No deposit bonus: the grant, costed before anything else

A no deposit bonus is the offer that asks for your money last. The operator hands over a small grant first, most often £5 to £10 printed as spins worth a few pence each, and only later does the small print say what the grant actually costs: a wagering requirement on whatever the spins win, a cap on what those winnings can convert into, an expiry on both, and a verification gate before any withdrawal. The promise is free; the terms are a price schedule; and the distance between the two is measurable, which is what the rest of this page measures.

The structure deserves one careful paragraph, because every figure on the page hangs off it. You claim the grant and play the spins. The spins produce winnings, and those winnings usually land as bonus funds rather than cash. The terms attach a wagering multiple to those winnings: forty times is the common asking rate, sixty the heavy end. The multiple bites on the winnings, so a grant whose spins have produced £10 carries £400 of required play. Your bonus balance does that play, which means each round of it costs the game’s edge, and if the balance busts before the requirement is met, the grant and everything it won are gone. Whatever survives the turnover becomes withdrawable, up to the conversion cap. That chain, winnings, turnover, survival, cap, is the whole machine.

Costing the machine needs one modelling choice printed up front. Expected value is not the same as the balance you will hold when the requirement ends, because the requirement can kill the balance on the way. The model on this page therefore prices survival: the chance that a bonus balance carries through the required turnover at a stated cost of play, and the expected net is the winnings multiplied by that chance. The blended cost of clearing play is taken at 2.5 percent, a fair middle for the slots these grants usually lock to. Winnings are taken at the grant’s face value, which is generous by the game’s own edge and is printed here as the assumption it is. Change either input and every figure below moves with it.

The table runs the model across the grant sizes the market actually prints, from the token £5 to the rare £50, with the multiple set at each row’s stated level.

Read the net column against the grant column and the shape of the market appears. A £10 grant with no wagering is worth £10; the same grant at forty times is worth £3.70 in expectation, which the chart in the next section rounds to about £4; at sixty times it is worth £2.20. Doubling the grant to £20 at the same forty times doubles the net but not the rate: the wagering discount takes the same share off everything it touches. The rows that hold their value are the rows with the lighter or absent requirement, never the rows with the bigger headline. A £50 grant at sixty times is worth £11; the same money spread across grants with no wagering would have been worth far more. Size is marketing. Terms are price.

Two honest limits sit over all of it. First, variance: the expected net is an average across many attempts, and a single session lands at zero far more often than it lands on the average, because the survival chance is well under half at every wagered row. Second, drift: terms move weekly, caps drop, games swap, and a grant costed today may be withdrawn by the month’s end. The model prices structures, not headlines, and it prints every assumption beside the arithmetic so the reader can argue with any of them.

Wagering on winnings: the dial that decides the value

Every wagering requirement has two halves, the number and the base, and deposit offers make a show of both because the base can be the bonus alone, the deposit alone or the two combined, a choice that triples the bill or halves it. A no deposit bonus narrows the question, since there is no deposit to fold in, and opens another that matters just as much: whether the multiple bites on the winnings or on the grant itself. Forty times on £10 of winnings is £400 of play. Forty times measured on a different base moves that figure, and some terms re-measure the base after every winning spin rather than once at the end. The base is written in the same terms, and finding it is a minute’s reading, not a negotiation.

What the turnover does to the balance is the second half of the costing, and grants differ from deposit offers here more than anywhere else. A deposit bonus clears alongside your own money, so the requirement shares the load with funds you chose to put at risk. A grant stands alone: the balance that must meet the turnover is the balance the spins produced, every round it stakes returns slightly less than it costs, and if the balance busts before the multiple is met, the grant and its winnings are gone together. The honest question is therefore not how much the play costs in the abstract but how likely the balance is to still be standing at the end. That chance falls steeply as the multiple rises. The arithmetic below takes forty times, since that is the multiple mid-market terms most often attach to winnings from a free grant.

The heavy end needs its own line rather than a footnote. Some terms print sixty times on winnings, and at that level surviving the requirement stops being the likely outcome and becomes the minority one. The arithmetic below takes sixty times, since the heavy end of the offshore market still prints it at the top of its range, and the survival curve prices that at roughly one balance in five.

The chart sets the three outcomes of a £10 grant side by side: after the mid-market multiple, after the heavy one, and with no wagering at all. The amber bar is the no-wagering benchmark, the value the grant would keep if the terms asked for nothing, and the gap between it and the other two is the cash price of the requirement.

Read the bars as roundings of the model, not as exact outputs: the model’s own figures are £3.70 after forty times and £2.20 after sixty, and the chart rounds to the nearest pound. The shape matters more than the decimals. No wagering keeps the whole grant; the mid-market multiple keeps about a third; the heavy end keeps about a fifth. The requirement does not merely delay a withdrawal, it consumes the grant while it runs, and the multiple decides how much is left when it stops.

