What GAMSTOP is
A free national self-exclusion scheme for online gambling in Great Britain. You register once, choose a minimum period of six months, one year or five years, and every operator licensed by the Gambling Commission is required to block you from opening or using an account for that period. Participation is mandatory for licensees, not optional, which is what makes it the only exclusion route that reliably works across the whole licensed market.
It covers all 139 brands listed on this site, through the 48 companies that hold their licences. There is no brand here that sits outside it.
How to register
Registration is at gamstop.co.uk, takes a few minutes, and needs the personal details operators hold about you — name, date of birth, address, email and mobile — so the block can be matched to your accounts. It is free. It does not require you to contact any casino, and no operator can talk you out of it or delay it.
Once the period has started it cannot be shortened. That is the design rather than a limitation: an exclusion that could be reversed in a bad moment would not be an exclusion.
What it blocks, and what it does not
It blocks online gambling with Gambling Commission licensees: casino, bingo, sports betting, poker and lottery products offered by licensed operators to customers in Britain. It does not cover betting shops, casinos or arcades in person, gambling with operators licensed elsewhere and not covered by the scheme, or products that fall outside gambling regulation altogether.
It also does not remove gambling advertising from your life, block payments from your bank, or delete apps from your phone. Several banks offer a gambling block on card transactions, and device-level blocking software exists. Used together with GAMSTOP those close most of the routes; used alone, each leaves gaps.
Brand-level exclusion is not the same thing
Most casinos let you self-exclude from that brand directly. It works, and it is narrower than people assume. Where several brands sit on one Gambling Commission account — which on this site is most of them — we could not confirm from any published terms that excluding yourself at one brand excludes you at its siblings.
That is a real gap and it is why the licence pages matter here rather than only as trivia. The risk tool will show you how many companies a list of casinos actually represents, and the licences page explains how few companies are behind the market. If you want one action that certainly covers all of them, it is GAMSTOP.
Deposit limits and reality checks
Short of exclusion, every licensee must offer deposit limits — daily, weekly or monthly — plus reality checks that interrupt a session with the time and amount spent, and time-outs of up to six weeks. Those are licence conditions, so they exist at every brand on this site whether or not its marketing mentions them. A limit set at one brand may not follow you to another brand on the same licence, so set it wherever you play.
"Casinos not on GAMSTOP": what that phrase actually means
It is one of the most-searched gambling phrases in Britain, and it is worth answering directly rather than pretending the demand does not exist. A site advertising that it is not on GAMSTOP is telling you it holds no Gambling Commission licence. Everything the licence carries goes with it: no mandated fund protection, no free adjudicator for a dispute, no British regulator to complain to, no obligation to verify age, and no participation in the scheme you registered with.
Those sites are also, by definition, aimed at people who have formally asked to be stopped. This site does not list them, link to them or name them, and that is a decision rather than an oversight. If you have excluded yourself and are looking for a way around it, the exclusion is working — that is the moment the support below is more use than any casino.
Free, independent support
The National Gambling Helpline is free, confidential and open 24 hours a day on 0808 8020 133. GambleAware provides information and routes into free treatment across Britain. Gamblers Anonymous runs local and online meetings. GamCare offers structured support to gamblers and to affected family members, which matters because the harm is rarely contained to one person.
None of those organisations is connected to us or to any operator named on this site, and none of them requires you to have stopped before getting in touch.
Why this page exists at all
It will not bring traffic. The search demand around self-exclusion is overwhelmingly for the opposite of what this page says, and we have chosen not to serve that. It is here because a site that publishes the machinery of the British casino market should also publish the mechanism for leaving it — and because 18+ warnings in a footer are not the same as an explanation.
Questions about gamstop and self-exclusion
4 answers
01 What does GAMSTOP actually cover?
Every operator licensed by the Gambling Commission to offer online gambling to British consumers, which is every brand on this site. One registration applies across all of them for the period you choose.
02 Why do sites advertise that they are "not on GAMSTOP"?
Because they hold no British licence. GAMSTOP participation is a condition of the Commission's licence, so an operator outside the scheme is outside the regulator — which also means no British complaints route, no UK deposit protections and no recourse through the register.
03 Can I undo a self-exclusion early?
No. The minimum period is six months and it cannot be shortened once it starts. After it expires the exclusion stays in force until you actively contact GAMSTOP to end it, and there is a further cooling-off period before accounts reopen.
04 Does self-exclusion cover betting shops and apps?
GAMSTOP covers online operators licensed in Britain. Land-based venues run a separate scheme, and an operator's own account closure is separate again. Registering with GAMSTOP does not close accounts you hold with unlicensed sites, because those are outside the system entirely.