DCMS Will Raise Operator License Fees by 25% From October 1

Operator licensing fees in Great Britain will increase by 25% from the start of October, as part of an effort to help the regulator - the UK Gambling Commission - overcome annual budget deficits of about £4 million.

The decision made by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) follows a consultation on proposals for changes to the licensing fees paid to the Commission that was held between January 27 and March 30 this year. A total of 47 consultation responses were received, leading to three proposals for how to raise fees and recover costs for the Commission.

What were the options?

The first option was to increase license fees by 30%; the second option was to raise the fees by 20%; and the third option was for the fees to go up 20%, as well as a 10% increase ringfenced for illegal markets, revenue protection and related activity. However, in light of the responses received, the DCMS has decided not to proceed with any of these options.

The DCMS has instead opted for a 25% increase to license fees, with the exceptions of society lotteries, for which fees will be frozen, and general betting operating licenses. For those licensees, fees will be adjusted to a market-share-based approach based on GGY rather than the number of days in operation.

The license fees operators are required to pay is dependent on the betting vertical they operated in and their gross gambling yield (GGY) generated in a year. As an example, casino operators pay a new application fee of £8,185 if their GGY is less than £250,000, with the fees rising incrementally, going above £100,000 when GGY is between £130 million and £455 million.

The overall headline increase to operating license fees will not be distributed evenly across all types of operating license. The DCMS stressed that even with the 25% license fee increase, the Commission will need to identify further efficiency savings of at least £8 million across the next five years.

Operator opposition

The DCMS said almost all who responded to the consultation were against all three options that were proposed, favouring no increase at all, while some operators proposed exemptions for their specific category of license. Operators cited the impact of other increased costs, such as the new gambling duty regime that was implemented in April.

Remote gaming duty, paid on online casino bets, has been raised from 21% of GGY to 40%. In addition, general betting duty, paid on online sports bets, will go up from 15% of GGY to 25% from April 2027; bets on horseracing will be exempt from the increase. The operators also mentioned the introduction of the statutory levy.

The statutory levy came into effect in April 2025, as one of the terms from the 2023 Gambling White Paper, requiring all licensed operators to pay a percentage of their GGY to contribute towards efforts to treat and prevent gambling harm. The rate ranges from 0.1% to 1.1%, dependent on the specific gambling-related activity.

Black market issue

A number of operators are said to have objected to providing any funding for tackling the illegal market via license fee increases. The operators instead recommended that funding should come from central government departments, including the Treasury and the Home Office.

Certain types of operators, such as society lotteries and on-course bookmakers, argued there is very little illegal betting in their sectors, so their funding should be minimal.