British gambling yield reached £4.5bn in three months ending December 2025
Overall gambling participation was largely steady at 47 per cent.
UK.- The regulated British gambling sector generated gross gambling yield (GGY) of £4.5bn in the third quarter of the financial year. That’s according to the Gambling Commission’s latest statistics on the period from October to December 2025.
Excluding lotteries, GGY was £3.3bn, with £2.12bn of that from remote casino, betting and bingo. Land-based gambling generated £1.2bn and non-remote betting £613m (48 per cent of non-remote GGY).
The UK had 8,148 licensed gambling premises at the end of the reporting period, including 5,669 betting shops, and 191,325 gaming machines. The National Lottery directed £415m to good causes while large society lotteries raised £126m.
The figures for the calendar year as a whole show that remote gambling remained the dominant revenue stream with £5.55bn in GGY.
British gambling participation figures
Alongside the financial data, the Gambling Commission and the National Centre for Social Research released Wave 4 of the Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB) on gambling behaviour between September 2025 and January 2026. Fieldwork captured 5,203 usable responses from over 22,000 addresses.
Overall gambling participation was largely steady at 47 per cent, or 26 per cent when excluding lottery-only players. Online gambling participation was 37 per cent, or 15 per cent excluding lottery-only.
The highest participation was among 35–64 year-olds (51–56 per cent), but rates dropped sharply when lottery-only play was excluded. Among 18–24 year-olds, participation was 31 per cent overall, with stronger engagement in non-lottery products and higher emphasis on enjoyment/excitement.
As for gender differences, male participation was 49 per cent compared to 44 per cent for women. The figures were 41 per cent and 34 per cent in online gambling and 13 per cent vs 4 per cent in betting.
Last week, the Gambling Commission announced plans for an AI marketing sweep of gambling ads, particularly seeking to identify ads unsuitable for under-18s.
