula with a hidden weighting we can pretend is objective. It is built from four things, in this order of importance:

What you keep. The wagering requirement, what it applies to, the maximum bet allowed while wagering, and the time limit. An offer with a low multiplier, a bonus-only basis and clean terms scores above a larger one with 50× wagering on deposit plus bonus and a seven-day window, however big the headline.

Breadth. Whether the welcome package covers more than slots — a separate live casino, sportsbook or crypto offer is real additional value if you use those products, and worth nothing if you do not. We say which case a score assumes.

Clarity. Whether the terms are findable, complete and internally consistent. An operator whose promotions page contradicts its own terms loses points for that alone, because it is the reader who pays for the ambiguity.

Accessibility. The minimum deposit and the deposit methods that qualify. An offer that excludes e-wallets is a narrower offer than one that does not, even at the same headline.

What the score is not: it is not a user rating, and it is not computed from player votes, because this site collects none. Two offers with identical terms get identical scores. The 8 operators here share one near-identical core bonus, so none of them outscores another on the bonus arithmetic; the small gaps you see reflect breadth and clarity, and the head-to-head pages spell out which. The ordering is our opinion of the offers — but the set of offers being ranked was chosen commercially, which the About us explains in full.

What we deliberately do not rate

A method is defined as much by what it refuses to measure as by what it measures. There are things other sites score that we leave blank, because scoring them honestly is not something we can do from an operator's terms page.

Payout speed. We make no claim about how fast a casino pays, because we have not timed withdrawals across a statistically useful sample and will not print a number we did not measure. “Instant payouts” on an affiliate page is almost always the operator's own marketing quoted back.

Star ratings and review counts. No aggregate star average, no “4.7 from 318 players”, and no aggregateRating in the page markup. With no player votes collected, any such figure would be a fabrication rather than a measurement.

Games and RTP. We do not review the game library or publish return-to-player percentages. Those are set by the games studios rather than the casino, and a bonus comparison is not the place to pretend we have tested them.

Personal play. We do not tell you we deposited real money and played the bonus through, because we did not. The figures come from the written terms, which is what governs your account and what you can check for yourself. The Editorial policy lists in full what we will not publish.

Keeping the figures current

Bonus terms change without announcement, and an affiliate table that is right on the day it is written quietly goes wrong over the following months. So every listing carries the date it was last verified, and that date is not auto-generated: it moves when someone actually re-reads the operator's source, not when the site is rebuilt.

A rebuild that stamped a fresh date without anyone re-checking the terms would be exactly the kind of manufactured freshness this page exists to rule out. The operator's own terms page is always the final authority, and we link to it from every review, so any figure can be checked against the source in one click. If you find one here that no longer matches, telling us is the fastest way it gets fixed.

The 52-casino study behind the method

This method was not invented for 8 casinos. It was applied to 52 in a separate bonus-terms study, and the same 9 fields were recorded for every one of them. The Study publishes the full findings and, unusually, the raw records themselves, downloadable under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

Each record carries its own source link, a plain-language note on what was and was not confirmed, and a confidence rating, so you can see how solid each figure is rather than taking a tidy average on trust. That honesty cuts both ways: confidence was low for 17 of the 52 offers, and 27 of them — more than half — needed a correction on a second pass. It is not a flattering statistic, and that is the point: it is a direct measure of how unclear and inconsistent bonus terms are across the market, which is the problem this site was built to answer.

Corrections

If a figure on this site is wrong, we want to know, and the fastest route is the Contact page. A link to the operator's terms where the correct figure appears makes the fix immediate.

How it is handled: a reported figure is checked against the operator's current terms page. If the figure here is wrong, it is corrected and the page's verification date is updated in the same change. If the operator has changed its terms since we last checked, the listing is updated and treated as a normal re-verification rather than a correction. Where a correction changes the substance of a recommendation we note it on the page rather than editing silently; small typographic fixes are made without a note. The full procedure is set out in the Editorial policy.