A wagering requirement (also called a rollover or playthrough) is the number of times you must bet a bonus amount — or the bonus plus your deposit, depending on the operator — before you're allowed to withdraw any winnings made with it. It's shown as a multiplier, like ×30 or ×40. Until you've wagered that total, the bonus and anything you won with it stay locked in your account.
Say a casino gives you a ₹8,000 bonus with a ×40 wagering requirement that applies to the bonus only. You'd need to place bets totalling ₹320,000 (₹8,000 × 40) before you could withdraw any winnings tied to that bonus. If the requirement applied to the bonus plus your deposit instead, the number to wager would be higher. Our bonus wagering calculator works this out for any bonus and deposit automatically, including the expected cost based on the game's RTP.
Without a wagering requirement, someone could claim a bonus, deposit, and withdraw it immediately without ever really playing — which is why essentially every real-money bonus has one attached. It's the mechanism that turns a bonus into "play more, not withdraw immediately."
The wagering multiplier is the single biggest factor in how much betting a bonus actually demands. The table below uses a ₹10,000 bonus as the base figure, applied to the bonus amount only:
| Multiplier | Bonus | You need to wager |
|---|---|---|
| ×10 | ₹10,000 | ₹100,000 |
| ×20 | ₹10,000 | ₹200,000 |
| ×30 | ₹10,000 | ₹300,000 |
| ×40 | ₹10,000 | ₹400,000 |
| ×50 | ₹10,000 | ₹500,000 |
The jump from ×10 to ×50 is a five-fold difference in required turnover for the exact same bonus amount — which is why the multiplier matters more than the headline bonus percentage when you're comparing offers.
Operators calculate the wagering base in one of two ways, and the terms rarely spell this out in plain language. Take a ₹5,000 deposit matched by a ₹5,000 bonus (a 100% match), with a ×30 requirement:
| Bonus only | Bonus + deposit | |
|---|---|---|
| Wagering base | ₹5,000 | ₹10,000 |
| You need to wager (×30) | ₹150,000 | ₹300,000 |
Same bonus, same multiplier, but the bonus+deposit version demands exactly double the turnover. This single detail changes the real cost of a bonus more than almost anything else in the terms, so it's worth confirming before you deposit rather than after.
Not every bet counts the same. Slots usually contribute 100% of the amount wagered, while table games like roulette or blackjack often count for only a fraction — commonly 10-20% — because they have better odds for the player. Live dealer games and some jackpot slots are frequently excluded altogether. The game contribution percentages are normally listed in the bonus terms, not the promotional banner, so it's worth checking before you start.
Contribution rate changes how much you actually have to bet, not just which games you can play with the bonus. If you need to clear ₹300,000 in wagering and you play a slot that contributes 100%, a ₹300,000 turnover does it. If you instead play a table game that contributes only 20%, every ₹1 you bet only counts as ₹0.20 toward the requirement — so you'd need to turn over ₹1,500,000 in actual bets to clear the same ₹300,000 requirement. Low contribution rates are the most common reason a wagering requirement takes far longer to clear than a player expects.
A wagering requirement isn't free to complete, even though the bonus itself is. Every bet you place has a house edge built in, and over enough spins or hands your results tend toward the game's RTP (return to player). At a typical online slot RTP of 96%, the house keeps about 4% of everything wagered over time, on average — so a useful rule of thumb is: expected loss ≈ amount wagered × 4%.
Going back to the ₹8,000 bonus with a ×40 requirement from the earlier example — a ₹320,000 turnover — the expected loss while clearing it, at 96% RTP, works out to roughly ₹320,000 × 4% = ₹12,800. That's ₹4,800 more than the ₹8,000 bonus itself, which means on average you'd expect to come out behind just from the wagering grind, before counting anything you might win along the way. This is an average over many spins, not a guarantee for any single session — short-term results swing in both directions — but it's the right way to judge whether a bonus is genuinely worth claiming rather than looking at the headline percentage alone.
Four things matter more than the bonus percentage printed on the banner: the wagering multiplier, whether it applies to the bonus only or bonus plus deposit, the contribution rate of the games you'll actually play, and the RTP of those games. A 100% bonus with a ×50 requirement on bonus+deposit, cleared on a game with a 20% contribution rate, can cost far more in expected losses than a smaller 50% bonus with a ×15 requirement on the bonus only, played on a 100%-contribution slot. Before claiming any bonus, it's worth working through the real turnover and expected loss with our bonus wagering calculator rather than comparing headline percentages between operators.
Generally yes, assuming the bonus amount and game contributions are similar — a ×20 requirement means wagering half of what a ×40 requirement demands for the same bonus.
It depends on the operator. Some calculate the requirement on the bonus amount only; others calculate it on the bonus plus your deposit, which roughly doubles the amount you need to wager for the same multiplier.
The unused bonus amount and any winnings made with it are usually removed from your account — see our page on what happens if you don't complete a wagering requirement for the full picture.
Most operators show a running progress bar or a remaining-amount figure somewhere in your account or bonus dashboard — it's worth checking this regularly rather than guessing how close you are.
As a rough average, expected loss ≈ amount wagered × (1 − RTP). At a common slot RTP of 96%, that's about 4% of your total turnover — so a ₹320,000 wagering requirement carries an expected loss of roughly ₹12,800 on average, even though any single session can land above or below that.