Bingo Premises Up 8%, Bingo Halls Down! What Bingotastic's Census Found

Official figures say British bingo is growing. The Gambling Commission's latest count added 53 licensed bingo premises in a single year, taking the total to 684. Bingotastic.com's 2026 hall census, which checks every club against the operators' own listings, found the opposite trend over the same twelve months: twelve permanent closures and only three openings. Both sets of numbers are accurate. Only one of them describes places where people play bingo.

The licence that isn't about bingo

The largest holder of bingo premises licences in Britain is Merkur Slots UK, with 227 of them. Merkur runs no traditional bingo halls. It sold its last two, Cricklewood and Northampton, to Buzz Bingo in 2024.

The reason is in what the licence allows. A bingo premises licence permits unlimited lower-stake gaming machines and, unlike an arcade licence, doesn't prohibit alcohol. That is why so many slot-machine shops on the high street now trade under one.

What the government has said

A government consultation paper describes these venues as giving "the appearance to consumers of being adult gaming centres". It reports that high-street bingo operators take less than 1% of their revenue from bingo, and that across the licensed bingo sector gaming machines take 63p of every pound. Ministers are consulting on rules that would require anything called a bingo premises to contain a real bingo area with seats.

How the census counts instead

Bingotastic's rule is simple. A venue counts if you can walk in and play a proper session of cash bingo in a room built for it, whatever the paperwork says. Machine-led venues holding bingo licences, holiday park bingo and social clubs with occasional games are left out.

On that basis the UK had 232 traditional halls still trading in July 2026, against roughly 1,360 in the 1980s.

Why it matters for UK Bingo clubs

Anyone reading licence statistics as a health check on the hall would reach the wrong conclusion. A count built hall by hall gives a very different picture, and the census, with its methodology and closure list, is on Bingotastic.com.