How we rate bookmakers: the current top five
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1.
8.4/10Rated on 5 of 7 criteria
Its prices are not in the odds feed we record, so price is not part of this score.
Bet £10 Get £30 In Free Bets
New UK customers only, 18+. Place a £10 qualifying bet at odds of 1/5 or bigger within 30 days to get £30 in Bet Credits. Bet Credits expire after 7 days and the stake is not returned. Some deposit methods do not qualify. Full T&Cs apply. Offer checked 20 October 2026. Please gamble responsibly. GambleAware.org 18+
- Racing & extras10.0
- Payments & withdrawals9.0
- Safer-gambling tools9.0
- Welcome offer3.8
- App9.3
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2.
8.4/107.10% median football margin
From our first 13 days of odds; price enters the score after 21 days.
Bet £5, Get £30 in Free Bets
New customers only, 18+. Place a £5 bet at evens or bigger to get 3 x £10 free bets. E-wallet deposits do not qualify. Free bet stakes are not returned and the free bets expire after 30 days. Full T&Cs apply. Offer checked 22 October 2026. Please gamble responsibly. GambleAware.org 18+
- Racing & extras10.0
- Payments & withdrawals9.0
- Safer-gambling tools6.0
- Welcome offer7.5
- Market coverage8.0
- App9.0
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3.
8.4/1010.81% median football margin
From our first 13 days of odds; price enters the score after 21 days.
Bet £10 Get £30 in Free Bets
New UK customers only, 18+, excluding Northern Ireland. Deposit and bet £10 at evens or bigger within 30 days to get £30 in free bets, valid 7 days. PayPal, Skrill, Neteller and Paysafe deposits do not qualify. Full T&Cs apply. Offer checked 20 October 2026. Please gamble responsibly. GambleAware.org 18+
- Racing & extras10.0
- Payments & withdrawals10.0
- Safer-gambling tools10.0
- Welcome offer3.8
- Market coverage9.3
- App6.0
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4.
8.4/106.33% median football margin
From our first 13 days of odds; price enters the score after 21 days.
Bet £20, Get £40 in Free Bets
New GB customers only, 18+. Opt in, deposit £20+ by debit card or instant bank transfer and place a £20+ sports bet at odds of evens (2.0) or bigger, settled within 7 days of registering. Get 3 x £10 Bet Builder and 1 x £10 acca free bets (4+ selections each), valid 7 days, not for racing. Stake not returned. Cashed-out and boosted bets do not count. Full T&Cs apply. Offer checked 21 October 2026. Please gamble responsibly. GambleAware.org 18+
- Racing & extras10.0
- Payments & withdrawals10.0
- Safer-gambling tools10.0
- Welcome offer2.5
- Market coverage8.2
- App8.2
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5.
8.4/107.99% median football margin
From our first 13 days of odds; price enters the score after 21 days.
Bet £10, Get £30 in Free Bets
New customers only, 18+. Deposit £10+ and place a £10+ cash bet on any sport (excl. virtuals) at odds of 1/2 or bigger, settled within 14 days of registering. Accept 2 x £10 sportsbook free bets and 2 x £5 Bet Builder free bets within 7 days; valid 7 days once accepted. Stake not returned. Prepaid, virtual and unidentified debit cards do not qualify. Full T&Cs apply. Offer checked 21 October 2026. Please gamble responsibly. GambleAware.org 18+
- Racing & extras10.0
- Payments & withdrawals9.0
- Safer-gambling tools9.0
- Welcome offer3.8
- Market coverage8.4
- App8.8
The seven criteria and their weights
| Criterion | Weight | How it is scored out of 10 |
|---|---|---|
| Price (measured margin) | 30% | Best football match-result median margin among rated bookmakers = 10, worst = 0, linear in between |
| Racing & extras | 15% | Best odds guaranteed 4, extra places 3, cash out 1.5, acca extras such as insurance, boosts or freezes 1.5 |
| Payments & withdrawals | 15% | 1 point per distinct payment method up to 7, +2 if PayPal is available, +1 if a method pays out within hours |
| Safer-gambling tools | 10% | Every listed bookmaker starts at 6; +1 per verified extra tool, up to 10 |
| Welcome offer | 10% | Free bet value divided by the qualifying stake, × 1.25, capped at 10 |
| Market coverage | 10% | Share of tracked fixtures the bookmaker priced, × 10 |
| App | 10% | Average of App Store and Google Play ratings, × 2 |
The weights add up to 100, and the final rating is the weighted average of the seven scores, rounded to one decimal place. Price carries the most because it touches every bet a punter places, and because we can measure it directly. The other weights reflect how often each feature changes what a regular bettor actually gets back.
