The Quietest Conversation in British Racing
The quietest conversation in British racing is the one about the offshore market. Sit in a betting shop on a Saturday afternoon and you will hear about the form, the going, the trainer, the jockey, the going-stick reading and the SP. You will not hear about the punter who walked out of the shop six months ago and is now placing his Saturday afternoon Lucky 15s through an offshore site routed via a Curaçao licence. He is out there, his stake is meaningful, and the cumulative effect of the millions of similar moves over the past three years has reshaped the British betting market in ways that the licensed industry is only beginning to model.
The numbers force the conversation. Unique UK visitors to a sample of 22 unlicensed racing-betting sites grew by 522% between August 2021 and September 2024, compared with 49% growth on the licensed equivalents over the same window. UK-facing offshore betting turnover has nearly tripled from £5bn in 2019 to £16.6bn in 2025. The legal share of the wider UK gambling market has fallen from 97% in 2019 to 92% in 2025 – small in percentage terms, dramatic in absolute volume. This article describes how the offshore market grew, who is using it, what punters give up when they walk across the line, and the vocabulary the regulator and the industry have started to use for what is going on.
The 522% Growth in Unique Visitors
The 522% growth figure comes from the International Federation of Horseracing Authorities’ analysis of UK visitor traffic to 22 unlicensed racing-betting websites measured between August 2021 and September 2024. The methodology samples a defined population of offshore sites that accept UK-facing traffic on horse racing markets and tracks the unique visitor count from UK IP addresses through the measurement window. The 522% figure is the cumulative growth across the 22 sites over the three-year window, with the unlicensed visitor count climbing from a low base in 2021 to a substantially larger total by late 2024.
The contrast with the licensed market is the more revealing comparison. The same methodology applied to the licensed UK racing-betting sites over the same window shows a 49% growth in unique visitors – a meaningful figure but an order of magnitude smaller than the unlicensed equivalent. The unlicensed market is therefore growing roughly ten times faster than the licensed market on a unique-visitor basis, and the absolute volume of UK punters now visiting unlicensed sites for racing bets is a material share of the total UK racing punter population. The trajectory has been steepest in the post-pandemic recovery period and has continued through the affordability-checks rollout of 2024 and 2025.
The Racing Post’s Big Punting Survey for 2025 provided the supporting punter-level data. 4.9% of survey respondents acknowledged having used unlicensed bookmakers, up from 3.6% in the equivalent 2023 survey. Among high-stakes punters – those wagering at materially higher annual volumes than the median respondent – the share who acknowledged using unlicensed operators climbed to 33%. The survey is self-reported and the true figure may be higher than the acknowledged figure, but the direction of travel is unambiguous and consistent with the IFHA traffic data.
The £16.6bn Offshore Turnover Figure
H2 Gambling Capital’s research for the Betting and Gaming Council put the UK-facing offshore betting turnover at £16.6bn in 2025, up from £5bn in 2019. The figure is constructed from offshore operator filings, payment-flow analysis, and a sample of UK punter survey responses about offshore betting volumes. The methodology is open to challenge at the margins but the headline trajectory – nearly threefold growth in offshore turnover over six years – is broadly consistent with the IFHA traffic data and with the operator-side observations of falling legal turnover. The £16.6bn figure is also large relative to the licensed UK racing handle, which gives a sense of the scale of the leakage that the conversation now revolves around.
The share of the wider UK gambling market that operates within the licensed framework has fallen from 97% in 2019 to 92% in 2025. The 5-percentage-point shift represents a substantial reallocation of volume from licensed to unlicensed channels, and the trajectory has accelerated through the post-2023 affordability-checks rollout. The figure matters because it is the single most direct measure of the licensed framework’s coverage of the British gambling market – at 97%, the framework was effectively comprehensive; at 92%, the framework now covers a materially smaller share of the activity, and the policy challenge is how to recover the lost coverage without forcing further leakage.
