Paddy Power has told customers that from the 11th of August, Best Odds Guaranteed on horse racing will apply only to bets of £5 or more. Stakes below that threshold will simply settle at the price taken, or the starting price if that option was chosen. The change, confirmed in an email sent directly to customers, does not affect bets placed in shops. It is not the first erosion of the BOG offer.
Back in 2022, Paddy Power pulled BOG entirely from the 16 racecourses owned by the ARC group, amongst them being Doncaster, Newcastle and Wolverhampton.
How can that benefit paddy power in anyway , all there doing is turning away thousands and thousands of smaller stakes punters who’ll go elsewhere … makes zero sense too me pic.twitter.com/F2rRt702zQ
— BruceBigBalls (@BigBadBruce01) August 4, 2026
They are tracks that, between them, host around 40% of British racing fixtures. At the time, the firm said little publicly about its reasoning, though the numbers later showed BOG was its single most expensive promotion, costing tens of millions of pounds a year.
The timing fits the industry’s wider mood. Remote gaming duty rose from 21% to 40% this April, part of a tax overhaul expected to raise well over a billion pounds from operators by the end of the decade, and the cost of compliance and responsible gambling measures has climbed alongside it. Tax for sports betting sees a lower rise to 25% and horse racing tax has been fixed at 15% but the company may be looking to save costs to pay for its higher taxes on other gaming products.
BOG was once close to a given at every major firm, offered without a second thought on almost any race. That is no longer the case. A £5 threshold looks modest next to a 16-track cut, but it points the same way, which is that a concession that used to be free is turning conditional, one small-print change at a time. With bookmakers under this much tax and cost pressure, do not expect Paddy Power to be the last one to trim it.
If you do want a bookmaker that still gives BOG as standard online on all stakes see our Best Odds Guaranteed page.