If you’ve spent any time placing bets online, you will no doubt be aware that betting sites have maximum payout limits. The actual amount that fits into the maximum payout bracket will differ depending on the sport, but in essence, it is worth knowing what it is so that you don’t pay more on your stake money than you need to.
As you might imagine, the same sort of thing is true for betting shops, who also have maximum payout limits in place that are often lower than those offered to punters by online betting sites. There are numerous reasons for this, with available cash being the most obvious.
For safety and security reasons, betting shops will only have a limited amount of cash on-site at any given moment. Whilst we’d all like to imagine that people would behave sensibly, the reality is that there are some nefarious people out there who will see robbing a betting shop as being a really easy way to make some money.
One of the best ways of discouraging this is by having as little actual cash in the shop as possible. That is ideal for security, but it’s not great for people that might want to turn up and collect their winnings from the betting shop in question, being unable to do so.
What Does ‘Maximum Payout’ Mean?
When we talk about maximum payouts, it is important to note that we don’t necessarily mean that this is the maximum amount of money that you’ll be able to walk away from a betting shop with in your pocket if you’ve been successful with your wager.
Instead, what we’re referring to is the most that a bookmaker will payout to a punter in any form. In other words, the maximum payout could be £500,000, but that doesn’t mean that if you went to a bookies with a winning slip then you’d be able to walk away with £500,000 in cash, because you simply wouldn’t be able to for many reasons.
The maximum payout limit is the maximum amount of money that you will be able to win on a given bet. Imagine you’ve put together an accumulator on football matches that has odds of 2,000,000/1. The bookmaker that you’re placing the bet with has rules that say its maximum payout is £1,000,000.
In that instance, it would be pointless placing more than a 50p bet because you won’t be paid any more than £1,000,000 if your acca comes in. Here is a list of maximum payouts that one high street bookmaker has in place:
| Sport | Maximum Payout |
|---|---|
| UK & Irish Full Service Horse Racing | £1,000,000 |
| UK & Irish Tote Horse Racing | £200,000 |
| Ante-Post Horse Racing | £200,000 |
| Virtual Horse Racing | £50,000 |
| Any Other Horse Racing | £50,000 |
| Ante-Post Greyhound Racing | £100,000 |
| All BAGS/BEGS Full Service Greyhound Racing | £200,000 |
| Virtual Greyhound Racing | £50,000 |
| Any Other Greyhound Racing | £10,000 |
| Football | £500,000 |
| Golf | £200,000 |
| All Other Sports | £100,000 |
As you can see, it is not necessarily to do with how much cash there is in the shop when it comes to maximum payouts. Instead, it is about the maximum amount of money that a bookmaker is willing to payout for successful bets on the various sports.
The sports that are more likely to have long-odds winners and large sums of money placed on them, such as horse racing, will have larger payouts, whilst the lesser-bet on sports, like golf, will have lower maximum payouts. You should bear these payouts in mind before you place your actual bet, given you don’t want to waste stake money.
How Much Can You Physically Walk Away With?
The obvious question that someone placing a bet at a bookmaker’s shop is going to ask is what the maximum amount of money they will be able to walk away with after winning a bet. The answer, you probably won’t be surprised to learn, is that it depends on a number of different factors.
Each betting shop will have a limited amount of money that they’re able to give to someone in cash. This is usually kept relatively low in order to ensure the safety of the staff that are working there. Large sums of money attract criminal elements, so are avoided where possible.
The likelihood is that you will be able to withdraw a couple of thousands of pounds if your bet is a successful one. Sometimes, a bookie will ask you to return later in the day or the next day, giving them the chance to get the money together for your payout. This will be the case with relatively low winning bets, whilst larger ones will not be paid in full at the time that you go into the shop nor at a later time. Instead, you might be offered the chance to take some money home there and then and to collect the rest of your winnings via some other means, such as BACS or cheque.
Does It Mean You Won’t Get Paid In Full?
The important thing to realise is that the fact that a bookmaker won’t pay you in full when you go to claim a winning betting slip in a physical shop doesn’t mean that you won’t be paid at all. Whilst the maximum payout limit will stop them from paying you more than, saying, £200,000 if that is their limit, the fact that they only have £3,000 in cash in the shop, for argument’s sake, doesn’t mean that you’ll only be paid £3,000 out of the £200,000 that you won. Instead, the bookie will arrange an alternative payment method with you for the lion’s share of your winnings.
For those that don’t like bank accounts for whatever reason, the bad news is that you’re almost certainly going to need to have one in order to claim your winnings if they are over a certain amount. The likelihood is that your chosen bookmaker will look to make a bank transfer or give you a cheque for the balance of your winnings, if they’ve paid you a certain amount in cash already. You can try to get paid the full amount in cash, but the reality is that this is unlikely to happen if you’ve won more than a certain amount that is too much to pay in cash for safety reasons.