What a casino bonus is
A casino bonus is extra value a casino adds to your account for signing up or for playing: a match on your deposit, a share of your losses back, a cut of every bet you place. It almost always comes with conditions. You bet a set amount before the bonus money or its winnings can be withdrawn, you keep each bet under a limit while that runs, and you finish before a deadline. The headline tells you what you get. The conditions tell you what it costs, and they are what this page compares.
Right now 10 casinos in your market have an offer running. They are grouped above by type, and the table further down puts their terms side by side.
The types of casino bonus
- Sign-up bonus
- Usually a match on your first deposit: 100% up to $500 means a $500 deposit gets $500 of bonus money on top. It is the biggest headline a casino offers and nearly always the one with the heaviest wagering. The ones running now are on our casino welcome bonuses page.
- Reload bonus
- The same match idea for players who already have an account, typically smaller and tied to set days. See reload bonuses.
- Cashback
- A percentage of your net losses over a period, often a week, paid back as cash or as bonus money with its own wagering. On 10% weekly cashback, a week that ends $200 down returns $20. See cashback bonuses.
- Rakeback
- A share of the house edge on every bet you place, win or lose. On a game with a 1% edge, 50% rakeback returns about $0.50 for every $100 you wager. It is the reward most crypto casinos lead with. See rakeback casinos.
- Free spins and no deposit offers
- Small, usually capped and often tied to one slot. They appear on this page only when a casino in your market is running one.
How to read a wagering requirement
The wagering requirement is the amount you have to bet before bonus money turns into money you can withdraw. It is written as a multiple, and the words after the multiple matter as much as the number.
Take a hypothetical $100 deposit with a 100% match, so $100 of bonus money. At 40x the bonus, you have to bet $4,000 before you can cash out. At 40x the deposit plus the bonus, often written as 40x (D+B), the figure doubles to $8,000. Same headline, same deposit, twice the play.
Now put a cost on that play. Every slot keeps a share of what you bet over time, and a slot with 96% RTP keeps about 4%. Betting $4,000 on it costs about $160 on average, which is more than the $100 bonus, so on average the bonus runs out before the wagering does. At 20x the bonus the same sum is $2,000 of bets and about $80 of expected cost, which leaves roughly $20 of the bonus. That is why a lower multiple usually beats a bigger headline.
Three more terms change the result. The maximum bet while wagering, often $5 a spin, lets the casino void the bonus if you go over it once. Game weighting means table games may count 10% of each bet towards the total, or nothing. And some slots are excluded from wagering altogether. Our guide to reading a casino bonus goes through each one, and the bonus types hub has the full arithmetic.
Structure: non-sticky, sticky or no wagering
The Structure column tells you whose money is at risk first. With a non-sticky bonus, your deposit is played first and the bonus waits. If you win on your own money, you can withdraw it and walk away from the bonus. With a sticky bonus, deposit and bonus are one balance, and the wagering applies to both from the first spin. No wagering means winnings, rakeback or cashback are paid as cash you can withdraw straight away. Several crypto casinos on our list pay rakeback that way, which is why a modest rakeback rate can be worth more than a large match. The ones that make it a habit are on our no wagering casinos page.
Cashout caps and expiry
A cashout cap limits what you can withdraw from bonus winnings, however much the bonus wins. A cap of 5x the bonus on a $100 bonus means $500 at most. The expiry is the deadline for finishing the wagering, and when it passes the bonus and anything won with it are removed. Seven days for a $4,000 requirement is a lot of play for anyone with a job, so hold the deadline against how much you actually play.
Where a cell in the table shows a dash, the casino's terms did not state that figure clearly or we have not confirmed it yet. Treat it as unknown, not as zero and not as unlimited, and ask the casino's support before you deposit. A column no casino in the list has a figure for is left out of the table.
Crypto casino bonuses
Crypto casinos tend to put their value into rakeback, cashback, races and VIP levels rather than a big first-deposit match, and much of it is paid with little or no wagering. Where a crypto casino does run a deposit match, read two things. Some ask for identity verification before the match can be claimed, even when normal play needs none. And a bonus held in a coin moves with that coin's price, so a stablecoin such as USDT keeps the figures steady while you wager. Our crypto casinos page compares the casinos themselves.
Casino bonus codes
Some offers only apply if you enter a code at sign-up or in the cashier. Take the code from the casino's own promotions page, because codes change more often than offers do, and one copied from another site may have expired. An offer without a code is added when you make a qualifying deposit, so check the minimum deposit and any excluded payment methods first.
How we check an offer before it goes on this page
We read the full bonus terms on the casino's own site, not the promotions banner, and record five things: the headline, the structure, the wagering multiple and what it applies to, the cashout cap and the expiry. The figures shown are the ones in the terms when the review was last updated, and every review shows that date.
Our real-money test at a casino times the deposits, the withdrawals and the support replies. It does not mean we cleared every bonus, so read the bonus terms here as the casino's published terms, read by us, not as a result we measured. Casinos we have not tested yet are marked "Not tested yet" in the casino tables, and our methodology page sets out how the testing and the ratings work.
Within each type above, casinos our editors have placed come first, in the order they set, and the rest follow by headline value. The rating on each card scores the whole casino, not the size of its offer, and every operator has a full review on the casino list.
Five checks before you claim a casino bonus
- Work out the total you have to bet: the multiple times the bonus, or times the deposit plus the bonus.
- Compare that total with what you would play anyway. If it is many times more, the bonus is setting your schedule for you.
- Find the maximum bet and keep every spin under it, bonus buys included.
- Check the cashout cap and the deadline.
- Check that your payment method qualifies and that the casino accepts players from where you live.
A bonus never changes the house edge. If you would not deposit without the offer, skip it. Gambling is for adults aged 18 and over: set a deposit limit when you open the account, before the first bonus, and our responsible gambling page lists free help in each country.
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