Britain has a number for how fast casinos pay. Canada has none.
Not a worse number. Not an older one. There is no Canadian equivalent of the figure the UK regulator published — and the Ontario rulebook does not even contain a deadline to measure against.
What Britain published
In July 2023 the Great Britain Gambling Commission put a figure into the open, in a blog post about why players complain that withdrawals are slow:
“Data provided to the Commission by some of the largest gambling companies shows that those firms approve, process and fulfil around 99 percent of customer withdrawal requests within 24 to 48 hours of the request being made. But when you have over 20 million people gambling every four weeks, a mere 1 percent of withdrawals taking longer can still mean a lot of frustrated customers.”
Read the sentence carefully, because the caveat is in it. This is not an audit and not a measurement the regulator took. It is data the operators supplied about themselves, from “some of the largest” firms rather than all of them. It is a self-reported industry figure that a regulator chose to publish.
That is still further than anyone has gone here. A self-reported number that exists in public can be argued with. A number that does not exist cannot.
And it did not make the problem go away
A year later the Commission’s chief executive returned to the subject. Even with 99 percent of withdrawals reportedly clearing inside two days, his post records that the regulator’s contact centre receives around 2,000 complaints a year about delays to withdrawals, and that withdrawal delays remain the number one subject of complaints it receives.
Both things are true at once, and that is the point. A high headline average and a large pile of angry people are not contradictory: one percent of an enormous number is still a lot of people, and the ones who wait are not comforted by the ones who did not.
What Canada has instead
Nothing comparable, from anyone. The gap has three layers.
There is no deadline in the rules
Ontario’s Registrar’s Standards for Internet Gaming contain one requirement about cashing out. Standard 5.71 says players may withdraw “in an accurate and complete fashion and as soon as is practicable, subject to appropriate authorization and verification”. No hours, no days. The Kahnawà:ke regulations use the same phrase. You cannot measure compliance with a standard that has no number in it.
No regulator publishes timings
Kahnawà:ke does publish an annual complaints summary — 1,143 complaints in 2025, of which 598 were about late, delayed or non-payment, and 150 upheld for the player. That is a count of grievances, not a distribution of waiting times, and it is the most anyone in Canada publishes. Ontario publishes neither.
So every number you read is the operator’s own
Which leaves the “24–48 hours” on comparison sites, including the windows quoted in our own reviews. They come from operator terms and marketing. Nobody, us included, has yet published a measured Canadian figure to set against them.
Why this is worth fixing
Payout speed is the thing players ask about most and the thing they can verify least. It is also the one property of a casino where a bad experience arrives after the money is already committed — you find out how fast a site pays only once you have something to withdraw.
In a market with no published figure, an operator advertising “instant withdrawals” competes on the claim rather than the performance, and the claim costs nothing to make. Britain’s number is imperfect and self-supplied, and it still gives journalists, regulators and players something to point at. Canada has no equivalent artefact.
What we are doing, and what we have not done
We are collecting first-hand payout reports from members: hours waited, the hour the request was filed, the province, what verification asked for, and — the part nobody separates — how much of the wait was the casino reviewing the request versus the payment rail moving the money.
We have not published a single measured figure yet, and we will not until the sample justifies it. The rule is fixed in advance: nothing goes out for a payment method until at least 12 approved reports exist for that method, and every figure carries the sample size it came from. Setting that threshold before the data arrives is the only way it means anything.
Sources
- Gambling Commission blog, 17 July 2023 — the 99 percent figure and its wording
- Gambling Commission blog, 18 July 2024 — around 2,000 complaints a year, delays the number one subject
- AGCO Registrar’s Standards for Internet Gaming — Standard 5.71
- Kahnawà:ke Gaming Commission — complaints and annual dispute summary
All sources checked 25 August 2026. If you are writing about this and want the underlying figures or our collection method, the methodology page has both, and we will answer questions about it.
We earn a commission when readers choose a casino through some links on this site, disclosed on every page. It is also why the payout question is the one we cannot afford to answer loosely. 19+ (18+ in AB, MB, QC).