Casino Bonus Wagering Requirements Explained

Wagering requirements are important terms and conditions associated with most online casino bonuses. They impose restrictions on the use of bonus funds, limiting their use for betting within the casino platform.

In short, a wagering requirement prevents you from withdrawing funds received through bonus offers until you use them for betting several times over.

Generally, this implies that any bonus funds are effectively “locked” in your casino account until you have wagered them a specified number of times. Consequently, comprehending wagering requirements is crucial for identifying the most advantageous bonuses offered by online casinos.  In fact, It can be argued that this aspect is one of the most important parts of any bonus, even more so than the bonus amount itself. After all, receiving a big bonus is pointless if you can’t ever use it to actually win anything.

The following guide covers all essential information regarding casino bonus wagering requirements and their significance.

What Are Wagering Requirements?

Casino bonus wagering requirements, often referred to as playthrough requirements, denote the number of times you must wager your bonus before it becomes eligible for withdrawal.

This can seem a bit confusing if you’re new to online gambling, but no worries. The best way to explain it all is through a concrete example.

Let’s say you want to take advantage of a tasty welcome bonus at a new casino site. It offers to double your deposit, so you top up your account with $100 and receive $100 as a bonus.

Despite what most casino promotions claim, this is by no means “free money.” If it was, you could just immediately withdraw your $200 and walk away smiling. We’re pretty sure that casino would quickly go bankrupt, too.

Instead, this bonus must be used for wagering within the casino. Moreover, you will be required to bet the bonus amount multiple times before it is fully accessible for withdrawal. This is listed in pretty much every Terms and Conditions page of every casino bonus offer ever.

Anyway, the number of times you have to play through the funds is the wagering requirement. For instance, if the requirement is listed as “30x”, you need to bet a total of 30 times the amount you received as a bonus.

Therefore, if you receive a $100 bonus with a 30x wagering requirement, you will need to wager a total of $3,000 at the casino before the bonus can be withdrawn in its entirety.

Wagering Requirement Contribution

There’s another important term you’ll need to understand about wagering requirements: contribution. Although secondary, this limitation impacts how easy it will be to complete the requirement.

In casino bonus terms and conditions, the wagering contribution refers to the percentage of every bet that counts toward completing playthrough requirements. Different types of games usually (but not necessarily) contribute at a different rate.

Let’s use the same example of a 30x requirement. You would need to make 3,000 bets of $1 to clear the $3,000 requirement. However, let’s say you’re playing a game that only contributed 50% of every bet. Again, this would be listed in the bonus terms and conditions.

Only half of every bet would actually count. This would mean that you would need to wager a total of $6,000, assuming you’re only making that single bet over and over again.

If that sounds annoying, rest assured that it really is.

Thankfully, online slots generally have 100% contribution. This type of limitation is usually reserved for high-RTP games such as blackjack or baccarat. In fact, blackjack very often has a 0% contribution towards wagering requirements because a skilled player could easily exploit its high RTP.

Other Bonus Terms

If you thought this was the only part of bonus terms and conditions you need to worry about, you’re unfortunately wrong.

For example, some bonuses also limit how much you can win while wagering with your bonus. For instance, if you end up winning more than 100x the bonus amount through a stroke of luck, the casino will only pay a portion of your total winnings up to a maximum. This type of limitation is luckily mostly applied to free spins, but we would be lying if we said we never saw it listed for matched bonuses.

Also, pretty much every bonus out there has an expiry date. Most bonus funds only last so long. If you fail to use your funds before the date, you lose them.

Some bonuses have terms regarding the minimum odds needed for the wager to contribute towards completing requirements. These rules prevent you from, for example, making every bet at a roulette table.

Why Do Wagering Requirements Exist?

That’s a bit of a complicated question, but we’ve already explained a good chunk of it. Casinos are just not in the business of handing out money. They want to attract players with bonuses and whatnot, but they also need to be careful in how they go about things.

The idea here is simple. By the time a player completes the wagering requirement, most (usually all) of the bonus money will be gone. 

So does this make bonuses useless?

Yes and no. It certainly makes bonuses less appealing than they seem at first glance.

In practice, though, you can theoretically get a profit from a bonus. It’s just a lot harder to do than the casino makes it seem. Also, don’t expect the gambling site to make this easy for you.

It’s all about finding good and actually usable bonuses. We’re not only talking about low requirements, either. You want bonuses with reasonable limits and expiration dates. For example, a popular “trick” casinos use is to impose high deposit limits and short time frames. This makes the player wager aggressively to earn back their bonus, which typically ends with them losing the whole thing.

Conclusion

In conclusion, casino bonuses are designed to be enticing but not necessarily profitable for the player. To make sure of this, casino operators surround such offers with complex rules and limitations. This should not come as a surprise – casinos exist to make money for their owners.

Hopefully, our guide helped you understand that. We can also outline three main takeaways from the topic:

1. Always read the fine print of every offer you’re agreeing to. Complaints from players that boil down to “the casino won’t let me withdraw!” are so incredibly common. 9 times out of 10 this happens because someone didn’t take the time to understand what they’re signing up for. Don’t be that guy.
2. Although enticing, bonuses are not as good or important as many players seem to believe. When picking a casino, we recommend focusing on other things such as transparency, customer support, and the core offer of games and payment options. Bonuses are secondary at best.
3. Like everything related to gambling, bonuses are not a way to make money. Gambling is about fun, and every part of it is carefully designed so that the house always has the advantage. Trust us – if you think you figured out some way to exploit promotions or games, the casino is probably way ahead of you. We can practically guarantee that it won’t work.

Congrats, you’re now better equipped to be a better casino player. Good luck!