Is Polymarket Legal in the UK?

I noticed Polymarket’s creep into the UK  the same way most people probably did: screenshots on social media of someone “trading” on an election or an interest rate decision, prices quoted in cents, the vocabulary all markets and positions rather than bets and bookies. Prediction markets have gone from niche curiosity to mainstream phenomenon in a couple of years, driven largely by Polymarket and Kalshi in the US, and the question I’m getting recently from British readers is always the same: can I use it here?

The short answer is no, not lawfully, and not from the platform’s side. The longer answer is where it gets a little less certain, because the search results for this question are some of the most contradictory I’ve seen on any gambling topic, and a fair chunk of that confusion isn’t accidental.

What a prediction market actually is

Strip away the branding and a prediction market is a place to buy contracts on whether something will happen. Each contract pays a fixed amount, typically a dollar, if the answer turns out to be yes, and nothing if it’s no. The price floats between 1 and 99 cents as people buy and sell, and that price doubles as the crowd’s implied probability. You’re not betting against the house. You’re trading against other users, with the platform matching buyers to sellers and taking its cut along the way.

That betting exchange comparison isn’t mine alone. It’s exactly the point the regulator made when it decided what these things are.

The official answer

The Gambling Commission set out its position on these markets in February 2026. A blog post from its director of strategy concluded that prediction markets aimed at British consumers would, in most business models, fall within the Gambling Act’s definition of a Betting Intermediary, the same licence category that covers exchanges. Crucially, it shut the obvious escape hatch, saying of any such operator launching here: “we do not believe they would be able to classify themselves as non-gambling products.” Operating without the right licence is a criminal offence. Ministers backed that reading within a fortnight, confirming in a written Lords answer that any prediction market wanting to trade in Britain would need a Commission licence and, if approved, would be regulated as a Betting Intermediary.

The financial strand is worth watching, because reports this month suggested the FCA has been talking to platforms about softening its stance on contracts tied to things like rate decisions. Even if it does, that changes nothing for contracts on football, elections or TV shows. Under British law, those are bets, whatever the interface calls them.

Where Polymarket stands

Polymarket holds no Gambling Commission licence and hasn’t announced any plan to apply for one. Its own list of restricted countries places the UK in close-only mode, meaning British residents can wind down positions they already hold but can’t open new ones. Kalshi, its main American rival, holds neither a Commission licence nor FCA authorisation. In other words, the platforms agree with the regulator, and they’ve chosen to stop taking new British business rather than argue the point.

Britain isn’t an outlier here either. Gambling regulators across Europe and beyond have reached the same conclusion, and country after country has been added to Polymarket’s restriction list this year, from the Netherlands and Portugal to Brazil and several Canadian provinces. The “it’s a financial market, not gambling” argument has had a rough year almost everywhere outside the US.

Why the internet can’t give you a straight answer

Search Google for this question, and you’ll find confident articles saying Polymarket is perfectly legal to use here, others calling it completely illegal, some insisting there’s no block at all, and plenty walking you through VPN setups. A good number are published by sites that earn money when readers sign up for the exact platforms they’re reassuring them about. Here’s how the main claims actually stack up.

What you give up if you go round the block

The route most of those guides try to sell you is a VPN plus a crypto wallet, since Polymarket settles in a dollar-pegged stablecoin rather than pounds. Put those two ingredients together and look at what disappears.

Regular readers will recognise that last point from my recent piece on using UK casino accounts abroad: the VPN doesn’t just get you past a block; it hands the operator the rulebook to use against you. The self-exclusion gap is the one that worries me most, though. If you’ve registered with GAMSTOP, a betting platform dressed up as an investing app is precisely the kind of door the scheme can’t close, which is exactly why the “it’s not really gambling” framing is so dangerous in the wrong hands.

Britain has had prediction markets since 2000

Here’s what makes the whole media frenzy a bit bizarre from a British vantage point. We’ve had regulated, peer-to-peer markets on elections, sport and entertainment for more than a quarter of a century. Betfair’s exchange launched in 2000 and matched something like £84 billion in bets last year. Smarkets built its name on political markets. Britain didn’t need prediction markets invented for it. It already had them, fully licensed, with all the protections attached.

And the new packaging is arriving through the licensed front door. Matchbook announced a dedicated yes-or-no prediction product built on its existing exchange licence, lined up for January. Betfair began trialling Betfair Predicts in April with an invite-only group, a simplified yes-or-no layer over its exchange covering sport, politics and entertainment, run under its existing Commission licence. Whatever you make of either, they come with complaints routes, limits, self-exclusion and a regulator standing behind them.

That tells you what’s actually new about Polymarket, and it isn’t the concept. It’s the aesthetic: cents instead of fractions, “trading” instead of betting, wallets instead of debit cards, and a social media culture that frames a punt on a rate decision as financial savvy rather than a flutter. That framing is the product. It pulls in people, often younger and more finance-curious than the typical bookie customer, who’d never think of themselves as gamblers, and it removes every safeguard British law builds around people who are.

The margin doesn’t disappear either

One more thing the “it’s a market, not a bookie” crowd rarely mentions. Prediction platforms make their money much as exchanges do, through fees, the spread between buying and selling prices, and sometimes charges on getting money in and out. As I explained in my recent piece on house edges, that’s simply the price of the product, and it’s no less real just because it’s expressed in cents. The crowd’s probability might be sharper than a bookmaker’s odds on some markets. You still pay to play, and if you keep staking on outcomes you’ve no real edge in, you’ll still lose over time.

Is Polymarket legal in the UK? Not as a service to British customers. It isn’t licensed, the regulator and the government have both said it would need to be, and the platform itself has stopped taking new UK positions. Using it wouldn’t make you a criminal, but getting there means a VPN, a crypto wallet and none of the protections you’d have at any licensed bookmaker in the country. Meanwhile, the thing it offers already exists here, legally, and has done since long before most of its users were old enough to place a bet. The prediction market boom isn’t a new kind of market. It’s an old kind of bet in a new outfit, and in Britain, you need licence to wear it.