You’ve been spinning for forty minutes. Nothing. Not a ******* sniff of a bonus! You’re down £60 and the free spins scatter symbols are treating you like an ex at a party – actively avoiding eye contact and being proper flirty.

Then you see it. The little button on the side. “BUY BONUS – 100x.” For a £1 stake, that’s £100 to skip the misery and jump straight into the feature round. Your finger hovers. Your brain says no. Your gambling brain – the one that’s been marinating in near-misses for the last half hour – says absolutely yes.

But here’s the question nobody stops to ask in that moment: does buying the bonus actually change the RTP?

The answer is not what most people think. And it’s not what most gambling sites tell you either, because most gambling sites are trying to sell you something rather than explain something.

RTP is the percentage a slot returns to players over millions of spins. A slot with 96.50% RTP theoretically pays back £96.50 for every £100 wagered. Over millions of spins. Not your session. Not your lifetime. Millions.

That number is mathematical. It’s baked into the game’s code. It doesn’t care about your feelings, your lucky socks, or the fact that you won £400 on this same slot last Tuesday. It is what it is.

What most people don’t realise is that RTP isn’t always a single fixed number. And that’s where bonus buys make things interesting.

Three things can happen depending on the slot. And this is where it gets properly annoying because there’s no single answer.

This is the most common scenario and the one slot providers love to advertise. Gates of Olympus, Sweet Bonanza, most Pragmatic Play bonus buy slots – the RTP is the same whether you trigger the bonus naturally through scatters or buy it for 100x. If the game says 96.50%, it’s 96.50% either way.

What DOES change is the volatility. When you buy a bonus for 100x your bet, you’re essentially compressing what might take 200+ base game spins into a single event. Same long-term return percentage. Wildly different short-term experience. You’re paying to skip the base game grind and go straight to the bit where the big numbers happen – or don’t.

Think of it like this. Walking to the shops takes 30 minutes and costs nothing. Taking a taxi costs £10 and gets you there in 5 minutes. You end up at the same shops either way. The bonus buy is the taxi. Faster, more expensive, same destination.

This one surprises people. Some slots genuinely have a higher RTP in bonus buy mode than in base play. Medusa Megaways is the classic example – 96.28% RTP in base game, jumping to 97.63% when you use the Buy Pass feature. That’s a 1.35% difference. Sounds small. Over 10,000 spins at £1 it’s the difference between losing £372 and losing £237. That’s £135 you keep just by clicking a different button. Still think decimals don’t matter?

Why would a provider do this? Because the buy price is already factored into the maths. The 100x or 200x you’re paying is effectively a larger wager concentrated into fewer rounds, and the game’s math model can afford to return slightly more because the player is spending more per action. The house edge is maintained through the sheer size of the buy-in rather than through grinding it out over hundreds of low-value spins.

Nolimit City does this with some of their games too. The most expensive bonus option can push the RTP from around 96.26% up to 96.95%. Not life-changing. But over thousands of bonus buys, that 0.69% adds up. And here’s the thing that should annoy you – most gambling sites won’t tell you this because they don’t want you doing maths. They want you doing vibes. Vibes are more profitable for them.

Yeah. Nobody talks about this one. Wonder why. 🙁 Makes me not want to keep smashing big bass splash bonus buys like an absolute degen..

Some slots have a LOWER RTP when you buy the bonus. A slot might advertise 96% RTP in standard play but drop closer to 94% in bonus buy mode. Read that again. You’re paying MORE per spin to get WORSE odds. That is objectively terrible. On £10,000 worth of play, that’s the difference between a theoretical loss of £400 and a theoretical loss of £600. You paid extra for the privilege of losing an additional £200.

Why would providers do this? Because they can. Because most players never check. They see the “BUY BONUS” button, get a little dopamine rush, and click it without ever opening the game info screen. The provider knows this. The casino knows this. The affiliate site that recommended the slot knows this. Everyone in the chain knows this except the person handing over the money.

I genuinely think this is one of the scummiest things in the industry. Not because bonus buys exist – they’re fine as a concept. But because a player can be actively paying for a worse mathematical deal without being told, and the only way to find out is to dig through a game info screen that’s been designed to be as boring and hard to find as possible. That’s not transparency. That’s technically-not-lying.

This is why I’m writing this article. Not to tell you never to buy bonuses – I buy them myself, I enjoy them. But to make sure you check the numbers BEFORE you spend 100x your stake on something that might be mathematically screwing you.