A current UK Gambling Commission licence is a condition for appearing at all, never a score. A brand without one is simply absent from our tables. That keeps the method focused on differences between legal options, since every listed bookmaker already meets the licence conditions on identity checks, complaints handling and the core safer-gambling tools.
To see how we rate bookmakers in practice, take a hypothetical bookmaker scoring 8 on price, 7 on racing, 9 on payments, 7 on safer gambling, 4 on the offer, 9 on coverage and 9 on the app. Multiply each score by its weight, add the results and divide by 100. The rating comes out at 7.7 out of 10.
Price: how the margin is measured
Once a day a script stores the prices UK bookmakers show in a commercial odds feed for seven competitions: the Premier League, Championship, League One, League Two, Scottish Premiership, FA Cup and EFL Cup. Two markets count, match result (home, draw, away) and over/under 2.5 goals. For each fixture and bookmaker, the last snapshot before kick-off counts.
- 01
Daily snapshot
Every day we store the match odds 21 sites show on English and Scottish football.
- 02
Last price before kick-off
For each fixture we keep the final price each site offered before the game started.
- 03
Median over 28 days
The margin of every market goes into a 28-day window; the median stops one odd price from skewing it.
- 04
Weekly refresh
The window rolls forward each week and the ranking is re-scored with the new figures.
Here is a worked example with round, made-up prices. Say a bookmaker offers 1.90 on the home side, 3.40 on the draw and 4.20 on the away team. The implied probabilities are 0.526, 0.294 and 0.238. Their sum is 1.058, so the margin is 5.8%. A two-way goals market at 1.90 each way works out at 5.3%.
The margin for one fixture is noisy, so the headline figure is the median across all fixtures in a rolling 28-day window. The average and the number of markets travel with it. To turn margins into a score, the cheapest rated bookmaker gets 10, the dearest gets 0, and everyone else sits proportionally between them.
Outliers and minimum samples
Feeds sometimes carry a price that was never really on offer: a quote left over from before a team news update, or a thin exchange market with one stray bet. Any single price set whose margin falls below minus 1% or above 30% is discarded as stale or broken. The limits are wide, so normal pricing is never trimmed.
A figure also needs enough fixtures behind it. Any table cell with fewer than five priced fixtures stays empty until the sample grows. That matters most in the cups, where a round can bring only a handful of ties, and explains why a bookmaker sometimes appears in the Premier League column but not in the FA Cup one.
Price also needs enough days behind it. Until our daily record holds 21 days of odds, the margins are shown and labelled as an early sample, but price is left out of every rating and its 30% weight is shared among the other six criteria. No site is called the cheapest place to bet before that point.
Exchanges and commission
An exchange price is not directly comparable with a bookmaker price, because the exchange takes commission from net winnings. We adjust each price first with the formula odds’ = 1 + (odds − 1) × (1 − commission). With a 5% commission, a back price of 3.00 becomes 2.90. The margin we publish is what a backer actually pays.
The other six criteria in practice
Racing and extras rewards the concessions racing punters value most. Best odds guaranteed carries 4 points because it pays the higher starting price on winners, extra places add 3, and cash out and acca extras add 1.5 each. Payments count distinct deposit and withdrawal methods, with a bonus for PayPal and another for withdrawals that land within hours.
