Industry Gross Gambling Yield Reaches £17.5 Billion In 2025/26

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Written By Craig Simpkin | Published at September 25, 2026
Apr 23, 2023; London, UK; Participants of the London Marathon seen in the finish area after completing the race. Mandatory Credit: Peter van den Berg-USA TODAY Sports

Of all the various measures of the strength of the UK betting industry, Gross Gambling Yield (GGY) is a useful starting point.

This takes the total amount of bets taken by operators and subtracts the amount paid out in winnings – leaving their gross yield for the financial year.

In the financial year 2025/26, that reached £17.5 billion for the UK sector… an increase of some 4.4% on the same period in 2024/25.

That’s a rare bright note at a time in which the industry is facing significant challenges; many of which were not included in the Gambling Commission’s data.

A Snapshot of the Industry

For their annual Industry Statistics report, the regulator has collated data from April 2025 through to April 2026.

That’s a period in which the government announced their catastrophic Gambling Tax increase, which was one of the main takeaways of their Autumn Budget in November 2025.

The fall-out from that, despite the delay in implementing the taxation changes, was immediate, with Paddy Power closing 57 betting shops and other operators embarking on emergency strategy meetings – the Evoke Group’s ultimately led to their pending sale to Bally’s Intralot.

However, that 2025/26 data doesn’t take into consideration the implementation timeframe of the Remote Gaming Duty hike from 21% to 40%, which was introduced after the accounting period in April of this year.

So many of the mitigative actions taken by operators, from shop closures to redundancies, don’t feature in the Gambling Commission’s Industry Statistics report for 2025/26.

Gross Gambling Yield On the Rise

Even so, the data offers an interesting snapshot of the landscape of the UK gambling sector.

Although not confirmed by the Gambling Commission, we believe that the £17.5 billion gross gambling yield is a yearly record for the UK market.

That was a 4.4% increase on the 2024/25 figures, with that rise climbing to 4.7% where lottery draws are removed from the data.

The complete breakdown:

Betting Shop Closures

Based upon the GGY data, you might think that the gambling industry is in rude health in the UK.

But it’s the 2026/27 data, which will be published in September 2027, that will perhaps make for the most damning reading. During the prior financial year, high street betting shop numbers fell from 5,825 to 5,617; a decrease of 208 (3.6%).

But we know for a certainly that more than 500 betting shops have now closed since April, when the RGD hike was implemented – the likes of Evoke (270), Betfred (132) and Paddy Power (100+) all contributing to the alarming downturn.

So the percentage decline in the 2026/27 data will be even more grave… with hundreds more shops likely to close if the government presses on with their Machine Games Duty (MGD) increase in their next Budget.

Lotteries Lead the Way

At the same time that the Gambling Commission published their industry data, they also revealed the latest results from the Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB).

Conducted by the National Centre for Social Research from a group of more than 5,000 adults aged 18+, the key findings were:

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