Checking a licence number yourself, without taking anyone’s word

A licence number in a page footer is a claim, and it is checkable in a few minutes. We do this check routinely before writing about any operator, and the method is worth publishing because the two common ways of getting it wrong both produce an answer that looks right.

The register is a download, not a search box

The Commission publishes the register as files you can take away, which is what makes a proper check possible. There are four of them and they do different jobs:

File	What it lists	Use it for
domain names	every website a licensee has registered	the primary check — start here
trading names	the brand names operators trade under	when the domain is not listed
businesses	the licensed companies themselves	confirming who actually holds it
licences	the licences and their status	whether it is still in force

Together they are a few hundred kilobytes and cover something on the order of a couple of thousand domains against a couple of thousand companies. That is small enough to search on any machine, which is the point: the answer does not depend on anybody’s review.

Match in this order, and stop at the first hit

1. The exact domain. The one in the address bar, as it appears there.
2. The same stem with a British suffix. Operators frequently register a .co.uk alongside a .com and list only one of them.
3. The trading name, normalised. Lower-cased, punctuation and spacing removed, before comparing.
4. The company name. Last, and with the most care, for the reason in the next section.

The order matters because the strength of the evidence falls at every step. A domain match is the operator telling the regulator that this website is theirs. A company-name match is you guessing that two similar strings refer to the same entity.

The first mistake: matching on a name

Names collide, and gambling brands collide more than most because they are assembled from the same short word list. A register entry for a bingo brand whose name contains a word is not evidence about a casino brand containing the same word. A company called something like “National Gaming Limited” is not thereby the licensee behind a site called National-something. Both of those are false positives we have hit, and both of them read as confirmations.

The rule we apply: a name-only match is not a result. It is a reason to go and find a domain or a licence number that ties the name to the site.

The second mistake: treating a register entry as a live product

Three statuses matter when you find the licensee. Active is what you are looking for. White Label is also legitimate — the site is run under somebody else’s licence, which is a normal arrangement and means the obligations sit with the licence holder, so that is the name to check against. Inactive means the licence is no longer in force, often because it was surrendered.

And the converse: a live register entry does not mean a live site. Plenty of registered domains answer with a redirect, a holding page or nothing at all, because registering a domain with the regulator and running a product on it are separate acts.

Why it is worth doing rather than reading

Because the pages that assert it go stale. We have seen an operator surrender its licence in October 2024 and still be described as Commission-licensed by review sites well into 2026 — not through dishonesty, but because the claim was written once and the register moved underneath it. A licence is a current state, and only a current check establishes it.

That is the test we would apply to any page about operators, including this one: does it tell you how it knows? Our pieces on judging whether a site pays fairly and licences, bonuses and safe play cover the signals around the licence, and what a British licence obliges an operator to do covers what the status actually buys you once it is confirmed.