Safer gambling starts at 6 for everyone, because deposit limits, time-outs, self-exclusion and GamStop are licence conditions. Each extra tool we verify, such as stake limits, reality checks or profit and loss summaries, adds a point up to 10. For the welcome offer, £30 in free bets for a £10 stake gives a ratio of 3, which scores 3.75.
Market coverage is the share of tracked fixtures a bookmaker priced, multiplied by 10, so a brand pricing nine in ten matches scores 9. The app score doubles the average of the App Store and Google Play ratings: 4.6 and 4.4 average 4.5, which scores 9. Neither figure involves any judgement from our editors, which is deliberate.
When a criterion cannot be measured
Some brands miss a criterion. bet365 is not in the odds feed, so its price and market coverage cannot be measured, and it is rated on the remaining five criteria. Their weights are scaled up in proportion so they still total 100, and the bet365 review says this plainly. The same rule covers missing app ratings.
In numbers: with price and coverage gone, 60 points of weight remain. Racing and payments each move from 15 to 25, while safer gambling, offer and app each move from 10 to about 16.7. A brand rated this way is compared on a narrower base, so read its review alongside the tables before choosing where to open an account.
Limits and refresh cadence
The price data covers English and Scottish football only. Horse racing, darts and snooker odds are not measured, so racing quality enters the rating through features alone. The tables and ratings refresh weekly. Between refreshes, offers and features are rechecked against operator terms pages and dated on each listing, and the rating catches up at the next refresh.
How offers and features are checked
Callum Reid checks each welcome offer, payment method and racing feature against the operator’s own terms and records the date on the listing. Priya Nair verifies the safer-gambling tools. When something changes, the listing is updated straight away with a new date, while the rating waits for the weekly refresh so every brand is scored on the same day.
Any change to how we rate bookmakers, whether a new weight, an added competition or a different outlier limit, is dated in the changelog below. Old ratings are not rewritten after the fact. A score that does not match the inputs shown in the ranking breakdown at the top of this page is the kind of error we want flagged.
How these numbers were collected
Every price in the margin tables comes from the daily snapshot of a commercial odds feed, across the seven competitions above. We use the median of the full match-result book, keep the last price before each fixture starts, include exchange commission and drop quotes above 30% as stale. This is how we rate bookmakers on evidence anyone can inspect.
Two limits apply: football only, and bet365 sits outside the feed. The whole set refreshes weekly, and the stamp below shows how many fixtures and days of odds the current tables rest on, with the date range. Anyone wanting a single competition can open the margin tables, which break every figure down by league and by market type.
243 fixtures · 13 days of odds · updated 2 November 2026Changelog
- October 2026 – method last reviewed.
- 21 October 2026 – price enters the rating only after 21 days of recorded odds; until then the margins are published as a labelled early sample.
Frequently asked questions
How is a bookmaker's rating calculated?
Each bookmaker is scored from 0 to 10 on seven criteria, and the scores are combined with fixed weights: price 30%, racing and extras 15%, payments 15%, and 10% each for safer-gambling tools, welcome offer, market coverage and app.
What is a bookmaker margin?
It is the amount by which the implied probabilities of all outcomes in a market exceed 100%. We calculate it as the sum of one divided by each decimal price, minus one.
Why is bet365 rated without a price score?
bet365 is not in the commercial odds feed we record, so neither its margin nor its market coverage can be measured. Those weights are shared out in proportion across its other five criteria.
How often do the ratings change?
The margin tables and ratings are refreshed weekly. Offers and features are rechecked and dated on each listing, and any change feeds into the score at the next refresh.
Do you measure horse racing odds?
No. Our price data covers English and Scottish football only. Racing affects the rating through features such as best odds guaranteed and extra places, never through measured racing prices.