The Gambling Commission’s third annual Gambling Survey for Great Britain found that 2.4% of participants scored eight or more on the Problem Gambling Severity Index in 2025, leaving the headline measure unchanged across the survey’s first three years.
The report was published on 16 July and covered 2025. It was based on 20,775 adults aged 18 and over interviewed through a push-to-web survey carried out in four waves between January 2025 and January 2026.
The Commission says the GSGB is its primary source of official statistics on gambling behaviour and, alongside its supplementary reports, the main evidence base for policy and regulatory decisions in Great Britain. It also says the survey is produced by the National Centre for Social Research and the University of Glasgow, and is one of the world’s largest dedicated gambling surveys, with around 20,000 respondents each year.
The regulator has also been clear about how the figures should be read. It says the 2025 results form the third year of a new baseline and should not be directly compared with older gambling or health surveys because the methodology is different. The better comparison, it says, is between successive GSGB waves.
PGSI itself is a nine-item scale that runs from 0 to 27 and is used to measure both behavioural symptoms of gambling disorder and certain adverse consequences from gambling. On that measure, the Commission recorded 2.5% at 8+ in 2023, 2.7% in 2024 and 2.4% in 2025.
Participation was broader. Nearly half of adults, 47%, said they had gambled in the past four weeks. That fell to 27% when people who had only taken part in lottery draws were excluded.
Online gambling was reported by 38% of adults and in-person gambling by 28% over the same four-week period. Once lottery-only players were excluded, those figures were 16% for online gambling and 17% for in-person gambling.
Gambling intensity also varied by age. The mean number of gambling activities in the past four weeks was 3.6 among 18- to 24-year-olds and 1.7 among those aged 75 and over.
Among gamblers, 78% reported a positive or neutral view of their gambling. The Commission’s trends report for 2023 to 2025 says that, overall, the picture was stable across most measures, with 48% saying they had gambled in the past four weeks in 2023 and 47% in 2025, and the share with a PGSI score of 0 rising slightly from 76.1% to 76.9%.
The trends report also pointed to some differences within the overall stability. It found an increase in male participants who had gambled on non-lottery activities in the past year, an increase in adults aged 35 to 54 seeking help and support for their own gambling, and a reduction in female participants aged 55 and over seeking help because of someone else’s gambling.
Looking beyond PGSI, 2.7% of adults who had gambled in the past 12 months reported one or more severe consequences from their own gambling. Relationship breakdown was the most commonly reported severe consequence, at 1.7%.
The most frequently reported potential adverse consequences were reducing spending on everyday items, at 6.4%, and lying to family, at 5.9%. Among past-year gamblers, 3.4% said they had sought support because of their own gambling.
Help-seeking patterns varied by service type. The Commission said 1.4% had used gambling support services and 1.7% had used mental health services.
The wider survey also captured the impact on people close to gamblers. Some 43.2% of all participants said someone close to them gambled, even if only occasionally, and 3.3% of that group said they had sought help, support or information as a result.
The Commission has said the three years of GSGB now provide a richer and more timely picture of gambling in Great Britain than was previously available. But it continues to warn that the figures should be compared with care, and chiefly against other GSGB releases rather than older survey series.
