Statistics and research release
Market overview - operator data to December 2025 (published February 2026)
An overview of the data provided by gambling operators up to December 2025.
Summary
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Operator Data
The Gambling Commission has published data to December 2025, with the dataset collected since March 2020 showing how gambling behaviour has changed over the period.
This release compares Quarter 3 (October to December) of financial year 2025 to 2026, with Quarter 3 of 2024 to 2025, looking at how the market has changed in comparative periods over a year.
This is the third quarter since the maximum stake limit for online slots games was introduced. The £5 limit for all adults went live 9 April 2025 and the £2 limit for adults aged 18 to 24 went live 21 May 2025.
Note: We encourage you to always refer to the most recent excel data document which contains updated data for the entire period. This can be found on Gambling business data on gambling to December 2025 (published February 2026).
Online gambling
The online gambling data, collected from the largest online operators, covers the months March 2020 through to December 2025.
Comparison should not be made with the industry statistics dataset, as the data set reported here may include free bets and bonuses and does not cover all operators.
Latest data, from October to December 2025, shows total online Gross Gambling Yield (GGY) decreased 2 percent, compared to the same period last year, to £1.5 billion. The decrease was mostly driven by real event betting which decreased by 18 percent year-on-year.
The overall number of total bets and/or spins increased 6 percent year-on-year to 27.4 billion, a new peak for the dataset. The number of average monthly active accounts1 decreased 2 percent during the quarter compared to the previous year, with the number of average monthly active accounts totalling 12.7 million.
Online real event betting
Online real event betting GGY decreased by 18 percent year-on-year for Quarter 3, to £530 million. The number of bets decreased 6 percent, while the average monthly active accounts decreased 7 percent compared to the same quarter last year.
Online slots
Slots GGY increased 10 percent year-on-year to £788 million for this reporting period. The number of spins increased 7 percent in the quarter to 25.7 billion, representing new peaks for these two metrics in the dataset. The number of average monthly active accounts increased by 5 percent year-on-year to 4.6 million. The number of spins per session has decreased from 139 to 128 year-on-year, whilst the GGY per session also decreased from £4.13 to £3.91 in the equivalent timeframe.
A couple of operators have refined their session length methodology during the previous year which will impact year-on-year comparisons on the number of sessions, sessions over one hour and average session length metrics.
Online safer gambling indicators
The number of online slots sessions lasting longer than an hour decreased by 16 percent year-on-year to 8.9 million. The number of total sessions increased by 17 percent in the equivalent time period to 201 million. Approximately 4.4 percent of all sessions lasted in excess of one hour during the quarter, compared to 6.2 percent the previous year. The average session length decreased by two minutes to 16 minutes.
A couple of operators have refined their session length methodology during the previous year which will impact year-on-year comparisons on the number of sessions, sessions over one hour and average session length metrics.
The total number of customer interactions in Quarter 3 increased by 63 percent year-on-year to 5.7 million, with the majority remaining automated in nature. The number of direct interactions undertaken by operators in this dataset has increased by 11 percent year-on-year. During the past year, several operators have refined their markers of harms algorithms, resulting in a higher number of interactions.
Offline Betting
The Commission has collected data from the largest betting premises found on Britain's high streets for the months of March (pre-lockdown) and June 2020 through to December 2025.
GGY reported for Quarter 3 (October to December) decreased by 7 percent from Q3 last year to £549 million, while the number of total bets and spins decreased by 1 percent to 3.1 billion.
Over the Counter (OTC)
The number of bets placed over the counter decreased 2 percent in the quarter compared to the same period last year to 128 million, while GGY decreased by 12 percent to £141 million.
Self-Service Betting Terminals (SSBT)
The number of bets placed on SSBTs increased slightly by 0.3 percent year-on-year to 39.6 million. GGY decreased year-on-year by 15 percent to £130 million.
Machines sessions
Machines GGY decreased by 1 percent in Q3 year-on-year to £278 million, with average spend per session increasing slightly by 3 pence year-on-year to £12.31. The average number of spins per machines session remained at 130 spins.
Offline safer gambling indicators
2.6 percent of machine sessions lasted more than one hour, which is a slight decrease on 2.7 percent in Quarter 3 2024 to 2025.
Notes
1This is the total number of times activity has taken place across all verticals; therefore, an active account may be counted more than once if they participate in more than one vertical. Additionally, a quarter-on-quarter comparison means that there is a further degree of double counting in the active accounts’ data-point. For example, if an account has been active in 2 months of the 3 months in a quarter, it will be counted twice in the total for that quarter. This is only applicable to active accounts and not any of the other data-points.
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