Guides · Rules & limits
Affordability and financial risk checks
Since February 2025 a light-touch financial vulnerability check applies once net deposits pass a set threshold in a rolling month. It is the most misunderstood rule in British gambling — and mostly it happens without you noticing.
The check in one box
- Light-touch check from
- 28 February 2025
- Threshold
- net deposits above £150 in 30 days
- What it screens for
- public indicators of financial vulnerability
- Usually
- runs in the background, no documents needed
- Deeper checks
- higher thresholds, being piloted
What the light-touch check is
From 28 February 2025, GB-licensed operators run a financial vulnerability check once a customer's net deposits exceed £150 over a rolling 30 days. "Net" matters: it is deposits minus withdrawals, so money you have taken back out does not count against you.
The check looks at publicly available indicators of financial distress — the kind of thing that would show on a credit file, such as a bankruptcy or a county court judgment. It is not a look at your bank balance, your salary or your spending, and in the overwhelming majority of cases it runs invisibly in the background with no request to you at all.
What it is not
- Not a credit application. The check is a data lookup and is not the sort of search that affects a credit score.
- Not a means test. Nobody is deciding what you can afford based on income.
- Not the same as anti-money-laundering checks, which are a separate legal obligation and can be triggered by patterns rather than by a fixed threshold.
Why an operator might still ask you for documents
Two other duties can produce a document request, and they are often confused with affordability. The first is identity verification, which must be completed before you gamble at all. The second is anti-money-laundering source-of-funds checking, which is triggered by transaction patterns and is not new.
A practical consequence: complete identity verification when you open the account, not at the moment you try to withdraw. Withdrawals held up by an unverified account are the single most common complaint in this market, and the cause is almost always paperwork that could have been done on day one.
The political argument, briefly
Checks of this kind are contested. The case for them is that the previous system relied on operators noticing harm and rarely acting; the case against is that friction pushes some players to unlicensed offshore sites where no protection applies at all. Deeper checks at higher thresholds have been piloted rather than switched on wholesale, precisely because of that trade-off.
What you can control
Whatever happens at the operator's end, the limits you set yourself are immediate and do not require anyone's approval: deposit caps, loss limits, session reminders and time-outs are all in the account. See responsible gambling, and GAMSTOP if you want the national self-exclusion.