The Four-Year Slide in UK Racing Turnover
UK horse racing betting turnover has been falling for four consecutive years, and the trajectory is not gentle. The BHA Racing Report for 2024 documented a 6.8% decline compared with 2023, and a cumulative drop of 16.5% since 2022. These are not seasonal fluctuations or rounding errors. They represent a structural contraction in the amount of money wagered on British racing — and that contraction has direct consequences for the quality, reliability, and fairness of the starting price.
Less money in the market, higher stakes for SP. When turnover falls, the pool of bets from which the SP is derived becomes shallower. Thinner markets produce less robust prices, more volatile overrounds, and a greater susceptibility to distortion by individual large bets. Understanding the turnover trend is not just an industry concern — it is a betting concern.
The Data: Year-by-Year Turnover Trajectory
The decline is best understood through the lens of average turnover per race, which strips out the effect of changes in the number of fixtures and isolates the underlying market depth.
According to the HBLB Annual Report for 2024/25, average turnover per race fell by approximately 8% compared with the 2023/24 period, by 15% compared with 2022/23, and by 19% compared with 2021/22. Those are stacking declines — each year the base is lower, and the next year’s drop is measured against an already diminished figure.
The BHA’s own 2025 Racing Report adds further granularity. Average turnover per race in 2025 fell 5.6% compared with 2024 and 11.6% compared with 2023. But the aggregate conceals a critical split: on Premier racedays — the flagship Saturday cards, festival meetings, and major championship days — average turnover per race actually rose by 1.1%. On Core racedays — the everyday bread-and-butter fixtures that make up the majority of the calendar — turnover per race fell by 8.1%.
Alan Delmonte, Chief Executive of the HBLB, was explicit in his 2023/24 annual report: “There has been a material change in the industry environment with turnover down by around 20% in two years.” That assessment, from the body responsible for collecting and distributing the Horserace Betting Levy, carries institutional weight. The decline is not disputed by any major stakeholder; the debate is about its causes and whether it can be reversed.
Why Turnover Is Falling: Key Drivers
Multiple factors are compressing turnover simultaneously, making it difficult to isolate a single cause.
Affordability checks — the regulatory mechanism requiring bookmakers to verify that customers can afford their level of gambling — are cited by virtually every industry body as the primary driver. The checks, introduced as part of the Gambling Commission’s harm-reduction framework, trigger enhanced due diligence for customers whose spending exceeds certain thresholds. The practical effect is that some punters reduce their stakes voluntarily to avoid triggering the checks, while others are actively limited or excluded by bookmakers who would rather lose a customer than face regulatory scrutiny.
Competition from other gambling products is a secondary factor. Casino, slots, and in-play football betting compete for the same discretionary spending that once flowed to horse racing. The Gambling Commission’s data tells a striking story on the revenue side: remote betting gross gambling yield for horse racing was £766.7 million for the year to March 2025, within a total remote betting GGY of £2.6 billion. Racing’s share of the pie is significant but no longer dominant, and bookmakers increasingly allocate promotional spend and product development to higher-margin verticals.
The growth of unlicensed betting operators has also siphoned volume from the regulated market. Punters who face affordability restrictions at licensed bookmakers are migrating to offshore platforms where no such checks exist. This migration is invisible in official turnover data — it simply looks like money leaving the market — but its effect on SP formation is real. Every pound wagered offshore is a pound that does not contribute to the pool from which the SP is calculated.
What Lower Turnover Means for SP Quality
The SP is a market-derived price. Its quality depends on the depth and breadth of the market from which it is drawn. When turnover declines, three things happen to the SP.
First, the sample becomes thinner. The Industry Starting Price uses a median of bookmaker prices, and those prices are themselves influenced by the volume of bets placed with each firm. Lower volume means each bookmaker is setting prices based on less information — fewer bets, fewer market signals, less data to distinguish between genuine market interest and noise. The resulting SP is more likely to be influenced by a small number of large bets or by bookmaker model errors that would normally be corrected by market activity.
Second, overround tends to increase. When bookmakers face lower volume, their incentive to compete on price diminishes. Tight margins attract turnover; wide margins protect profit. In a high-volume environment, competitive pressure keeps overrounds in check. In a low-volume environment, bookmakers can afford to widen margins because the punters remaining in the market have fewer alternatives. This is precisely the pattern the Horseracing Bettors Forum flagged with its analysis of rising overround per horse in 2023 and 2024.
Third, the gap between Premier and Core fixtures widens. Premier events still attract substantial volume, producing deep markets and reliable SPs. Core fixtures — which account for the majority of British racing — are increasingly operating with the kind of thin markets that used to be the province of minor all-weather cards. The SP at a Tuesday afternoon meeting at Carlisle in 2026 is drawn from a fundamentally different quality of market than the SP at Royal Ascot.
Outlook: Can the Trend Reverse?
The honest answer is that reversal looks unlikely without structural change.
Affordability checks are not going away. The Gambling Commission has committed to its harm-reduction framework, and political appetite for deregulation in gambling is minimal. The most the industry can realistically hope for is a refinement of the thresholds and processes — a calibration that reduces the friction for moderate punters without eliminating the checks entirely.
The migration to unlicensed operators is harder to address. Enforcement against offshore platforms is technically and jurisdictionally complex. The BHA and other bodies have called for stronger government action, but the tools available — domain blocking, payment disruption, and public awareness campaigns — are slow to implement and imperfect in execution.
Where there is room for optimism is in scheduling reform and product innovation. The reduction in fixture clashes — from 11.1% of Saturday races in 2022 to 5.8% in 2024 — has demonstrably concentrated betting pools and improved turnover per race at the surviving fixtures. More aggressive scheduling reform, combined with better broadcast coverage and enhanced digital betting experiences, could stabilise or even grow turnover per race even if aggregate volume continues to fall.
For SP bettors, the implication is practical. The market you are betting into is getting thinner, and the price you receive is increasingly sensitive to the type of fixture, the day of the week, and the level of public interest. Treating all SPs as equal — a Tuesday all-weather card and a Saturday Group race — is a mistake that the turnover data exposes with clarity. Less money in the market means more responsibility on the bettor to understand which markets deserve their trust.