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The levy's audit threshold goes to consultation
HBLB is consulting on the £250,000–£500,000 band in which small betting operators must file a full independent accountant's report. The paperwork is the small story; the turnover line behind it is the larger one.
Eighteen bookmakers, and an accountant’s bill of up to £2,000 each, every year. That is the size of the problem the Horserace Betting Levy Board opened for consultation on Tuesday. It earns a paragraph because of a much larger number filed by the same body in June.
Per the Board’s notice of 25 August, it is consulting on narrowing the band inside which small betting operators must supply a full independent accountant’s report on their assessable profits — narrowed, in the Board’s words, to capture a smaller number of operators. The band currently runs from £250,000 to £500,000. Eighteen operators sit inside it, 16 more just above or below, and the report costs up to £2,000 each a year. Responses close on 26 October 2026.
Read that against the Board’s own published levy terms and the shape of it is clear enough. Its bookmaker levy page, for levy periods from 1 April 2021, sets the exempt amount at £500,000, with levy at 10% of profits above it on bets on British horseracing. The band under consultation therefore sits wholly beneath the point at which levy starts. The Board says why the reports exist anyway: they are “necessary assurance for HBLB in its duty to collect the appropriate amount of Levy”. The report is the price of the exemption, and the consultation asks how many firms should keep paying it.
The number that matters is elsewhere in the same filings. In June the Board projected levy income for the year ended 31 March 2026 at around £110m, and set a starting assumption of £109m for 2026/27. That release calls the year a continuation, at a materially slower rate, of recent years’ trend of lower betting turnover on British horseracing: average turnover per race down 1.2% on 2024/25, after a 7.7% fall the year before, and 2025/26 sitting 9.2% below the three-year historic average and 19% below 2021/22.
Hold both facts at once. Levy is charged on gross win, and gross win is turnover multiplied by margin. A yield that holds near £110m while turnover keeps sliding implies the margin side of that product is carrying the difference. That is the Board’s own worry, and one it says it noted before: with turnover falling, there is concern as to the sustainability of maintaining gross win, and therefore levy, at around current levels.
For a price reader, that sentence outranks the consultation. A market extracting the same money from a smaller pool of stakes is a market getting dearer per bet, whatever happens to a reporting threshold. It also sits directly under the duty arithmetic set out here when racing’s carve-out was confirmed — 15% duty plus the statutory 10%, on a base that keeps thinning.
None of which is an argument for betting more races to make the sums work. Decide the month’s figure before the fixture list decides it for you, and stop when you reach it.