A data investigation

Six Thousand Euros

Most casino bonuses come with a wagering requirement, and every one of them states it as a single number. We took 889 live offers and worked out what that number actually costs. It turns out the headline figure doesn’t decide the answer.

By Antti Virtanen , Lead Analyst Published 4 August 2026 Investigation · 5 min read

In short

Two offers, both advertising 35× wagering, can cost twice as much as each other, depending on what the multiple applies to. On a €100 deposit, the median offer requires €6,000 of betting. Of 733 offers analysed, only five would meet Finland's incoming 5× cap.

A wagering requirement is the casino’s insurance against people taking a bonus and cashing straight out. Accept €100 in bonus money, and you agree to bet some multiple of it before anything becomes withdrawable. The multiple is always disclosed, usually in large type, and it is the number every comparison site (this one included) puts in the table.

It is also, on its own, close to meaningless. Because the multiple has to apply to something, and the offers don’t agree on what.

40 times what?

The question the headline number doesn't answer

Some offers apply the multiple to the bonus alone. Others apply it to the bonus and the deposit that unlocked it. On a €100 deposit with a €100 bonus, that is the difference between betting through €100 and betting through €200, before the multiple is applied. Then those figures are multiplied by 35 or 40.

• Bonus only

  356 of 889 offers

  1. You deposit €100
  2. ↓
  3. The casino adds €100
  4. ↓
  5. You must bet 40× the bonus
  6. ↓
  7. €4,000 of turnover

  The lighter of the two

• Bonus + deposit

  465 of 889 offers

  1. You deposit €100
  2. ↓
  3. The casino adds €100
  4. ↓
  5. You must bet 35× both together
  6. ↓
  7. €7,000 of turnover

  Double, on a smaller headline number

• Unstated

  68 of 889 offers

  1. You deposit €100
  2. ↓
  3. The casino adds a bonus
  4. ↓
  5. The basis is not given in the offer
  6. ↓
  7. You find out in the terms, or later

  Not modelled in this study

Of the 889 offers, 465 apply the multiple to bonus and deposit together and 356 apply it to the bonus alone. The remaining 68 do not say in the offer itself.

Look only at the advertised numbers and the harder offers appear easier: 35 against 40. That is the whole problem in two figures.

The same number, twice the money

Advertised claim vs required turnover

Hold the advertised multiple fixed and the difference is unambiguous. These are offers making the identical claim, on the identical deposit, differing only in what the multiple is applied to.

• 30× wagering Bonus only €6,000 €200 bonus 38 offers Bonus + deposit €6,000 €100 bonus 31 offers No difference
• 35× wagering Bonus only €3,500 €100 bonus 75 offers Bonus + deposit €7,000 €100 bonus 295 offers Twice the cost
• 40× wagering Bonus only €4,000 €100 bonus 91 offers Bonus + deposit €8,000 €100 bonus 82 offers Twice the cost
• 50× wagering Bonus only €5,000 €100 bonus 10 offers Bonus + deposit €8,750 €75 bonus 7 offers Nearly twice

Each side also shows the median bonus its turnover is built on. Where that bonus is €100 the wider basis costs exactly double; the 30× and 50× rows depart from that because their median bonus is €200 and €75.

At 35× (the single most common requirement in the dataset, and the one most likely to be sitting in front of a Finnish player right now), the bonus-only version asks for €3,500, and the bonus-and-deposit version asks for €7,000. Same two digits on the landing page, but costing twice the money.

The 30× row is there deliberately: it is the case where the two land in the same place, because the bonus-only offers at that multiple happen to carry larger bonuses. The effect is real, but it is not mechanical, and a chart showing only the dramatic rows would imply otherwise.

What that means across the market

Every modelled offer, one €100 deposit

• <€1,000 1.8%
• €1–2,000 4.1%
• €2–3,000 5.9%
• €3–4,000 10.5%
• €4–5,000 11.2%
• €5–7,500 51.2%
• €7.5–10,000 11.7%
• €10,000+ 3.7%

Half the market sits in a single band, between €5,000 and €7,500 of required betting on a €100 deposit. The quartiles are €4,000 and €7,000. Expressed the way players actually think about it (as a multiple of the bonus they were offered), the median is not 35× but 70×.

The extreme is worse than the distribution suggests: the single steepest offer in the dataset advertises 200× and requires €30,000 of turnover on a €100 deposit.

Two ways this could have been nothing

Testing the obvious explanations

There are two innocent readings of all this, and both are checkable.

The first: maybe the harder offers are simply more generous. A bigger bonus for a bigger clearing burden would be a fair trade, and nobody could complain. It goes the other way. Bonus-and-deposit offers carry a smaller average match (89.5% against 104.1%) and a lower average maximum bonus, €770 against €937. The offers that cost twice as much to clear are slightly smaller, not bigger.

The second: maybe this is an offshore practice. That would make it a licensing story rather than an industry one. It is more common outside the EEA, where 62.5% of offers from brands without an EEA licence use the wider base, against 50.8% of those from EEA-licensed brands. But 50.8% is close to being a coin flip. This is a convention the whole industry shares, tilted rather than divided.

Two things the number still doesn't include

And both make it worse

The bonus usually isn’t yours. 86.7% of these offers (771 of 889) are sticky, meaning the bonus money itself is never withdrawable. You bet through it to keep what it wins, and then it is removed. The €6,000 buys you the winnings, not the bonus.

Free spins are wagered separately. 633 offers attach a second, independent requirement to their free spins, at a median of 40× and a maximum of 200×. None of that is included in any figures above.

So what is a bonus worth?

The honest answer

Six thousand euros of betting for a hundred-euro bonus, at the middle of the market, and that is before the bonus is taken back off you at the end, and before the free spins bring their own requirement along. Finland’s incoming Gambling Act caps wagering at five times [1]. Of the 733 offers modelled here, 5 meet that threshold. Not five per cent. Five. And welcome bonuses will not be permitted at all.

None of which makes the advertised multiple a lie. It is disclosed, it is accurate, and it is in the terms. It simply isn’t the number that determines what the offer costs you, and the number that does isn’t on the page.

Next time a bonus tells you 35×, that is the question worth asking: thirty-five times what?