How to Read a Casino Bonus

The five numbers, and why the headline is not one

A bonus is a contract. The part they print in 48-point type, "200% up to 500 euro", is marketing. The part that decides whether you ever see a cent of it lives three scrolls down, in a grey paragraph headed "Bonus Terms". We read that paragraph for a living, and after a few thousand of them the job comes down to five figures: the wagering multiplier, the base it applies to, the max bet, the game weighting, the expiry, and the win cap. That is technically six, but the multiplier and its base are one decision, so we count five levers.

Get those five and you can price any offer in under a minute, in your head, without the casino's help. Miss one and a generous-looking match can cost you more in stakes than it ever pays out. We will take them in the order a reviewer actually checks them, because the order matters: a single bad number can kill an offer before the others are worth reading.

One habit before we start. Screenshot the terms page with the date visible the moment you opt in. Terms change, promotions get pulled, and "the version live when you deposited" is the only version that protects you in a dispute. It takes three seconds and we have seen it settle arguments that would otherwise have gone nowhere.

Wagering multiplier and its base

Wagering, also called rollover or playthrough, is how many times you must stake an amount before winnings become withdrawable. It is the single biggest driver of what an offer is worth, and it is the price tag. A 100 euro bonus at 35x means 3,500 euro must pass through your account as bets before the casino lets you cash out.

Here is the maths people skip. Slots keep an edge, typically around 4% of every stake on a mainstream title. Push 3,500 euro through them and the expected cost of the grind is roughly 3,500 times 0.04, about 140 euro. Your bonus was 100. On average, before variance, that offer loses you money to release money. The same 100 euro bonus at 20x demands 2,000 euro of stakes, an expected cost near 80 euro, which leaves the offer marginally in your favour. The multiplier is not a detail. It flips the sign.

Then read the base, because 35x is two completely different offers depending on what it multiplies. "35x bonus" on a 100 euro bonus is 3,500 euro of wagering. "35x deposit plus bonus", on a 100 euro deposit matched by a 100 euro bonus, is 35 times 200, which is 7,000 euro. Same headline number, double the grind. Wherever the terms say "d+b" or "deposit and bonus", mentally double the cost. The table below prices a fixed 100 euro bonus across common multipliers so you can see how fast the expected cost outruns the gift.

Those expected-cost figures are averages, not promises. Variance means some players clear a 35x bonus and walk away up, while others are cleaned out at 15x. But over many offers the average is what you are buying, and the average says a smaller multiplier on a bonus-only base beats a bigger headline nearly every time.

Max bet: the clause that voids winnings

Almost every bonus caps the stake you may place on a single spin or hand while wagering is still active. The common ceiling is 4 to 5 euro, or the local equivalent. It sounds trivial. It is the single most-cited reason in confiscation complaints we track, and it catches careful people, not just chancers.

The trap is that breaking it once is usually enough. Set an autoplay at 6 euro to clear the rollover faster, forget the cap for ten spins, and the operator is within its terms to void the bonus and every euro of winnings attached to it, even the wins from spins that were under the limit. Some casinos apply it retroactively to the whole session. There is rarely a warning pop-up. The system simply flags the account at cash-out and the withdrawal never arrives.

The fix costs nothing. Find the max bet before your first spin, set your default stake at or below it, and leave it there until the wagering meter reads zero. If the offer also restricts feature buys or bonus buys during wagering, and many now do, treat those as blocked entirely. When you cannot find the max bet stated anywhere in the terms, that absence is itself the answer: assume the worst and play something else.

Game weighting: why table play barely counts

Not every euro you stake counts the same towards wagering. Slots usually contribute 100%, meaning a 2 euro spin knocks 2 euro off your rollover. Table games and live dealer are where it gets brutal. Blackjack and roulette commonly weight at 10%, sometimes 5%, sometimes zero. At 10%, a 2 euro blackjack hand clears just 20 cents of wagering.

Run the numbers on a 3,500 euro requirement. Clear it on slots at 100% and you stake 3,500 euro, as expected. Clear it on blackjack at 10% weighting and you must stake 35,000 euro to satisfy the same requirement. No bonus survives that, and no bankroll should try. This is why "great blackjack bonus" is close to a contradiction: the games with the lowest house edge are precisely the ones the weighting punishes hardest, because the casino knows a skilled table player would otherwise clear the rollover too cheaply.

Read the weighting table in the terms and read the exclusion list next to it. Operators routinely bar or cap contribution from specific high-RTP slots, the ones with published return rates around 97% and up, and playing an excluded title during wagering can void the bonus the same way a max-bet breach does. The table below shows how the same 3,500 euro requirement balloons by game type.

Expiry: the countdown that fails you quietly

Expiry is how long you have to complete the entire wagering requirement before the bonus and any winnings tied to it disappear. It is quieter than the other numbers because nothing dramatic happens: no void, no dispute, just a balance that resets to zero while you were at work. That is exactly why it is worth checking early.

