The Testing Method
Every casino reviewed on this site goes through five stages, in a fixed order, before publication. (1) Licence verification by number: we take the licence number from the operator's site and check it against the issuing regulator's public register; a number that does not resolve, or resolves to a different company, ends the review. (2) Deposit test: a real deposit of £20–£50 from our own funds, on the operator's most common payment rail, as an ordinary UK player. (3) Withdrawal clock: a real withdrawal timed from request to spendable funds — not to the operator's "processed" email — with weekday and weekend requests logged separately. (4) Full terms reading: the complete bonus and general terms, with the wagering multiple, maximum-bet clause, game weighting, withdrawal caps and dormancy clauses recorded. (5) Support test: a specific payments question put to live support at a UK evening hour, scored for accuracy.
Scores are stepped and uneven because judgment is uneven. We do not award 10s, we do not publish tied scores at the top of a list, and no two sites earn the same score for the same reasons. Where a figure cannot be verified — an operator's internal processing target, say — we publish the typical range for that operator's tier and label it as typical. We do not publish invented licence numbers, invented test counts, or third-party ratings we have not checked.
Independence and Affiliate Disclosure
This site earns affiliate commissions: sign up through a link in our rankings and the operator pays us. Three structural rules keep that from touching the editorial. First, rankings are set by test results before commercial terms are ever discussed, and no operator can pay to be listed, promoted, or softened. Second, the writers are not paid per conversion — nobody's income moves when you click. Third, operators that fail our checks stay unlisted regardless of what their programme pays, and several well-paying programmes are absent from this site for exactly that reason. If we ever list a site we have not fully tested, the review says so explicitly until testing completes.
Freshness, Corrections and Dates
The "Last Updated" date on a page changes only when the substance changes — a re-test, a term change, a licensing event — never as a cosmetic bump. Standing pages are re-checked on a rolling cycle, and listed casinos are re-tested when reader reports or term changes give us cause. Corrections work like this: a reader or operator sends evidence to the contact address, we verify it against the source, and the page is amended. Material corrections are noted on the page. We would rather be corrected than consistent.
Responsible Content Rules
Some rules bind every word on this site. We do not advise anyone to evade a self-exclusion, and we do not describe offshore play as a way around GamStop — where the subject arises, the responsible gambling page and the National Gambling Helpline (0808 8020 133) are the answer we give. We do not use "safe" as a blanket adjective for any casino category; safety claims are tied to the specific checks that support them. We write for adults: every page assumes, and states, an 18+ reader. And we do not manufacture urgency — no countdown timers, no "offer ends tonight", no exclamation marks doing the work evidence should do.