Casino Bonuses: How to Price a Wagering Requirement Before You Accept It

A bonus is an offer to lend you playing money in exchange for a fixed amount of turnover. That makes it an arithmetic problem, not a generosity problem, and the arithmetic is almost always doable in under a minute from three numbers in the terms. This page shows the calculation, the two places the multiplier is applied, and the clauses that change the answer by a factor of ten.

The three numbers that decide everything

Every wagering requirement reduces to a multiplier, a base, and a deadline. The multiplier is the headline number, something like thirty-five times. The base is what the multiplier is applied to, which is either the bonus alone or the bonus plus your deposit. The deadline is how long you have. Miss any one of the three and you cannot say what the offer is worth, and the base is the one most often skipped, even though it changes the answer by a clean factor of two.

Multiplier times base equals turnover

Turnover is the total amount that has to pass through bets before the balance becomes withdrawable. It is not the amount you must lose and it is not the amount you must deposit — it is the sum of your stakes, counted again every time you restake the same money. A hundred dollars cycled through thirty-five times is three and a half thousand dollars of turnover from a hundred dollars of cash, which is why a requirement that sounds enormous is still reachable. Reaching it and keeping something is the separate question.

x35 on the bonus is not x35 on bonus plus deposit

This is the clause that costs people the most and gets read the least. Take a hundred dollar deposit matched with a hundred dollar bonus, at thirty-five times. If the terms say the multiplier applies to the bonus, the required turnover is thirty-five hundred dollars. If they say it applies to the bonus and the deposit, the base is two hundred and the required turnover is seven thousand dollars. Same headline multiplier, same deposit, same bonus, twice the work.

Turnover costs money even when you do not lose a bet

Every dollar of turnover passes through a game with a house edge, so the expected cost of generating turnover is the turnover multiplied by that edge. If the eligible games carry a four per cent edge, then thirty-five hundred dollars of required turnover has an expected cost of a hundred and forty dollars. That is the real price of the hundred dollar bonus, before any maximum cashout clause is applied.

The same sum with the doubled base

Run it again with the bonus-plus-deposit base. Seven thousand dollars of turnover at a four per cent edge has an expected cost of two hundred and eighty dollars, against a hundred dollar bonus. You are not being paid to play; you are paying for the privilege of a longer session. None of this means nobody ever finishes a bonus in front — variance is real and short runs are wide — but it does mean the average outcome is known in advance, and it is not the outcome the banner implies.

• Expected cost of a bonus ≈ required turnover × the house edge of the eligible games.
• Compare that figure to the bonus, not to the size of your deposit.
• A low multiplier on a high-edge game can be worse than a high multiplier on a low-edge one.
• Variance decides your result; the edge decides the average of everyone's results.

Game weighting: the clause that multiplies the job

Contribution weighting decides how much of each dollar staked counts towards the requirement. Pokies commonly count in full. Table games, video poker and anything with a low house edge are usually weighted far lower, and some games are excluded altogether. Because the weighting divides rather than subtracts, a modest-looking percentage turns a reachable requirement into an unreachable one.

What a ten per cent weighting really means

If a game contributes ten per cent, then every dollar you stake on it only counts as ten cents towards the requirement. A thirty-five hundred dollar requirement becomes thirty-five thousand dollars of actual stakes. At a five per cent weighting it becomes seventy thousand. This is why the sensible reading order is weighting first and multiplier second: the weighting table tells you which games the offer is actually for, and everything else is detail.

• Find the weighting table before the multiplier — it is usually further down the terms page.
• Divide the required turnover by the weighting to get the real stake total for that game.
• Check whether excluded games void the bonus or merely fail to contribute; these are very different penalties.
• Check whether live dealer tables are weighted differently from the same game in software form.

The three caps that decide what you can keep

Even a requirement you clear can be capped on the way out. Maximum bet while a bonus is active limits the stake per round, often to a small figure, and breaching it can void the balance rather than just reject the bet. Maximum cashout caps what you can withdraw from bonus play regardless of what the balance says. Expiry ends the whole thing, and expiry clocks usually run from the moment the bonus is credited, not from the moment you start playing.

Sticky or not sticky

A non-sticky bonus sits beside your cash and your cash stays yours; a sticky bonus is merged into one balance and is removed when you withdraw, taking part of what you thought was your money with it. The terms rarely use the words sticky or non-sticky. What you are looking for is a sentence describing what happens to the bonus amount at the moment of withdrawal, and whether cash and bonus are played in a defined order.

Bonus bets on sport behave differently again

On the wagering side the common form is a bonus bet whose stake is not returned with a win. That single clause changes the face value completely. A fifty dollar bonus bet at odds of three dollars returns a hundred dollars of winnings rather than a hundred and fifty, because the fifty is kept by the operator. In other words a fifty dollar bonus bet is worth noticeably less than fifty dollars of your own money, and the shorter the odds you use it at, the bigger that gap gets.

Minimum odds and the exclusions list

Bonus bets and promotions normally carry a minimum odds condition, a list of excluded markets, and a rule about what happens if the bet is voided or cashed out early. Cashing out a bonus bet frequently forfeits it entirely. A void leg in a multi can collapse the qualifying condition. These are not traps so much as the actual product: the promotion is the terms, and the headline is advertising copy wrapped around them.

• Work out the real value: winnings only, at the minimum permitted odds.
• Check whether cash-out voids the promotion before you ever touch the button.
• Check how a void or postponed event is treated for the qualifying bet.
• Check whether the promotion is per customer, per household or per payment method.

Where to read on

Each of these covers one part of the same arithmetic in more detail, so you can check a figure rather than take it on trust.

Read next

• Which rail your money rides
• Pokies maths and cost per hour
• Promotion terms, priced
• Wagering requirements
• Bonus bet terms
• Matched deposit terms

The small print that actually matters

18+ and where to get help

Everything on this page is information about how money moves, not advice to gamble and not a promise that any bet or spin returns anything. Wagering is for adults over 18 only. If the amounts, the chasing or the hours have stopped feeling like a choice, Gambling Help Online is free, confidential and open at any hour on 1800 858 858, and BetStop is the national self-exclusion register for licensed Australian wagering operators — it does not reach offshore online casinos, which is one more reason to decide the limit before the deposit rather than after it.