How We Rate

Every ranking on this site is the output of the same sequence. It is worth reading in order, because the weights at the bottom of this page are a consequence of the process rather than a decision we made first.

Step one: the shortlist

A market page starts with operators that actually accept players from that country, taken from the licensing and terms pages rather than from an advertising feed. Anything with no verifiable licence number, or a cashier that lists a single rail with no payout route, drops out here. Most of the attrition happens at this stage and none of it is visible in the finished article.

Step two: the account

We open a real account, complete identity verification straight away, and note what the operator asked for and how long it took. Doing verification before there is a balance is the only way to separate a genuinely slow payout from a payout that was waiting on a passport scan. It also tells us something useful: an operator that asks for documents it could reasonably have requested at sign-up, but waits until a cashout to ask, has told you how the rest of the relationship will go.

Step three: the deposit

Each rail the cashier advertises gets funded, not just the headline one. We record whether the payment clears, what the real minimum turns out to be, whether the deposit qualifies for the welcome offer, and what currency the balance lands in. That last one is quietly the most expensive detail on a cashier page and it is almost never stated up front.

Step four: the play

Enough real-money play to reach a withdrawable balance, using the games the offer actually counts. Bonus terms get read in full at this point rather than skimmed, because wagering, maximum bet while a bonus is live and game weighting are where a payout quietly becomes impossible.

Step five: the cashout

This is the part the whole site is built around. We request a withdrawal, timestamp it, and split the wait into its real components: the operator's pending window, any verification hold, the approval itself, and the time the payment rail takes afterwards. Then we try a second rail from the same account, because a cashier that pays a wallet in two hours and a card in four days is two different products depending on how you deposited.

Step six: the write-up

Only then does anything get written, and only what was observed goes in. Where a figure comes from the operator rather than from us, the page says so. Where a rail could not be tested because the cashier would not offer it to our account, the page says that too instead of quietly repeating the marketing.

The six criteria and their weights

The process above produces six things worth scoring. Payments carry the heaviest weight on this site for the obvious reason: it is a payments site, and the ranking would be dishonest if the thing we test hardest were not the thing that moves the score most.

What keeps an operator off a list

Three things end a review early regardless of score. A licence that cannot be found on the issuing regulator's register. A cashier with no working payout route for the market the page is written for. And a terms page that reserves the right to cancel winnings at the operator's sole discretion without a stated reason.

What changes by country

The rubric is the same everywhere; the checks underneath it are not. For British readers that means the licence status is stated plainly rather than implied, because a site outside the UK system is outside the GAMSTOP scheme and outside the UK complaints route, and both facts belong on the page. It also means checking that balances can be held in pounds, that the debit card rail survives contact with a UK bank, and that the local help line on our responsible gambling page is the free 24-hour one rather than an office-hours number. Every other market on this domain gets the same treatment against its own regulator, its own currency and its own rails.

What this method cannot tell you

A score is a snapshot of what was verified, not a guarantee of what happens next. Operators change payment providers, tighten bonus terms and adjust withdrawal limits without announcing any of it. Payout speed varies with the rail, with your bank and with whether your account was verified before you won. And a single cashout tells us how one cashout went, not how every future one will. Where a page and a cashier disagree, the cashier is right and we would like to hear about it.

Who writes this, and who pays for it

Miles Thornbury does the testing and the writing across every market on this domain. Some operators listed here pay us a commission when a reader opens an account through our link, at no cost to the reader. That funds the research and nothing else: it does not buy a listing, it does not raise a score, and several operators named in our articles carry no link at all.