Third Annual Gambling Survey for Great Britain Highlights Stable Trends Across Three Years

The UK Gambling Commission has published the third annual report from the Gambling Survey for Great Britain, delivering the first three years of comparable official statistics covering 2023 through 2025 on participation, behaviours, attitudes, and consequences across the country, and observers note this release marks a key milestone in tracking consistent national patterns.

Survey Scope and Methodology

Researchers collected responses from approximately 20,000 adults each year to build a robust dataset that allows direct year-on-year comparisons for the first time, while the approach focuses on adults aged 18 and over and captures activity over the past four weeks to provide clear snapshots of current engagement levels across Great Britain.

Participation Rates Remain Steady

Headline figures show 47 percent of adults gambled in the past four weeks during 2025, a rate that has held consistent across the three-year period, and when lottery-only players are excluded the participation rate stands at 27 percent, indicating that broader betting and gaming activities maintain a stable presence without significant upward or downward shifts in overall involvement.

Data indicates these numbers reflect participation across various formats including online platforms, retail outlets, and traditional draws, yet the consistency suggests underlying habits have not undergone major changes despite evolving market options and regulatory adjustments that have taken place since the survey began.

Problem Gambling Indicators Show No Movement

The problem gambling rate, measured by a PGSI score of 8 or higher, registered at 2.4 percent in 2025 and remained unchanged from previous years in the series, while experts point out that this stability provides a baseline against which future interventions or market developments can be evaluated with greater precision.

Those who have examined the full dataset note that the survey also tracks a range of related behaviours and harms, offering a more complete picture than single-metric approaches used in earlier studies, and the three-year run now allows researchers to identify whether any emerging patterns warrant closer attention in subsequent waves.

Reasons for Gambling and Participant Attitudes

The report outlines common reasons people give for gambling, such as entertainment, social interaction, and the chance of winning, while most respondents described their overall feelings toward gambling as positive or neutral rather than negative, and this distribution of attitudes has likewise shown little variation across the three years of comparable data.

Figures reveal that the majority of participants do not report experiencing adverse consequences, yet the survey continues to measure the smaller segment that does encounter difficulties, thereby supplying regulators and support services with ongoing evidence to inform targeted resources without relying on outdated or non-comparable sources.

Context Within Broader Regulatory Landscape

As the survey enters its fourth year of data collection in July 2026, the Gambling Commission gains an increasingly reliable tool for monitoring long-term trends, and the stable indicators recorded so far provide a foundation for assessing the impact of any new policies introduced after 2025 without the confounding effects of methodological changes.

According to the Gambling Survey for Great Britain (Annual Report 2025): Official statistics, the consistent methodology across the initial three years strengthens confidence in the reported stability, allowing direct attribution of any future shifts to actual behavioural changes rather than survey design differences.

Conclusion

The third annual report establishes a clear benchmark for gambling participation and related outcomes in Great Britain, with stable rates across both headline figures and problem gambling measures through 2025, and the ongoing series will continue to supply comparable data that supports evidence-based oversight in the years ahead.