Printed 2026 · figures read October 2026
Staying in control: the limits, the exclusion and the help behind both
People registered with Gamstop Online, the figure the scheme published on 16 July 2026. More than half of them took the longest period on offer.
01
A number set in advance is the cheapest control there is
A financial limit costs nothing and binds the operator rather than the customer’s resolve. Every licensee has to prompt a customer to set one as early as possible, and has to allow one to be set at any later point. That wording was revised with effect from 31 October 2025, and it replaced an older rule tied to the moment before a first deposit, so a prompt that arrives later than it used to is still the current standard rather than a lapse.
Three further duties sit alongside it. Anybody who has not set a limit must be asked to think again, yearly at least, with the limit offered as the default and a refusal requiring both an action and a confirmation. Every customer has to be prompted to look over their account and transaction history at least every six months, and may ask for that reminder more often. A reduction to a limit has to take effect straight away, which is the part worth knowing: the direction that protects a customer is the fast one.
02
What the screen is obliged to show while play runs
Since 17 January 2025 an operator has had to display net spend and elapsed time in real time during play. That turns two quantities people routinely misjudge into printed figures on the same screen as the game.
The design rules do more work than most readers expect, and they all attach to a British licence.
- 2.5 seconds is the floor for a slot. No game cycle may run quicker than that, and the start control has to be pressed again for each one, so keeping it held down achieves nothing.
- 5 seconds is the floor for other casino games. This is RTS 14G, which came in on 17 January 2025 and reaches casino play other than slots and peer-to-peer poker.
- Speeding up the result is prohibited. Turbo, quick spin and slam stop are out. Scratch-all and reveal-all features, and bonus rounds that take no further stake, are not caught.
- No celebration unless the payout beats the stake. Sound and animation that read as a win are not allowed where the return merely matches what went in, or falls short of it.
- Playing several games at once is barred, including split-screen and multi-screen arrangements, and operator-led simultaneous products such as two tables side by side have gone with them.
- Autoplay is banned outright. A customer has to commit to each cycle, the one exception being blinds posted automatically in peer-to-peer poker.
- Nothing may push a customer onward. A product may not work on somebody to recover a loss, to stake more than before, to exceed the amount they had settled on, or to carry on once they have signalled that they want to stop. Every top-up has to be begun by the customer.
Stake ceilings sit on top of that. The most one slot cycle may take is £5 where the customer is 25 or over, set on 9 April 2025, and £2 where the customer is aged 18 to 24, set on 21 May 2025. Those ceilings are a slots rule and do not reach roulette, blackjack or a bingo ticket.
03
One registration closes every British-licensed site
Gamstop Online is the national online self-exclusion scheme, and its legal entity is The National Online Self Exclusion Scheme Limited. It wrote itself in capitals until November 2025 and now writes itself as above, which is the spelling used throughout this site even though most readers and most searches still use the older form.
One sentence fixes its reach. Any company holding a British licence for online gambling is required to join. The scheme was set up in June 2017 by the Remote Gambling Association, at the request of the department and the Commission, and March 2020 turned participation into a licence condition for anybody taking business from British residents. From April 2020 a licensee has had to run its customer base against the register no less often than daily, at intervals of 24 hours or shorter. That is also why direct marketing from a firm a registered person once dealt with ought to stop.
Registration is free and is made directly with the scheme. Betting shops are handled separately: the Gamstop Betting Shops scheme, formerly MOSES, joined the same group in July 2023, so a shop exclusion and an online one are two different pieces of paperwork.
04
The periods, and how much longer each one really lasts
Four lengths are offered and none of them can be cut short. A registration cannot be deactivated before its minimum period has run out, and auto-renewal can only be switched off during the final six months of a five-year term. Nor does a period end itself. An exclusion is not lifted by the scheme when the minimum expires. It runs on for as much as seven years beyond that date, and stops only when the person gets in touch with the contact centre.
| Length chosen | Earliest it can be lifted | If nobody makes contact |
|---|---|---|
| Six months | After six months | Runs on, up to seven more years |
| One year | After one year | Runs on, up to seven more years |
| Five years | After five years | Runs on, up to seven more years |
| Five years, renewing | Four more five-year terms can follow | Renews until switched off in a final six months |
Lifting one takes a deliberate act even after the term is up. The contact centre has to be approached, a cooling-off of 24 hours at the very least has to pass, and once deactivation goes through, gambling operators keep being told about the registration for seven years more. The effect is that the decision is hard to reverse by design, which is the point of it.
