UK bookmaker margins compared, brand by brand

The 46 brands that priced every match quoted only 28 distinct price lists between them.

How the study was done

We took one snapshot of UK bookmaker prices from the OddsRelay feed at 20:16 UTC on Sunday 11 October 2026. It covered football matches kicking off in the next 24 hours. We kept 15 of them across 11 competitions, favouring the matches most bookmakers priced.

A bookmaker's margin on one match is the sum of the three implied probabilities (home, draw, away), less one. Each brand's figure below averages that margin over the 15 matches. We counted only brands with all three prices on all 15, so every brand covers the same games.

The study uses bookmaker prices only, with no exchange prices. One snapshot says nothing about how prices move, and every count here describes this snapshot, not what the feed covers.

def margin(home, draw, away):
    return 1 / home + 1 / draw + 1 / away - 1

margin(2.10, 3.40, 3.60)  # 0.0481, a 4.8% margin

Margins by price list

The median match-result margin across the 46 brands was 8.3% (8.5% counting each price list once). Brands that showed the same three prices on all 15 matches share a row, because they are one price list under several names.

Average match-result margin over the same 15 football matches, snapshot of 11 October 2026, 20:16 UTC.

Brands that share one price list

Of the 46 brands, 25 fall into seven groups that showed identical prices on every match. The largest, six brands, is the 8.3% row. Two more came within one game of sharing a list. LiveScore Bet and Virgin Bet matched on 14 of the 15, and so did Pub Casino and the Bet Target, Hopa and Karamba group.

A consensus price should group identical price lists first. Otherwise one list counts six times and pulls the average towards its own margin. How odds comparison sites use data covers how those prices become a comparison table.

Margins by match

Margin also seemed to vary with the competition. Counting each price list once, the median was 6.4% on Coventry City v Newcastle and 6.5% on Levante UD v Sevilla. The two Venezuelan Primera Division games came in at 11.7% and 12.1%. Fifteen matches is a small sample, so read the pattern as a hint. Football odds data, explained covers the markets behind these prices.

Margins across the 28 price lists on each match, snapshot of 11 October 2026, 20:16 UTC.