UK Licensing & Player Protection, Explained
Every operator featured on Payline House holds a current licence from the UK Gambling Commission. Here's what that licence actually covers, and how to check it yourself.
What the Gambling Commission does
The Gambling Commission is the statutory regulator for gambling in Great Britain. It licenses operators, sets conditions they must meet, and can fine, suspend or revoke a licence if an operator breaches them. It is not a government department that runs gambling itself, and it does not endorse any individual operator — a licence is a baseline of compliance, not a recommendation.
Types of remote licence
Operators need a separate authorisation for each activity they offer online: casino, bingo, general betting (split into real-event and virtual-event), and pool betting are the categories relevant to the operators on this site. A single licensee can hold several of these at once, which is why product range varies so much between the operators we compare.
Where your money sits
Licensed operators must keep player funds separate from company money to some degree, and must tell you which of the Gambling Commission's protection categories applies: broadly, whether funds are protected to a basic, medium, or higher standard in the event the operator becomes insolvent. This detail sits in each operator's own terms, and it's worth checking before you deposit rather than after.
Checking a licence yourself
You don't have to take any comparison site's word for a licence status, including ours. The Gambling Commission's public register lets you search by business name, trading name or domain, and shows the exact licensed activities, the account number, and any recorded regulatory action against that business.
Player protection tools required by licence
Licence conditions require operators to offer deposit limits, reality checks, time-outs and self-exclusion, and to signpost free support such as GamCare and GambleAware. GAMSTOP lets you self-exclude from every UK-licensed online gambling site in a single registration, rather than site by site. See our Responsible Gambling page for more detail on using these tools.