Five pounds is normally the minimum deposit that you’ll find at a betting site, but is it enough to get yourself a bonus? The answer to this is not only a resounding ‘Yes’ but the kind of sign up offers you can get on an initial fiver deposit are often some of the most generous that you’ll find – dishing out four times your deposit (or even more) in free bets.
Below you’ll find a list of the current bookmakers that run welcome offers that are triggered by a £5 minimum deposit.
See Also: For larger bonuses on a slightly bigger deposit we also have a list of free bets from a £10 deposit.
Free Bets on a £5 Minimum Deposit
Sign up and bet £5 and you'll receive £20 in free bets, given as four x £5 tokens. Min odds to qualify are 1/2 and there are various payment method restrictions that you'll need to pay attention to if not using a debit card.
This list changes regularly to don’t forget to check back to see the latest offers. You might also be interested in our list of bet £10 offers which often dish out bonuses of £30, £40 or even more on a tenner.
Example: Bet £5 Get £20 in Free Bets
The offers on this page change regularly and there is no hard and fast rule as to the format they follow. However generally speaking we’ve noticed the following trends on the better value offers:
- To trigger the offer you’ll need to deposit at least five pounds and then place a bet. Minimum odds almost always apply but generally speaking they don’t tend to be too restrictive – something in the 1/2 to evens range is fairly normal.
- Your free bets will be added to your account either after your bet has settled or as soon as it has placed. The actual procedure varies by site.
- The bonus is often split into multiple bet tokens, so it’s very common to see £20 awarded as four £5 free bets and £30 is often given as three £10 free bets.
- The free bets will have a time limit in which they need to be used. For these lower deposit bonuses it’s often pretty short, such as 48 hours to a week.
- In the vast majority of cases with 400%+ bonuses the free bet stake is not returned along with the winnings. So whilst the winnings are yours to keep, the free bet element vanishes regardless of whether your bet wins or loses.
Are These Offers Safe?
Some of these offers do sound a little too good to be true. After all, why is the bookie offering to give you £20 in bonuses when you’re only depositing five pounds? It all comes down to marketing. The offers are simply a cost that the betting site is willing to pay in order to attract new business. They’re hoping that after you’ve used your initial free bets that you’ll stick around and continue to use them as your go to bookie of choice.
There is a small caveat to this – make sure that you’re only using properly licensed sites. In the UK there are very strict rules to follow and punters are protected not only by the UK Gambling Commission, but also the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) who ensure that the promotions really do offer up what they say they do and that no one is being misled.
If you chose to venture offshore then not only do you lose this protection, but the sites actually aren’t legally allowed to offers services to customers in the UK, meaning that you’re potentially going to find yourself in fairly murky waters. As a responsible betting guide, we only list offers from UKGC licensed sites, meaning that you can claim any of the promotions without needing to worry about who they are.
You can verify this yourself by checking the site against the UKGC database. Simply enter the name or domain of the site you’re interested in and you’ll be able to see if they’re licensed, as well as what the status of that license is.
In addition to manually checking on the UKGC site, bookmakers are also required to publish details of their license on their own websites. You can normally find this in the footer of the site where you’ll either see their license number or a direct link to their license page on the UK Gambling Commission website.
Will There Be Restrictions on the Bets?
Just like their “bet £10” cousins, these bet £5 get… type offers sometimes come restricted to specific bets. For example, if you deposit £5 and receive three £10 free bets, you might find that the three bets need to be used on different products or bet types:
- Bet One: Single bet at odds of evens or more
- Bet Two: Accumulator with at least three legs
- Bet Three: Request a bet style feature
This isn’t always the case and often you have total free reign to use the free bets as you see fit, but it is relatively common for there to be some kind of restriction or specific use attached to them.
Sometimes you’ll also find that the offers change around big events – so if you were signing up just before the world cup you might find that the free bets are all football related. Or perhaps, one bet needs to be placed on the tournament winner, another on the group stages and a third on the top goalscorer.
Making Your Initial Deposit
Whilst these offers only require a small deposit, they do still involve ponying up some of your own cash and adding a legitimate payment method. On the whole it should be pretty straight forward but there are a couple of questions that keep cropping up, which we’ll address in this next section.
Can You Deposit Less Than £5?
For the purposes of the offers on this page, you’ll need to deposit at least £5 to trigger them. However this tends to also be the minimum you can deposit anyway. There are some high street bookmakers that technically offer minimum deposits as low as £1 through their betting shops, but this seems like a pretty unlikely scenario for a customer.
What if the Minimum Deposit is Higher Than £5?
We have occasionally seen strange scenarios where the deposit required to trigger the free bets is £5, but the minimum deposit for the site is higher – such as £10. This is more common when you’re looking at alternative deposit methods as the bare minimum £5 tends to be limited to debit cards, so if you want to use an ewallet you could find that you actually need to deposit more than £5 to trigger the £5 offer.
Having said that, many of these sign up bonuses are limited to debit cards anyway – which is a nice reminder to always check which payment methods are included in an offer as things like Neteller and Skrill are often excluded.
What if I Deposit More than the Minimum?
If you’ve deposited more than you had to to claim the bonus, either because your chosen payment method had a higher minimum or simply because you wanted to put in a bit more, then normally it shouldn’t affect your free bets. With deposit bonuses that have turnover attached you can find that bigger deposits can actually affect your wagering requirements or lock in the whole deposit until the WR has been met, but this isn’t normally the case with free bets.
We say ‘normally’ because anything can happen and it’s not outside the realms of possibility for a bookie to have slightly abnormal terms so our standard advice applies – always check the specific terms, and ask customer support if you’re unsure of anything.