The UK Budget has done something regulators, campaigners and many operators have been expecting for a while. It has turned up the heat on online gambling.

From 1 April 2026, remote gaming duty (RGD) on online casino, slots and similar products will jump from 21% to 40%. From 1 April 2027, a new remote betting rate of 25% will be introduced within general betting duty (GBD) for most remote betting, while remote bets on UK horseracing and bets placed via self-service betting terminals will remain taxed at 15%. At the same time, bingo duty will be abolished from April 2026, while in-person betting duties and machine games duty remain untouched.

According to HM Treasury’s Autumn Budget 2025 documents and the “Changes to gambling duties” note published on gov.uk, remote gaming duty will rise from 21% to 40% in April 2026, and a new 25% remote betting rate will apply from April 2027.

It is a clear signal. The government wants more revenue from remote gambling, sees online casino as higher risk, and is prepared to differentiate sharply between products and channels.

Unsurprisingly, the first reaction has been about margin: earnings downgrades, share price hits, warnings about jobs, black-market migration and reduced investment.

Those concerns are real. But they are not the whole story.

The bigger question for operators is not only what will be taxed, but how they will behave under that pressure. The next 18 months will expose the quality of decision making, the ethics of data use and the strength of culture in UK iGaming far more than any glossy strategy deck.

The first tax is on decision quality, not on gross gaming yield

Most commentary focuses on gross gaming yield (GGY) and how much of it is now going to the Treasury. That matters. But in my experience, the biggest cost in moments like this is not the tax bill itself. It is the panic cuts that leadership teams make.

Under pressure, organisations rarely start by cutting the least effective spend. They cut what is most visible and painful in the short term:

• Above-the-line marketing and sponsorships, because they are big numbers.
• Brand and player experience projects, because they are hard to measure.
•  Safer gambling and risk teams, because they are sometimes labelled as “non-revenue”.
• Experimentation and testing, because it is easier to freeze pilots than to unwind legacy deals.

On paper this protects the profit and loss (P&L) this quarter. It often erodes long-term value and increases regulatory and reputational risk.

The real tax in the next two years will be on decision quality. The operators who cope best with 40% RGD will not be those who cut fastest. They will be those who can slow the conversation down, look across the whole value chain and ask: “What creates sustainable value after tax, and what just looks good in a dashboard?”

That requires something that is often in short supply just after a Budget speech: calm.

Change the steering metric: lifetime value after tax per risk band

If the duty structure has changed, the steering metrics for commercial and marketing teams must change with it.

Many operators still live on a familiar set of numbers:

• Cost per acquisition (CPA).
• Average revenue per user (ARPU).
• Headline GGY per product or segment.
• Simple payback periods on bonuses and campaigns.

Those metrics made more sense when duty was lower and flatter. In a world where RGD nearly doubles and remote betting takes a ten-point step up; they become dangerously incomplete.

A more honest north star looks like:

Lifetime value (LTV) after tax per risk band.

Not just “What is this segment worth in GGY?”, but “What is this segment worth after tax, and how stable or risky is that value over time?”

When you run the maths this way, several things tend to happen:

• Some high spending but volatile players look less attractive once you factor in tax, intervention costs and the probability of future loss or exclusion.
• Some modest spending but very stable segments suddenly become your real heroes.
• Promotions that drove impressive deposit or staking volumes start to look weak once you net out bonus costs, duty and future churn.

This is not about turning marketing into an actuarial exercise. It is about making sure that acquisition, retention and customer relationship management (CRM) are optimised for the world we are moving into, not the one that just ended.

The operators who re-base their steering metrics on LTV after tax per risk band will be much clearer on which players, products and channels they can afford to fight for.

From gambling duty to a data duty of care

Once you start looking at LTV after tax per risk band, the conversation inevitably moves to data and artificial intelligence (AI).

Every operator is now saying roughly the same thing: “We will use data and AI to become more efficient.” The question is what you choose to be efficient at.

