Last month Hurstwood Holdings paid £2.9 million for Edinburgh’s Art Deco Maybury Casino, a deal priced on a Grosvenor lease backed by a Rank guarantee, at a net initial yield of about 15%. That is how the bricks and mortar end of the casino trade gets valued in Scotland: covenant strength and the years left on the lease. The online end is valued on something far less visible, namely the payment rails that move a customer’s money into an account, and one of the oddest of those rails runs through the monthly phone bill.
Operators listed among pay by mobile casinos in the UK take deposits through carrier billing firms such as Boku and Fonix, which add the charge to a contract bill or take it straight from pay as you go credit. The amounts are small by design. Deposits typically run from £10 to £40 a time, with providers commonly capping spending at around £30 to £40 a day and £240 a month.
The cap is neither new nor Ofcom’s
It is tempting to read the £30 figure as a fresh Ofcom rule designed to rein in phone bill gambling. The record does not support that. Ofcom took over day to day regulation of phone paid services from the PSA on 1 February 2025 and replaced the old code of practice with its own Premium Rate Services Order. The per transaction and daily ceilings that casino customers run into are set by the networks and the billing intermediaries, and they have been part of the product for years.
That distinction matters for anyone modelling the channel. A regulator rewriting a limit is a policy risk that can arrive at short notice. A commercial ceiling agreed between networks and payment firms moves more slowly, and it is already priced into every operator that offers the method.
What Ofcom’s own numbers say
The more useful evidence sits in Ofcom’s annual market review of phone paid services for 2025/26, published in July. It does not describe a boom. Total phone paid service revenue fell by 3.4% in real terms to £604.5 million. Operator billing, the channel that carries most carrier billed casino deposits, was one of only two channels to grow, rising 2.1% to £385.1 million and taking 64% of the market, up from 43% in 2020/21.
Gambling shows up clearly in the consumer research. Among adults who had paid for something on their phone bill in the previous year, 24% had used it for lotteries, betting or gambling, second only to entertainment subscriptions. That share climbed to 29% among men and 31% among those aged 55 and over, which runs against the assumption that phone billing is mainly a young person’s habit.
Set against the size of the regulated online casino market, the channel stays modest. Remote casino gross gambling yield in Great Britain reached about £5.7 billion in the year to March 2026, according to the Gambling Commission. Even if every pound of operator billing went to gambling, which it does not, the phone bill would be a side door rather than the main entrance.
Where the Gambling Commission’s rules bite
The bigger compliance question for operators is how a deliberately capped payment method interacts with checks built around much larger sums.
The Commission’s financial vulnerability checks, which use public records such as county court judgments and insolvency data, apply once a customer’s net deposits pass £150 in a rolling 30 day period. That trigger fell from £500 in February 2025. A customer using only phone billing at the common £240 monthly ceiling can cross it well inside a month, so the small ticket channel does not sit below the check threshold at all. At £30 a day, it takes five days.
The financial risk assessments announced in July sit at the other extreme. Stage one targets net deposits of £5,000 in 24 hours at the largest operators, falling eventually to £1,000 in 24 hours or £3,000 over 90 days for customers aged 25 and over. No one reaches those figures by phone bill alone. For operators, that splits the customer base neatly: phone billing customers generate vulnerability check volume, while the expensive assessment work concentrates on card and open banking users.
One question gets less attention than it deserves. Credit cards have been banned for gambling in Great Britain since April 2020, and the ban extends to digital wallets topped up from credit cards. A contract phone bill is not a credit card, but the customer still plays now and pays at the end of the month. So far, carrier billing has not been caught by that ban. An operator building a product line around it is betting that this stays true.
What this means for product and compliance budgets
For operators, the practical costs are already visible. Phone billing is a deposit only method, so every customer who wants to withdraw needs a second, verified payment route, which means the same identity and source of funds work as any other account, spread across smaller balances. Billing intermediaries take their margin on each transaction, and the ceilings limit how much any single customer can bring in through the channel.
The likely direction is not a dramatic regulatory clampdown but steady pressure from both regulators at once. Ofcom holds the consumer protection rules for the bill, while the Gambling Commission holds the rules for the account, and an operator offering carrier billing has to satisfy both. Those costs fall on a payment channel whose overall revenue, on Ofcom’s figures, grew 2.1% last year.
For a business reader in Edinburgh, the contrast with the Maybury is hard to miss. A landlord can underwrite a casino building on a lease with a guaranteed tenant and a fixed uplift. Nobody can underwrite the phone bill channel the same way, because its value rests on a single regulatory assumption: that paying for gambling at the end of the month on a mobile contract is not credit by another name. If that assumption ever shifts, £30 a day will be the least of the industry’s concerns.
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