Online gambling operators in Great Britain placed restrictions on 4.31% of player accounts in 2024, according to data released by the Gambling Commission on Wednesday. The period covered the previous calendar year.
The commission responded to a data request made in early 2025, showing that last year a total of 643,779 player accounts were restricted in some form, from a total of 14,923,840 active customer accounts submitted as part of the study.
Operators restricting winning accounts is often a point of contention with successful players. The data showed restricted accounts were more profitable than non-restricted accounts, with 46.78% of restricted customers being in profit versus 25.42% of overall active customers.
A significantly higher proportion of active customers were found to be loss-making at 72.54%, compared with 51.29% of restricted customers.
Stake factor reduction
During the period in question, restricting a player’s maximum stake was the most common measure taken by operators.
Stake factoring covers any limit to a customer’s maximum stake below what’s available to a non-restricted customer.
Players who were stake-factored were most commonly restricted to placing between 1% and 9% of a non-restricted maximum stake. This applied to more than a third of stake-factor reductions at 36.22%.
In some cases, players were restricted from betting on certain markets rather than across an entire sportsbook product and this applied to 5.72% of restricted accounts.
Greater understanding of player account restrictions needed
Andrew Rhodes, Gambling Commission CEO, said in a blog post published on Wednesday, that operators were allowed to make commercial restrictions so long as they did not discriminate on the basis of protected characteristics. If a player is successful, that alone does not protect them in discrimination law.
However, Rhodes also outlined the Gambling Commission’s wishes to understand the role that commercial restrictions may be playing in pushing customers towards illegal gambling operators and driving players to open multiple accounts.
Rhodes said: “It is not in our remit to mandate how operators handle their commercial liabilities, but we do have a statutory responsibility to ensure that gambling is conducted in a fair and open manner, to understand potential drivers of illegal gambling, and to ensure that industry practices are not having an adverse impact on the effectiveness of regulation. That is why, as an evidence-led regulator, we have undertaken this piece of work.”
The commission last week also released data covering the dramatic increase to VIP schemes across operators between 2020 and 2024.
The most common restriction was to maximum stakes, while restricted accounts were found to be more profitable.