How we review

This page is the method. If anything elsewhere on the site contradicts it, this page is wrong or that page is — either way we want to know, and the contact address is at the bottom.

What decides the order, in one paragraph

Sites are ordered by two things and nothing else: the regulatory frame — whether the operator holds a licence we can look up, which regulator issued it, and whether the domain is a white label — and the bingo, meaning whether there are real scheduled rooms, how many ticket formats run, and whether there is a chat. Where those are equal, the cashier decides: a lower minimum deposit and a cheaper withdrawal rank higher.

Commission plays no part in it. We are paid the same way by every operator on the site, no operator has ever paid or offered to pay for a position, and if one ever did we would say so on this page rather than take it. We state this plainly because a site that ranks things and earns a commission on each of them has to: under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 and the Competition and Markets Authority's guidance on it, giving a trader more prominence in return for payment, without saying so, is a misleading practice.

How we are paid, and what it does not buy

Bingotime is an affiliate site. When a reader opens an account through one of our links the operator pays us a commission, at no cost to the reader. That is the whole of our income and we would rather say it in the first paragraph than in a footnote.

What it does not buy is position. The arrangement is the same for every operator on the site, which means it cannot discriminate between them, and the order of our lists follows the regulatory frame and the bingo on offer. We have never been paid to rank a site higher and we would say so on this page if we had. No operator sees a page before it is published and no operator has approval over anything we write.

Where we have no commercial arrangement with a site at all, we still list it if it belongs in a list. The archive of closed sites carries no links to anything, for obvious reasons.

This site is advertising, and says so

Every page that carries a commercial link opens with a box saying the page carries advertising, before the first link rather than after it, and the box says in plain words that the operator pays us when a reader opens an account. We do not write “may earn a commission”: we are paid on those links, and the conditional would be misleading. We do not describe our selection as independent of the commercial relationship where it is not.

The archive of closed sites carries no commercial links at all, and the guides carry a boxed operator and a short list rather than a grid. Nothing on this site is written to look like editorial while working as advertising: where a page sells, it says so at the top.

The licence check

Every operator on this site has its licence number looked up on the regulator’s own public register, and on every card that number is a link to the entry rather than to a logo. We record the account holder, whether the domain is listed as a white label, and which activities the licence covers — a licence for remote casino is not a licence for bingo.

A site that is not on the register does not go on the site, whatever its own footer says.

The room count

The bingo column on every card is counted in the lobby, not taken from the home page. We look at which ticket formats are actually running, and where a site has no bingo at all we write “none” rather than leaving the column blank — four of the fourteen sites we track have no bingo, and the home page of at least one of them does not make that obvious.

We do not publish room schedules. They change weekly and a stale schedule is worse than none.

The four-term rule on offers

We publish a bonus figure when four things are confirmed on the operator’s own page: the minimum deposit, the playthrough in figures, the deadline, and how much can be withdrawn. Short of all four, the card carries the type of offer or the minimum deposit and nothing else.

At the time of writing, no offer on any site we track had all four in one place. That is why there is not a single bonus amount anywhere on this site, and it is a deliberate position rather than an omission. Bonus terms, in plain words explains the four and does the arithmetic.

The ten criteria

Reviews score ten criteria separately rather than producing one number: bingo rooms and formats, chat and community, welcome offer, wagering terms, withdrawals, payment methods, mobile play, safer gambling tools, customer support, and finding your way around. Each gets a mark out of five and a sentence saying why.

We do not round them up. Where a site charges £2.50 to pay you, withdrawals score two out of five and the paragraph says so, even though the site is otherwise properly licensed and we are paid when you join it. A grid of straight fives is a banner, not a review.

What goes in the “against it” list

Every review has one and it is not decorative. Regulatory settlements against the operator go in it, with the amount and the date, including where the Gambling Commission has since taken the public statement down — it publishes them for three years, so a clean licence page is not a clean record. Withdrawal fees go in it. Support hours that do not cover the evening go in it. The absence of chat on a bingo site goes in it.

The rules we write to

We are not a gambling operator and we hold no licence: the Gambling Commission does not license affiliates, and nobody does. What binds us is the advertising code, the general law on misleading practices, and the contracts we have with the operators — which require us to behave as though the operator's own licence conditions applied to us, because the operator answers for our pages as well as its own.

In practice that means: no bonus figure without all four terms; no urgency in a button; no claim that gambling pays bills, fixes loneliness or proves anything about you; nobody under twenty-five pictured playing, and no artwork, lettering or character likely to appeal strongly to anyone under eighteen; the age notice, the helpline and the self-exclusion route on every page rather than buried in the footer; and only operators whose licence we have looked up on a public register. Where we have had to correct ourselves against these — we have, more than once — the page changed and the date moved.

Dates, and what “last checked” means

The date at the top of each page is the date we last checked the facts on it, not the date the page was written. When an operator changes something we have published, the page changes and the date moves. Where sources disagree about a launch year we leave it blank rather than pick one.

When we get it wrong

Corrections are made on the page itself and the date moves. If you find something wrong — a licence number, a room count, a fee, a term — write to us at the address on the contact page and tell us what the source says. Operators are welcome to do the same, and several have.