The Racing Post survey identified affordability checks as the principal driver of the offshore migration. 63.6% of respondents who acknowledged using unlicensed operators cited affordability checks as the main reason for the migration, up from 51% in the 2023 survey. The figure is the highest among the cited reasons by some distance and it represents the punter-level expression of the wider regulatory shift towards explicit financial risk assessments at defined stake thresholds. The implication is that the affordability framework, whatever its harm-prevention merits, has become the principal driver of the offshore leakage that the industry now models.
Why Punters Leave the Licensed Market
The reasons UK punters give for moving to offshore operators cluster around four themes. Affordability checks are the headline cause – punters who have hit the £150-per-month threshold for the financial risk assessment, or who have experienced the broader operator-side checks that preceded the formal framework, have moved their activity offshore rather than provide the source-of-funds documentation that the checks require. The convenience of the offshore alternative – generally no checks, no documentation requirements, and faster account onboarding – is the visible practical benefit, even though the offshore operators offer none of the protections of the licensed framework.
The second theme is restrictions on betting on the licensed framework. Punters who have been restricted by licensed operators – typically arbitrage punters and consistently winning customers whom the operators have closed or limited – have moved their activity to offshore operators that accept higher-stakes business and do not restrict winning customers in the same way. The licensed framework’s restriction practices have been a long-running source of friction with the punter population, and the offshore alternative has been a release valve for a particular segment of the market. The 33% offshore-usage figure among high-stakes punters in the Racing Post survey is consistent with this restriction-driven migration.
The third theme is product range. Offshore operators offer betting products that the UK licensed framework restricts or prohibits – particularly some forms of in-play betting, certain accumulator structures, and some markets on non-British racing and other sports. The product-side migration is smaller than the affordability-side migration but it is meaningful at the margin, particularly among punters who are looking for specific betting products that the licensed framework does not offer.
The fourth theme is anticipatory migration in response to tax changes. A YouGov survey commissioned by the BGC in 2025 found that 65% of UK betting respondents would consider using black-market sites if gambling taxes rose further. The figure is a survey-based forward indicator rather than a behavioural observation, and the actual migration in response to tax changes is likely to be lower than the stated willingness, but the figure nevertheless reflects a meaningful underlying disposition in the punter population to move offshore in response to further regulatory or tax tightening. The Autumn 2025 Budget changes to Remote Gaming Duty have made this dynamic more salient even though they do not apply to betting on horse racing directly.
What Punters Lose When They Cross the Line
The protections that UK punters lose when they move to offshore operators are real and consequential, and the offshore migration debate has only recently begun to articulate them clearly. The licensed framework provides dispute resolution through the operator’s complaints process and (where the operator complaint is unresolved) through the Independent Betting Adjudication Service and other Alternative Dispute Resolution providers approved by the Gambling Commission. A punter who disputes a bet with a licensed operator has a defined escalation path with formal protections at each stage. A punter who disputes a bet with an unlicensed offshore operator typically has no equivalent recourse – the operator’s jurisdiction is offshore, the regulator does not respond to UK consumer complaints, and the punter’s only realistic option is to write off the disputed stake.
The wider concerns about offshore operators have been forcefully articulated within the industry. Grainne Hurst, CEO of the Betting and Gaming Council, has framed the offshore operators in characteristically direct terms – calling them parasite operators that do not pay tax, do not care about safer gambling, and do not contribute a penny to the Levy. The framing captures the structural argument: offshore operators benefit from the British racing product without contributing to the Levy that funds the sport, do not contribute to the General Betting Duty that funds the wider public services, and are not bound by the safer-gambling framework that the licensed operators operate within. The cumulative effect on the sport and on the wider public framework is the reason the offshore conversation has moved from being a peripheral concern to being a central part of the British racing policy debate, and the data-sharing measures introduced to address it – including the cross-operator Single Customer View – are discussed in how the Gambling Commission’s Single Customer View pilot works.
