Remote Gaming Duty went from 21% to 40% on 1 April, under last November’s Budget. The Chancellor who announced it has since left the Treasury, and her successor’s first Budget is due on 28 October 2026.
The government said the gambling package would “raise over £1 billion per year”, and that the online casino rise was meant “to disincentivise gambling companies from pushing consumers towards” the products it considers more harmful.
The Treasury’s own small print is less generous. Its Budget policy costings put the static yield for 2026-27 at £1.32 billion, and the figure after people change their behaviour at £810 million.
The billion only turns up in 2027-28, when a new 25% rate on remote betting arrives, with bets on UK horseracing left at 15%. Not every part of the package was a rise: bingo duty was abolished on the same April date.
The gap between those two numbers is an assumption. The costing “assumes that 89% of the duty rise is passed on in higher margins” and gives online gaming an elasticity of minus 1.7, which in English means the Treasury expects punters to get worse value and to play less as a result.
The duty is worked out on gross gaming yield, the money a casino keeps after paying out winnings, and is settled quarterly rather than bet by bet. While an unlicensed operator avoids British oversight entirely, a regulated online casino must absorb the new 40% duty alongside mandatory identity checks, consumer safeguards, and Gambling Commission licence fees that rose by 25% on 1 October.
HMRC counts 95 businesses offering remote gaming to UK customers, 55 of them offering betting too. The pass-through assumption means the Treasury expects most of the bill to reach their customers as poorer returns.
Six operator bosses told the Chancellor in a letter published by the Betting and Gaming Council on 14 October that more than 600 betting shops have closed and 10,250 jobs have been lost or announced for redundancy across online and retail since the Budget.
Those are the industry’s own figures and they cover more than one tax. At least one shop chain has blamed national insurance and wage costs alongside the gambling tax rises.
The black-market warning is harder to test. The Gambling Commission says it cannot yet put a reliable figure on illegal online gambling, and that “we will never know the exact amount” spent there. The Treasury’s answer was £26 million over three years for the Commission to go after illegal sites.
The campaigners who pushed for the rise have their own doubts. A Social Market Foundation draft revealed on this site in October admits that “we do not currently know how operators would respond to a tax increase.”
HMRC says betting and gaming duties brought in £1,933 million between April and July, 19% more than a year earlier, and expects the new rate to have pushed receipts up from July onwards. It has said only that it will consider monitoring the measure once two years of data are in.
A fair test would set the receipts against the Treasury’s year-one forecast, and the Commission’s own survey figures on gambling harm against the duty’s stated aim. Until then the shop closures are being counted by the people paying the tax.
Krishnan Guru-Murthy asked John Healey: “Just finally, I mean Andy Burnham has been very clear he wants Britain back in the European Union in his lifetime. Do you?”
The Chancellor replied: “I’m older than Andy Burnham. I don’t expect to see that.”