How we rate casinos
A star rating is only worth something if you know how it was made. This page sets out the whole method — what gets a casino through the door, what moves the score, and what we refuse to score at all.
Step one: the licence gate
Nothing appears on this site without a current remote casino authorisation from the UK Gambling Commission. We check the Commission's public register directly — the legal licensee, the account number, the licence status and the registered domain — and we link to the register entry from every review so you can repeat the check yourself. This step is pass or fail. There is no such thing as a casino that is "nearly licensed", and an operator that loses its authorisation comes off the site, whatever its star rating was.
The licence gate is deliberately separate from the rating. Holding a licence is the legal minimum for taking British customers, not an achievement worth stars.
Step two: the editorial score
The stars reflect our judgement across five areas, weighted roughly equally:
- Games and live casino. Depth and breadth of the catalogue, quality of the live-dealer offering, and whether the lobby helps you find things or buries them.
- Everyday usability. How the site behaves on a phone, how quickly pages respond, and how much cross-selling noise you have to wade through to play a game.
- Clarity of terms. Whether the operator's terms and promotional conditions are written to be understood or written to be survived.
- Safer-gambling tools. How easy it is to set a deposit limit, take a time-out or self-exclude — and how prominently those tools are offered, not just whether they legally exist.
- Regulatory record. Public enforcement history from the Gambling Commission. A past settlement does not disqualify an operator, but we tell you about it and it weighs on the score.
What the stars mean
| 5.0 | Near-faultless. We have not yet awarded it. |
|---|---|
| 4.0 – 4.5 | A confident recommendation. Strong across all five areas, with only minor reservations that we spell out in the review. |
| 3.0 – 3.5 | Competent, with real caveats. Perfectly usable, but read the review before deciding — the caveats are the point. |
| Below 3.0 | Not published. If we believe a casino should be avoided, listing it with a low score still sends traffic there. We just leave it out. |
What we refuse to score
Welcome bonuses do not feature in our ratings. Promotional terms change weekly, and a published comparison of offers goes stale before the ink dries — a stale bonus table is worse than none, because it misleads with confidence. We explain how to read any bonus yourself in our bonus terms guide instead.
We also do not score brand recognition, sponsorships or advertising presence. A shirt sponsorship tells you the marketing budget; it tells you nothing about how the casino treats a withdrawal request.
Money and independence
This site is funded by affiliate commission, and some operators we review pay us when readers open accounts. The scoring method above is how we keep that from mattering: the criteria are fixed before any review is written, the licence facts are checkable against the register, and low-scoring reviews stay published with their warnings intact. Two of the six casinos currently on our comparison carry three stars and explicit cautions — commission has never removed a caveat from this site. The full picture is in our affiliate disclosure and editorial policy.
When scores change
Ratings are revisited when something material happens: an enforcement action, a change of licensee, a platform migration, or reader reports that check out. When a score changes, the review says so plainly. If you believe something on this site is out of date or wrong, the corrections page explains how to tell us — we would rather be corrected than confidently wrong.