05
Who is registering, in the scheme’s own figures
614,738 people were registered as at the publication of 16 July 2026. New sign-ups came in 16 per cent above the first six months of 2025. May 2026 was the busiest single month the scheme has on record, at 12,236.
The age split is the part worth sitting with. Registrations by people under 25 rose 26 per cent year on year, and that group is now close to one in three of every self-exclusion on the register. More than one registrant in two took the five-year maximum. One in four across all ages took six months, rising to 38 per cent among the under-25s, and men made up better than seven of every ten new registrations.
06
Where the scheme stops, stated as a gap in protection
The scheme’s reach is the British licence and nothing wider. Its terms say it can keep a person away from the gambling services of those operators which take part in it. Services run by organisations outside the scheme are, in its own words, beyond what it is able to prevent. That sentence measures a limit on the protection a registration buys. It is not an instruction, and this site treats it as what it is.
Nothing on any page here assists anybody in reaching a site they have shut themselves out of. There are no workarounds printed, suggested or hinted at, on this page or on any other. The pages in outside the licence exist to price what is lost at a site with no British permission, and they open on that loss rather than on an offer.
A warning notice the Commission put to the industry on 20 January 2025 is blunt about the businesses in question. They operate without regulation and without the safeguards a licence requires. Vulnerable people may be the point of them, and that includes anybody who has registered an exclusion nationally. Controls for social responsibility, and controls against money laundering, may be weak. A player may meet fraud, may find data handled badly, and may meet practices no licensee could use. Recognising a game in the lobby proves nothing either. Titles from licensed suppliers have turned up on unlicensed sites, generally because a reseller broke its contract. £4.75m was the price one supplier accepted on 23 July 2026, the Commission having found its games running on six sites that had no British licence and that consumers here could reach, through two operators it dealt with.
07
Checks that run whether or not a customer asks for them
£150 a month is the current threshold. A light-touch financial vulnerability check applies to an online customer whose net deposits pass that figure in a month, a level that dropped from £500 a month on 28 February 2025. Fifteen deposits of £10 take a customer past it. A single one of £160 does the same.
Those checks use publicly available data only. They do not call for a postcode or a job title, and they leave a credit rating untouched. The separate enhanced financial risk assessments are a different thing again and have never gone live: they remain a pilot, consumers are not affected by it, and whether permanent rules follow is a decision the Commission has yet to take. Its second stage put roughly 1.7 million assessments through three credit reference agencies, over something near 860,000 accounts. 97 in every 100 went through with no friction reaching the customer at all.
08
Free help, and the scale it works at
Calls to the National Gambling Helpline go to 0808 8020 133. Nothing is charged for one, and somebody picks up at four in the morning as readily as at noon. Gamstop Online takes a registration directly and that registration is free. GambleAware closed down as an operating body on 31 March 2026. Its website did not go with it: the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities keeps the site up, with March 2027 given as the earliest it might come down, so the advice and treatment routes published there can still be followed.
Two figures put the subject in proportion. 47 per cent of adults reported gambling at some point in the four weeks running up to the interview. Set aside everybody who only buys a lottery draw and the figure is 27 per cent. Both come from the Commission’s Gambling Survey for Great Britain. Its third annual report appeared on 16 July 2026. In 2025, 2.4 per cent of the population scored eight or more on the problem gambling severity index, a level the Commission describes as steady across the survey’s three years. The survey interviews about 20,000 adults a year and covers 2023 to 2025, and the Commission asks that it be compared with its own later waves rather than with surveys built on other methods.
If somebody else’s gambling is the worry rather than your own, the helpline takes those calls too. Two neighbouring pages may help with the practical end: write to us sets out what a message to this publication can and cannot settle, and how we score an offer shows what a bonus is actually worth before anybody chases one.