No-wagering grants deserve their own paragraph, because they are the control group for everything above. Where winnings from the spins are withdrawable as they land, the top bar is the offer: the grant’s winnings, priced at face value under the stated assumption, with no turnover to survive and no clock to beat. Those structures are rarer than the wagered kind and usually smaller, and they are the standard every wagered grant should be measured against, because the difference between the bars is exactly what the word free is doing in the advert.

Price a grant in a minute: the spins calculator

The model is small enough to run by hand, and the tool below runs it for you. It takes four inputs, all of them printed on the face of any spins offer: the number of spins, the value of each spin, the wagering multiple attached to winnings, and the cap on what those winnings can convert into. Set them from the terms page in front of you and the expected net updates with the survival arithmetic set out above. It is a costing tool, not a forecast: it prices the average of many attempts, it does not know a lucky run from a dead one, and it will never tell you what this evening will do.

The prefill sets fifty spins at £0.10, which is a £5 grant, with a forty times requirement on winnings and a £100 conversion cap. Priced at the model’s blended 2.5 percent cost of clearing play, the £200 of required turnover survives about 37 percent of the time, so the grant’s expected net sits near £1.85, and the cap is nowhere in sight: it would need a run well past £100 of winnings before it bit. The assumptions sit in two layers and both are printed. The winnings base is taken at the grant’s face value, which is generous by the locked game’s own return and by any session that runs below average. The survival curve is priced at that 2.5 percent, so a tighter game cuts every figure on this page proportionally, and the tool has no way to know which game you have been handed, which is why that input belongs to you.

Two inputs reward the most attention. The multiple is the steep one: each extra ten times cuts the survival chance by roughly a quarter, which is why the difference between thirty times and sixty times is the difference between half a grant and a fifth of one. The cap is the quiet one: at modelled grant sizes it rarely binds, but on a single lucky run it is the most expensive line in the terms, because everything above it is forfeit at conversion. A tool can price the average; only the terms page can price the tail, and the tail is where caps live.

Caps, expiry and the small print that moves the number

The wagering multiple is the loudest term and rarely the decisive one. Around it sits a ring of quieter clauses, each of which can move the expected net further than ten extra times of wagering would, and each of which is written in the same terms page that the advert never links to. Four of them deserve a paragraph each.

The conversion cap comes first, because on a free grant it is the operator’s main defence against a lucky afternoon. The cap limits what the winnings can become: everything a session produces above the cap is forfeit at the moment of conversion. At the modelled sizes the £100 cap never binds, but caps of £25 are common on no-deposit spins, and at £25 the tail of the distribution is cut off entirely: the expected net falls, the upside disappears, and the offer becomes a small, bounded one with the big prizes clipped off. Where a cap sits matters as much as where the multiple sits, and both live in the same paragraph of the terms.

Expiry comes second. Free spins commonly carry a short clock, and winnings produced by expired spins vanish with them, often along with any unfinished wagering progress. A short clock converts the requirement into a daily quota: £400 of turnover spread over two days is £200 a day, a different commitment from the same figure spread over a month. Where a terms page states no clock at all, that absence is itself worth a note in your own arithmetic, because it is rarer than the reader assumes.

The games come third. Spins are usually locked to named titles, and the play that clears the requirement is often restricted to a list the terms approve. A locked game’s return is not printed in the offer; it sits on the game’s own information page, and a few percent of difference in return moves every figure this page costs. A maximum stake while clearing is common too, and the licensed baseline caps online slots at £5 per spin for adults and £2 per spin for 18 to 24 year olds, in force since September 2024; offshore tills sit outside that limit, so the ceiling there is whatever the game allows.

Verification comes last, and it is the gate that decides whether any of the above was worth walking through. First withdrawals tend to arrive with document requests attached, and an unanswered request parks the money for as long as it goes unanswered. The grant was free, but the withdrawal is where the account is suddenly worth checking properly, which is why the documents are worth having to hand before the first spin rather than after it.

The wider market in one table: offers, wagering, licences

The grant is one structure in a wider market, and the table below sets it beside the offers a reader will meet in the same afternoon of browsing. Every figure is a category-typical range compiled from operator-published terms at the time of writing, varied by row, and none of it is a quote of any single promotion. The licence column is the one to read first, and everything else in a row is downstream of it.

Figures are category-typical ranges compiled from operator-published terms at the time of writing. They are not quotes of any single promotion. UKGC rows are the British baseline, shown for comparison; none of them are claimable at offshore offers.

Read with the page’s subject in mind, the rows split the way the subject does. The licensed rows print deposit-led bundles, because that is the shape the British baseline takes, and the bingo-led row carries the lightest wagering on the page at two to three times on small bonuses. The offshore-facing rows carry the percentage matches and the heavier multiples, and in practice it is there that a reader meets the free-grant structures this page costs. The wagering column spans twenty-five to sixty times across the offshore rows and two to sixty across the whole table, which is the dial the sections above costed.

Two cautions travel with the table. Ranges describe categories, not promises, and an individual cashier moves outside its band in either direction whenever its terms change. And the licence label outranks the rest of the row every time: a generous percentage at a till with no complaints route is priced, in the end, by what happens the day you ask for your money.