UK Gambling Commission Sets New Gaming Machine Safety Standards

The Gambling Commission on 30 вересня 2026 announced new standards to make gaming machines fairer and safer for consumers, including requirements that new category B gaming machines provide improved access to gambling management tools and sessional information showing how long a customer has been playing and how much they have won or lost.

Sessional information will also be available to licensees to support them in meeting regulatory obligations, such as interacting with consumers who are displaying signs of gambling harm. The package also targets game design, ensuring that awards below the stake size are not celebrated and prohibiting features that permit a customer to reduce the time until a result is known.

The changes follow a consultation held to implement proposals from the квітень 2023 Gambling Act Review White Paper, High Stakes: gambling reform for the digital age. That document committed the Commission to reviewing its gaming machine technical standards, including an assessment of the role of session limits across category B and C machines and the role of safer gambling tools.

Helen Rhodes, the Commission’s Director of Major Policy Projects and Evaluation, said the evidence submitted during the consultation shaped the final package and that changes were made where there was legitimate and evidenced concern.

“These measures will help both to empower consumers to understand and manage their gambling and ensure operators play their part,” Rhodes said.

Consultation and Response History

The Commission set out its decisions in a consultation response published on 30 вересня 2026. The underlying consultation, issued on 29 січня 2025, proposed changes to the Gaming Machine Technical Standards, the Gaming Machine Testing Strategy and the Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice. It ran until 3 червня 2025 and received 1,065 responses, including the submission of supplementary data, consumer research and evidence reports.

One element of the package was settled earlier. On 29 січня 2026, the Commission published the first part of its response, covering a proposal to introduce a licence condition to address non-compliant gaming machines more effectively. That condition, which requires the removal of non-compliant machines from licensed premises upon notification from the Commission, came into effect on 29 липня 2026. The new document sets out the Commission’s position on all remaining proposals.

Decisions Across the Twelve Proposals

The Commission will consolidate the twelve individual Gaming Machine Technical Standards into a single standard reflecting legislative changes and removing obsolete material, and will update the machine testing strategy. It will also adopt a formal definition of a session that aligns closely with the definition manufacturers have historically used to collect sessional data, providing a consistent approach for all stakeholders and supporting future evaluation of sessional data.

New category A, B1, B2, B3, B3A and B4 machines must make limit-setting functionality available to customers. Existing machines are exempt unless they are made available for use on a game compendium that contains a new game; once a new game appears on a compendium, all games on it, including existing games and category C and D games, must comply. No exemptions will apply for machine types such as tablets and community games.

Licensees that make category B machines available for use must ensure the machines comply with the limit-setting standard and that staff alerts are acted upon appropriately and in a timely manner, under an amended social responsibility provision in the Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice. The Commission decided not to require staff alerts when a customer reaches the first or second default time limit, stating that action following an alert should be targeted where there is most risk.

New machines in categories A, B1, B2, B3, B3A and B4 must display the customer’s net position and elapsed time at game level while a game is being played, and compendiums containing a new game must also display the information at machine level on the main menu. Machines must provide safer gambling information and signposting during breaks in play when a customer-set or default limit is reached, or modified before being reached. The display requirement will not apply to existing machines.

Two further standards address game design. New category A, B1, B2, B3, B3A, B4 and C machines may not celebrate a return that is less than or equal to the total stake gambled, and may not allow a customer to reduce the time until a result is known.

The Commission also proceeded with three changes proposed in response to industry feedback. It will adjust the number of games that may be linked together on category C machines and increase the value of wins generally in line with inflation, remove the requirement for a 50/50 chance following a losing game on category B machine links, and permit live jackpot wins to be gambled, in whole or in part, on all categories of machine.

Amendments and Staged Implementation

The final package differs from the original proposals in several respects. Existing machines were removed from the scope of the limit-setting and display requirements after the Commission weighed the complex technical changes involved and the costs to business, particularly for smaller licensees and the social club sector, which it said would not necessarily deliver proportionate consumer benefits. Other amendments include adopting net position as the monetary metric in place of deposited sums, reducing the minimum breaks in play triggered by the first and second default time limits from 30 seconds to 10 and 20 seconds respectively, and permitting customers to hide sessional information after a minimum break in play of 10 seconds.

In a Commission blog post published alongside the response, Policy Senior Manager Graham Burgin said gaming machines are played by adults and children alike in venues ranging from social clubs and seaside arcades to betting shops and casinos, and generate over a fifth of the total Gross Gambling Yield reported for the gambling industry in Britain, excluding lotteries.

The Commission said the outcomes sit alongside work by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to protect land-based gambling consumers, and that the government has made clear that consumer protection standards for gaming machines must be raised before it will consider deregulatory reform. The response lists the direct use of debit cards on machines, relaxations of category B entitlements in adult gaming centres and bingo premises, and future stakes and prizes reviews as measures that may follow.

Implementation will proceed in three stages. The session definition comes into force on 30 березня 2027, and the Commission said the sequencing will support the collection of a dataset using the new definition before the technical standards change, with the exercise repeated after the standards come into force, subject to resources, to help evaluate the impact of the changes. All other proposals except the staff alert elements come into force on 30 червня 2027, with the staff alert requirements following on 3 жовтня 2028.

Burgin described the two-year staff alert timeline as a “hard stop” and said licensees should continue to use staff alert technology where it already exists and introduce it as quickly as they are able to where it does not. He encouraged all stakeholders that make gaming machines available for use, or that play a role in ensuring compliance with the technical standards and testing strategy, to start planning for implementation now.