How we score casinos, and what our scores cannot tell you

The one thing to understand before reading any score

A trust score only compares casinos licensed by the same class of regulator. A 7.0 and an 8.0 from different classes are not two points on one scale — they are two different measurements. We start every licensed casino from the class of its regulator, so a casino supervised by a regulator that publishes its enforcement, audits player funds and can revoke a licence starts high and is then marked down for what it has actually done. A casino licensed where none of that happens starts low and stays there even with a spotless record, because a spotless record from a regulator that publishes nothing is not evidence of anything. Structurally, a heavily-fined top-tier casino can score below a clean lighter-touch one. That is not a bug; it is the honest reading of the two facts.

Trust, term by term

1. The regulator's class sets the base. Top-tier 9, lighter-touch 6, unclassified 6, none named 2.
2. A top-tier regulator that hides its enforcement loses part of that base. Our top-tier base assumes decisions we can check. Where a regulator publishes sanctions anonymised, in aggregate, or not at all, we discount it — a supervisor whose work is invisible cannot be verified to be doing it.
3. The licence's status. Active is neutral; pending −2; suspended −4; revoked or affirmatively unlicensed collapses the score to 1.
4. Enforcement action counts against the score, weighted by category (money laundering, player funds and social-responsibility failures weigh full; advertising less; administrative paperwork barely at all) and by size of penalty. The total is saturating: more findings always lower the score, but never without limit, so one catastrophic brand cannot be driven to absurdity while a second offence still registers.
5. Only actions against the brand itself or the company it grew out of count. A sister brand's fine is shown on our pages for context and scores nothing.
6. Trading history adds up to +1, from the shorter of the domain's age and the company's stated age — a 2002 domain parked until 2019 buys nothing.

What we refuse to do

• We do not score bonuses. A bonus is an advertisement. What a casino spends to acquire you tells you nothing about how it treats you afterwards, so no offer, wagering multiple or free-spin count moves any number here. We show them because you will be offered them.
• We do not blend payout speeds. A casino paying crypto in an hour and cards in five days is not a "two-day casino". Speed is ranked per rail, separately.
• We do not call a casino unlicensed because we could not find its licence. Those are different claims. We say what we could not verify and leave it there.
• We do not publish a score for a casino nobody has checked. A brand whose enforcement history we have not searched is held out of the safest ranking rather than shown with an unearned clean sheet.

What our payout times mean

Every withdrawal time here is end-to-end wall clock: from you requesting the money to the money being spendable, including the operator's own review window. It is not the "instant" figure on a cashier screen, which times only the last step. Where sources conflict we take the upper bound within the single most credible source and name it — never the fastest number from one source and the slowest from another, which would describe a casino that does not exist. Methods that are not really cashouts — cash at a cage, cheques, transfers to another player — are excluded entirely.

Where the numbers can be wrong

We would rather you knew this from us. Payout times come from operator help pages that are often stale and occasionally contradict each other; card times are the least reliable figures we hold. Bonus terms rotate and vary by market, so an offer may have changed since we read it. Ownership of these companies changes by takeover faster than any register updates. Each fact on a profile carries the document we read it in and the date we read it — if a fact matters to you, follow the link and check it yourself. If we have something wrong, tell us and we will correct it and say that we did.