UK Gambling Commission Issues Third GSGB Annual Report Detailing Stable 2025 Trends

The UK Gambling Commission released the third annual report from its Gambling Survey for Great Britain in July 2026, and this document compiles official statistics on participation, behaviours, attitudes and harms drawn from responses by more than 20,000 adults across the three comparable years of 2023 through 2025. Observers note that the survey maintains consistent methodology, which allows direct year-on-year comparisons without the distortions that often accompany changes in sampling or question design. Data shows participation rates holding steady while problem gambling prevalence remains unchanged from the prior two years, a pattern researchers attribute to the established regulatory environment that has operated since the early 2020s.

Survey Scope and Methodology

The Gambling Survey for Great Britain draws on a large, nationally representative sample that captures adults aged 18 and over living in England, Scotland and Wales. Because the same core questions have been fielded each year since 2023, analysts can track shifts in frequency of play, preferred products and reported negative consequences without adjusting for methodological drift. The 2025 dataset therefore slots directly alongside the 2023 and 2024 figures, giving policymakers a three-year run of comparable evidence rather than isolated snapshots. Figures reveal that response rates stayed high enough to keep margins of error narrow, which strengthens confidence in the headline percentages that appear throughout the report.

Participation Trends Across Three Years

Overall gambling participation showed little movement between 2023 and 2025, with the proportion of adults who reported any gambling activity in the past four weeks remaining within a narrow band. Lottery draws continued to account for the largest share of participants, while online casino games and sports betting occupied smaller but consistent slices of the market. Those who study the sector point out that the stability appears across both land-based and remote channels, suggesting that neither regulatory tightening nor product innovation has produced dramatic swings in uptake during the measured period. Regional breakdowns indicate broadly similar patterns in England, Scotland and Wales, although minor variations in online slot engagement appear in the detailed tables.

Problem Gambling Rates Remain Level

Problem gambling prevalence, measured through the Problem Gambling Severity Index, stayed flat across the three survey waves. The percentage of adults classified as problem gamblers showed no statistically significant change from 2023 to 2025, and the same held true for the moderate-risk category. Researchers have observed that this plateau occurs even as certain product features, such as faster play speeds on some digital games, continued to evolve. The report presents these figures alongside confidence intervals, allowing readers to see that the year-on-year differences fall well within sampling variation. Public health analysts therefore treat the current rate as a baseline rather than evidence of either improvement or deterioration.

Attitudes and Reported Harms

Attitudinal questions in the survey cover perceptions of gambling’s fairness, the effectiveness of responsible gambling tools and the acceptability of different marketing approaches. Responses remained largely consistent with previous years, with most participants expressing support for existing age and stake restrictions. Reported harms, including financial difficulties, relationship strain and mental health impacts, also tracked closely with the 2023 and 2024 results. The data indicates that the subset of individuals experiencing multiple harms at once has not expanded, although the absolute numbers naturally scale with population size. Those who analyse harm distributions note that the concentration of severe harms among a small group of participants continues to shape policy discussions around targeted interventions.

Implications for Ongoing Monitoring

Because the survey now supplies three full years of comparable statistics, the Gambling Commission and external researchers can begin to test whether longer-term trends are emerging beneath the year-to-year stability. The report itself flags several areas for continued scrutiny, including the intersection of online gambling with other leisure activities and the effectiveness of current self-exclusion mechanisms. Data from the 2025 wave will feed into future modelling exercises that aim to project participation and harm levels under different regulatory scenarios. Observers expect the next annual release, due in 2027, to extend the time series further and potentially reveal whether the plateau observed so far persists or begins to shift.

Conclusion

The third annual Gambling Survey for Great Britain supplies a clear, methodologically consistent picture of gambling behaviours and outcomes through 2025. Stable participation figures and unchanged problem gambling rates form the core narrative, while detailed tables on attitudes and harms offer additional context for anyone tracking the sector. The report is available on the Gambling Commission website, where readers can examine the full set of statistics and methodological notes.