Bonus funds
Bonus funds are money an operator credits to your account as part of a promotion, held apart from your cash balance and locked until you meet the attached terms, usually a wagering requirement. You can stake them like cash, but you cannot withdraw them, or anything won with them, until those terms are cleared. Until then they belong to the operator. On most sites they sit in a separate bonus balance, and the order in which cash and bonus are spent decides how much of your own money stays withdrawable along the way.
How bonus funds are calculated and cleared
The cost of bonus funds is the turnover they demand, and you work it out by multiplying the wagering requirement by whatever base the terms name. A 40x requirement on a €100 bonus means €4,000 of bets before the balance converts to cash.
The base is the clause to read first. Some operators apply the multiplier to the bonus only, while others write “wagering applies to deposit plus bonus”, and that wording doubles the work on a matched offer: €100 deposited plus €100 bonus at 40x is €8,000 of bets, not €4,000.
Game weighting stretches the figure further.
If slots count at 100% and table games at 10%, every €1 staked on blackjack clears only 10 cent of the requirement, so the same €4,000 target becomes €40,000 in table stakes. Weightings, the multiplier and the base all vary between operators, and there is no single industry standard, so the only reliable number is the one you calculate from the terms page of the offer in front of you.
Where the terms on bonus funds bite
You meet bonus funds in your account balance, usually shown as a second figure beside your cash, and the rules around that figure matter as much as the multiplier.
A maximum bet rule caps each stake while bonus funds are active, and breaking it once can be grounds for the operator to void the bonus and any winnings from it. A deadline does similar damage from the other side: if the turnover is not finished in the stated number of days, the remaining bonus balance is removed.
Caps on winnings are the quieter clause. A term reading “maximum withdrawal from bonus winnings is 5x the bonus amount” means that a €20 bonus can never turn into more than €100 of cash, however well the session goes.
Sticky and non-sticky bonus funds
With a non-sticky bonus, your cash is played first and you can withdraw it before the bonus funds are touched, which leaves you in control of your own money. With a sticky bonus, the bonus amount itself is never paid out and is deducted when you withdraw, and the deposit is usually locked in alongside it until wagering is complete. For the same headline figure, the sticky version is the worse offer.
What bonus funds are often confused with
The most common mix-up is treating bonus funds as cash. They are not withdrawable, and many sites only show the difference in a small line under the main balance.
Free spins are a separate thing that often ends up in the same place. The spins themselves are a fixed stake on set games, but whatever they win is frequently credited as bonus funds with its own wagering requirement, so a spin win of €15 at 35x still needs €525 of bets. Cashback differs again: some operators pay it as cash with no wagering, others as bonus funds, and the terms say which.
In Ireland, bonus funds are an inducement within the meaning of the Gambling Regulation Act 2024, which defines one as “a benefit or advantage, the intent or effect of which is, either directly or indirectly, to encourage participation in gambling”. Section 157 bars a licensee from offering an inducement to a person or a specific group of persons, and allows the Minister to set conditions on, or prohibit, offers made to the general public. That provision applies to licensees of the new regime, so an offshore site’s offer is not covered by it.
If bonus offers are pulling you into more play than you planned, set a deposit limit in your account settings and talk to the HSE’s addiction services or Gamblers Anonymous Ireland about support.