Under margin pressure, the temptation is to point your smartest models at one goal only: extract more value from the same players, faster. That might mean:

• Tighter, more aggressive personalisation of offers.
• More frictionless journeys towards high-yield products like slots.
• Faster identification of “high potential” players without equal investment in markers of harm.

The risk is obvious. If tax pressure becomes the excuse for pushing right up against the line on harm, affordability and privacy, it is only a matter of time before the next regulatory wave hits.

There is an alternative. Treat the Budget as the moment to define a “data duty of care”:

• Use AI and data to filter for sustainable value, not just high spend.
• Build journeys that keep players in healthier patterns of play.
• Design segmentation frameworks where risk is a first-class dimension, not an afterthought.

In other words, the same tools that could be used to squeeze the wrong players can be used to grow with the right ones. In a 40% RGD world, that distinction matters more than ever.

Who can still afford to care about the player?

The tax package also accelerates a structural shift that many in the industry have been predicting. Analysts are already talking about consolidation, squeezed margins and “winners and losers”.

Look at it from the player’s point of view and a barbell starts to appear.

On one end are large, diversified groups:

• They can absorb some of the duty increase across multiple markets.
• They have the capital to invest in product, AI and customer experience (CX).
•  They can justify sophisticated data and CRM teams who think in LTV after tax.

On the other end are small, focused operators:

• They survive by being very clear about who they serve and what experience they offer.
• They can move quickly, test niche propositions and build loyal communities.

In the middle sit the UK-heavy mid-tier operators:

• Too big to be nimble, not big enough to fund a full data and CX transformation.
• Facing real pressure to protect margins in their primary market.
• Most likely to reach for blunt cost-cutting first.

The uncomfortable question for any operator reading this is simple:

“After the tax rises, can we still afford to care about the player in the way we say we do?” If the honest answer is “not under our current model”, then the choice is to change the model or accept a gradual drift towards becoming a commodity.

Your cuts are your culture, live on stage

All of this becomes very concrete the moment the first “tax response” meeting starts and someone opens the budget spreadsheet.

What gets protected first tells everyone who you are.

Some operators will quietly ring-fence:

• Short-term revenue, at almost any cost.
• Paid acquisition volume, even if it is increasingly low quality.
• Executive comfort, with change pushed down the line.

Others will deliberately protect:

• Safer gambling and responsible gambling (RG) capabilities.
• The core CX infrastructure that keeps journeys clean and fair.
• The experimentation and testing budget that finds better answers.

Both paths are cultural choices. Both will be very visible to staff, players and regulators over the next two years.

As someone who has sat on the operator side of the table with a multimillion-pound P&L and a duty increase to absorb, I can say this with confidence: under pressure, you do not get a new culture. You get a magnified version of the one you already have.

Tax does not just move numbers in a model. It reveals character.

Use the tax runway as your test lab

There is one piece of good news in all of this. The changes do not all hit at once.

• The new 40% remote gaming duty (RGD) rate will apply from 1 April 2026.
• The 25% remote betting rate within general betting duty (GBD) will apply from 1 April 2027.

That gives operators a runway of roughly 12 to 24 months. The question is how you use it. One option is to treat that time as a grace period and delay decisions until the last possible moment. The other is to treat it as a test lab and start adjusting now.

Practical moves that fit that mindset include:

• Re-baselining your commercial dashboards around lifetime value (LTV) after tax per risk band, so leadership conversations change before the duty does.
• Cleaning and consolidating your data so that AI and segmentation run on solid foundations, not patchwork.
• Running controlled tests on new bonus structures, welcome offers and reactivation journeys that are designed for sustainable value, not just top-line gross gaming yield (GGY).
• Agreeing at board level what you will ring-fence when cuts come, so culture is a conscious choice, not the outcome of whoever shouts loudest.

The duty rates are outside your control. The quality of your decisions, the way you use data and the culture your cuts reveal are not.