UK Gambling Commission Releases Three-Year Data on Participation and Behaviours

The UK Gambling Commission has published the third annual report from the Gambling Survey for Great Britain, delivering official statistics that cover three full years of data from 2023 through 2025 on how adults engage with gambling, their attitudes, and any related consequences.

Headline participation stands at 47% of adults aged 18 and over who gambled in the past four weeks during 2025, a rate that remains consistent with earlier years in the series, while the figure falls to 27% once lottery-only players are removed from the calculation.

Stable Rates Across Multiple Years

Problem gambling prevalence, measured by a PGSI score of 8 or higher, holds steady at 2.4% over the same period, and observers note that these core indicators have shown little movement despite the large sample size collected each year.

The survey draws responses from roughly 20,000 people annually, which creates one of the largest dedicated gambling datasets worldwide and supports reliable comparisons across the three-year window.

Survey Scope and Methodology

Researchers designed the Gambling Survey for Great Britain to capture participation, behaviours, attitudes, and consequences in a single instrument, and the consistent methodology allows direct trend tracking without the adjustments that smaller or less frequent studies often require.

Data collection spans Great Britain as a whole, and the sample size delivers the statistical power needed to examine subgroups such as different age bands or game types while maintaining acceptable margins of error.

According to the Gambling Survey for Great Britain (Annual Report 2025): Official statistics, the three-year dataset now permits analysts to test whether short-term fluctuations represent genuine shifts or simply sampling variation.

Key Metrics and Trend Analysis

Participation figures break down further by product type, and the exclusion of lottery-only gamblers reveals that non-lottery gambling sits at 27% for 2025, a proportion that has likewise remained level since the survey began.

Problem gambling rates measured at the PGSI 8+ threshold show no statistically significant change across the three waves, and this stability holds even when researchers apply different weighting schemes to account for demographic shifts in the respondent pool.

Attitude questions within the survey track public perceptions of gambling harm, industry practices, and regulatory effectiveness, while consequence items record self-reported financial, emotional, and relationship impacts among those who gamble.

Broader Context for Regulators and Operators

Commission officials use these statistics to monitor the effectiveness of existing rules and to identify areas that may need closer attention, and the annual cadence means fresh data arrives each year without long gaps that could obscure emerging patterns.

Because the sample reaches 20,000 respondents, breakdowns by region or by specific gambling activities retain enough cases to produce usable estimates, which smaller surveys often cannot achieve.

Conclusion

The third annual report therefore supplies a solid foundation for understanding how gambling participation and associated behaviours have evolved in Great Britain between 2023 and 2025, and the stable headline numbers provide a clear baseline against which future waves can be compared.