Do the arithmetic against the requirement. A 3,500 euro rollover on a seven-day clock means 500 euro of stakes a day, every day, which is a lot of sessions for a modest bonus. Stretch the same 3,500 euro over 30 days and it becomes a relaxed 117 euro a day. Anything under seven days on a large requirement is, in our experience, a treadmill built to be missed, and the casino keeps whatever you deposited to chase it. We treat 14 days as the floor for a reasonable offer and 30 as the mark of a confident one.

Watch for a second, sneakier clock. Some free-spin offers expire the spins in 24 hours and then apply a separate multi-day wagering window to whatever the spins produced. Two countdowns, two ways to lose the lot. If the terms mention "spins expire" and "winnings must be wagered within" as separate lines, budget your time against the shorter one.

Win cap: the ceiling on a good night

The win cap, sometimes called a maximum cashout, limits how much you can withdraw from bonus play no matter what you actually hit. It is most common on free spins and no-deposit offers, and it is where a dream night quietly turns ordinary. Land a 4,000 euro win on 50 free spins carrying a 100 euro cap, and 100 euro is what clears. The other 3,900 is stripped at cash-out. The terms allowed it; you simply did not read that far.

Caps are usually expressed as a flat figure or a multiple of the bonus, often 5x or 10x. On a paid deposit bonus a win cap is a genuine red flag, because you have put your own money in and the upside is being throttled anyway. On a free no-deposit offer a cap is more defensible, since the stake was never yours, but you still want to know the number before you build any hope on top of it.

The practical move is to let the cap set your expectations and, sometimes, your strategy. If the cap is 100 euro and low, there is an argument for a small number of higher-variance spins rather than a long grind, because grinding only exposes you to the house edge on money you can never fully withdraw. When a deposit bonus carries no win cap at all, note it as a real plus. It is rarer than it should be.

Sticky vs non-sticky bonuses

This distinction sits underneath the five numbers and changes what all of them mean. A non-sticky, or cashable, bonus lets you withdraw your own deposit at any time, and only the bonus funds carry conditions. A sticky bonus fuses the bonus into your balance so that the bonus amount itself is never withdrawable; you keep only what you win above it, and only after clearing wagering. Some sites now use a phased "sticky until wagered" model that behaves like the first while you play and the second if you try to leave early.

The difference is real money. Deposit 100 euro and take a 100 euro non-sticky bonus, and if you decide the offer is not worth it you can withdraw close to your 100 euro deposit and walk. Take the same amount as a sticky bonus and cash out early, and the bonus portion, plus in many cases a proportional slice of your winnings, is removed first. Your escape route is worse, so the effective value of the headline is lower than the number suggests even when every other term is identical.

As a rule of thumb, a non-sticky bonus is friendlier and lets you leave with your deposit if variance turns against you. A sticky bonus can still be worth taking when the wagering is low and the win cap is generous, because you are effectively playing with the casino's money, but you have to accept that the bonus itself is theirs until you have earned past it. Read the withdrawal clause specifically for the phrase "bonus and associated winnings will be removed", and know which kind you are holding before you deposit, not after.

A full offer, read end to end

Put it together on a real-shaped example. The banner says "100% up to 200 euro, plus 50 free spins". You deposit 150 euro and receive a 150 euro bonus. The terms, once you find them, read: 40x wagering on deposit plus bonus, max bet 5 euro, slots 100% and everything else 10%, 14-day expiry, win cap of 500 euro on the free spins, non-sticky.

Price it. The base is deposit plus bonus, so 40 times 300 euro, which is 12,000 euro of wagering. At a 4% edge the expected cost of clearing that is around 480 euro. Your bonus was 150. That single line, the base, is what sinks this offer: on a bonus-only base the requirement would have been 40 times 150, or 6,000 euro, still steep but half the pain. The max bet of 5 euro is fine, the weighting is standard, the 14-day window is survivable at roughly 860 euro of stakes a day, and non-sticky at least means you could pull your 150 euro deposit before committing to the grind. The free-spin win cap of 500 euro is generous as caps go. The offer is not a scam. It is simply priced against you, and the "deposit plus bonus" base is the reason. That is the whole skill: not spotting fraud, but reading the sign correctly.

Play responsibly with all of this. The maths above tells you what an offer is worth in expectation, not what will happen to you on the night, and no bonus is a reason to deposit more than you would spend on any other entertainment. If chasing a rollover ever stops feeling like a game, the wagering meter is not the number that matters. In the UK, GamCare and BeGambleAware run free, confidential support; most licensed sites also offer deposit limits and self-exclusion in the account settings.

The 60-second bonus checklist

This is the desk version, the one we run before deciding whether an offer is worth a reviewer's time. Open the terms, find each line, and score it. One "walk away" in a column that matters is usually enough to close the tab.

Sixty seconds with those lines beats any banner. Every offer we feature on our top-rated casinos is checked against exactly this, and we publish the numbers up front, because an offer that cannot survive daylight was never really an offer.