Britain's high street bookmakers are being squeezed from both ends — and Betfred has just become the clearest casualty. The operator is shutting 132 shops and cutting roughly 600 jobs, pointing squarely at the tax bill.
Key takeaways
- 132 shops earmarked for closure — just over 10% of the estate — with about 600 jobs affected
- Betfred will be left with 1,094 shops and around 6,800 UK staff, down from a 2017 peak of 1,680
- Remote gaming duty jumped from 21% to 40% on 1 April 2026; a 25% general betting duty follows next year
- Entain, Evoke and Paddy Power have all trimmed retail or headcount in the past year
- Chairman Fred Done warned in late 2025 that rising duties could threaten the whole shop network
Betfred has opened a consultation with staff over plans to close 132 betting shops across the United Kingdom, a restructuring expected to cost around 600 jobs. The sites on the list represent slightly more than a tenth of the bookmaker's retail network, making this one of the sharpest cuts to its high street presence in years.
Once the programme completes, Betfred will run 1,094 shops and employ roughly 6,800 people in the UK. That is a long way from 2017, when the chain topped out at 1,680 locations — a decline of nearly 600 sites over less than a decade.
"No Choice", Says the CEO
Management framed the decision as the product of several cost pressures landing at once: gambling tax increases, a heavier employment cost base, and a generally uncertain economy.
"It is with deep regret that we have today started a consultation with colleagues working in more than 130 of our shops regarding a proposal to close those locations. We have tried hard to protect all our sites and the colleagues who work in them, but the combined impact of higher employer National Insurance contributions, wage inflation, increases in gambling taxes and wider economic uncertainty has left us with no choice."
— Jo Whittaker, Chief Executive, Betfred (statement cited by Sky News)
Whittaker added that the immediate focus is on supporting affected staff while continuing to serve customers through the remaining estate.
"These are well-run shops, staffed by dedicated colleagues, and it is incredibly hard to see any of them close, but the current fiscal and regulatory environment has made it impossible to keep trading all our shops."
— Joanne Whittaker, Chief Executive, Betfred (as reported by NEXT.io)
The closures were announced on 31 July. Trade publication NEXT.io has also reported that Betfred is exploring a move into adult gaming centres, otherwise known as slot arcades, which would give the group a different retail format alongside traditional bookmaking.
What the Budget Changed
The trigger sits in last year's budget measures. From 1 April 2026, remote gaming duty nearly doubled, climbing from 21% to 40%. A new 25% general betting duty rate is scheduled to follow next year, carved out to exclude self-service betting terminals, spread betting, pool betting and horse racing. Separate reporting has also flagged a 25% online sports betting duty arriving in 2027 for sports other than racing.
The Budget document published by the Treasury in November 2025 sets out the detail. After consulting on a single tax covering both remote betting and remote gaming, ministers decided against it and kept separate rates, citing higher levels of harm associated with online gaming. The new 25% charge is formally a Remote Betting Rate within General Betting Duty, taking effect on 1 April 2027, and the exemption applies specifically to UK horseracing. At the same time, Bingo Duty was abolished from April 2026 and the Gambling Commission was promised an extra £26 million over three years to tackle the illegal market.
The Treasury framed the package as shifting more of the tax burden onto online play while shielding in-person gambling such as bingo halls and racing. Betfred, which also runs the betfred.com online business, is nonetheless blaming the wider fiscal environment for the loss of more than a hundred physical shops.
A Sector-Wide Retreat From the High Street
Betfred is far from an outlier. The retail contraction has been running across the whole UK market as costs mount:
- Entain cut roughly 500 roles last month — about 2% of its workforce — having already warned that higher taxes could hit investment and force closures across its estate of some 2,300 outlets.
- Evoke, owner of William Hill and 888, shut shops and stripped costs in January to absorb the budget's tax changes.
- Paddy Power, part of Flutter Entertainment, announced 57 closures across the UK and Ireland last October, putting around 250 jobs at risk.
Entain's cuts, first reported by Bloomberg in mid-July, reached corporate, product and technology teams, and the company pointed to higher taxes, regulatory change and new competition from prediction markets. Evoke had warned of a £135 million hit from the November budget and launched a strategic review of the group in December, with Betfred and Bally's among the companies reported to be weighing deals for its roughly 1,300-strong shop estate. Paddy Power's closures split into 29 UK sites, one of them in Northern Ireland, and 28 in the Republic of Ireland, with 247 roles at risk.
Alongside taxation, operators have kept up their criticism of the Gambling Commission's affordability checks, arguing the requirements dampen betting activity with knock-on effects for connected industries — horse racing chief among them.
The Warning Was Already on Record
None of this arrived unannounced. In late 2025, Betfred co-founder and chairman Fred Done cautioned that further increases in gambling duty could eventually put the viability of the company's entire UK shop network in question. Eight months on, a tenth of that network is being consulted out of existence.
In October 2025 The Sunday Times reported that Betfred would close its entire estate of nearly 1,300 shops, putting almost 7,000 jobs at risk, if the chancellor went ahead with the duty rises then expected, which would have lifted sports betting duty from 15% to 30% and slots duty from 20% to 50%. Done set out his reasoning in a BBC interview:
"If [the overall tax rate] went up to anywhere like 40%, or even 35%, there is no profit in the business. We would have to close it down."
— Fred Done, Founder and Chairman, Betfred (BBC interview, October 2025, as reported by Casino.org)
The final Budget stopped short of the steepest proposals, but the rises that did arrive have now been followed by the first large wave of Betfred closures. The industry has heard similar warnings before: when fixed-odds betting terminal stakes were cut from £100 to £2, William Hill forecast up to 900 closures, and shop numbers across the sector ultimately fell by roughly a quarter over the following years, partly because of the pandemic.
Founded in Salford in 1967 by brothers Fred and Peter Done, Betfred grew into one of Britain's biggest bookmakers; the latest Sunday Times Rich List puts the brothers' combined wealth at £3.61 billion. That scale has not insulated the business from the arithmetic now reshaping the sector: as duties rise and margins compress, the betting shop is becoming the first line item operators are willing to cut.
The first Done Bookmakers shop opened in Ordsall, and the chain grew through acquisitions such as the Robert Walker estate in 1997, adopted the Betfred name in 2004, bought the Tote in 2011 and added 322 shops that were sold off following the Ladbrokes–Coral merger. Today the group is headquartered in Birchwood, Warrington. Accounts filed in January 2026, covering the 78 weeks to 30 March 2025, showed turnover of £1.45 billion and gross profit of £1 billion after it wound down its businesses in the United States and Spain.