This takes about fifteen seconds and almost nobody does it.

Open the slot. Before you spin, before you deposit, before you do anything – click the little “i” or “?” icon. It’s usually in the corner of the game screen. Every licensed slot is legally required to display its RTP.

Look for two numbers. Some games show a single RTP. Some show separate figures for base game and feature buy. If you see two different numbers, now you know whether buying the bonus helps you or hurts you.

If the game only shows one RTP figure, it’s almost certainly the same whether you buy or spin naturally.

One more thing. The same slot can run at different RTPs at different casinos. A game might have a 96.50% default setting but the casino you’re playing at might be running the 94% version. This isn’t a conspiracy theory – providers offer casinos multiple RTP configurations and the casino picks which one to use. Sites like FindMyRTP track this. Worth checking if you care about the numbers (and if you’re reading this article, you probably should).

Even when the RTP stays identical, buying the bonus fundamentally changes your experience. And this is the part that actually matters more than the RTP for most players.

When you spin normally, the base game acts as a buffer. You win small amounts, lose small amounts, and occasionally hit the bonus through scatters. Your bankroll goes down slowly, punctuated by occasional spikes. It’s a marathon.

When you buy the bonus, you skip the marathon and go straight to the sprint. £100 gone instantly. The bonus either pays or it doesn’t. There’s no buffer, no small wins to cushion the journey, no gentle downward slope. It’s a cliff edge. You’re either up or you’re down and you find out in sixty seconds.

Mathematically the long-term outcome is the same. Emotionally and practically, it’s completely different. Your bankroll can swing much harder in both directions. You can hit 500x your stake in a single bought bonus. You can also burn through £1,000 in ten minutes buying features that return 15x each time.

That volatility compression is the real product being sold. Not better odds. Not higher returns. Not some secret edge the casino doesn’t want you to know about. Speed and intensity. That’s it. The casino is selling you impatience at a markup and most of us happily pay it because waiting is boring and clicking buttons is fun. I include myself in that. I’m not above it. Nobody who’s stared at a bonus buy button for ten seconds and clicked it is above it.

If you understand that going in – that you’re paying for speed, not advantage – bonus buys are a perfectly fine way to play. If you think you’re buying better odds or some kind of shortcut to profit, stop. You’re not. You’re buying a faster route to the same long-term outcome, which for most players is losing money. That’s what slots do. The house always wins over time. Bonus buys just let you find that out faster.

I’m a slot player. I buy bonuses. I enjoy them. I’m not sitting here pretending to be above it. But there are things I do every time that most players don’t, and they’ve saved me from some genuinely stupid decisions.

Check the RTP before you buy. Every time. Not just the first time you play a slot – every time you play it at a new casino. Different casinos can run different RTP settings.

Set a bonus buy budget separate from your session budget. If you’ve got £200 for a session and you’re buying £100 bonuses, you’ve got two shots. Two. That’s not a session, that’s a coin flip with extra steps. Either lower the stake or increase the budget.

Don’t chase with bonus buys. This is where sessions go from bad to “I need to lie down and think about my life choices.” You buy a bonus for £100, it pays 12x. You’re down £88 on that single feature. Your brain goes: “That was rubbish, the next one will be better.” It won’t. You don’t know that, but mathematically it won’t. You buy another. 8x. Down £180. “One more.” 15x. Down £265. You’ve now spent £300 in about four minutes and have £35 to show for it. This exact sequence happens to thousands of players every single day and every single one of them thought they were the exception. You’re not. I’m not. Nobody is. If the first buy doesn’t hit, go back to base game or walk away. I know it feels like admitting defeat. It’s not. It’s maths.

The more expensive the buy, the more carefully you should think about it. A 100x buy on a £0.20 stake is £20. Fine. A 100x buy on a £2 stake is £200. That’s a different conversation entirely. Same slot, same feature, dramatically different consequences for your actual bank account.

Does buying the bonus give you better odds? Na. In most slots the RTP is identical whether you trigger the bonus naturally or buy it. Some slots actually have slightly higher RTP in buy mode, some have slightly lower. Check the game info screen before spending. The odds don’t improve just because you paid more.

Why do bonus buys cost 100x the stake? The price is calculated based on how often the bonus triggers naturally and what it pays on average. If a bonus naturally triggers every 150 spins and your stake is £1, you’d spend roughly £150 to get there organically. A 100x buy (£100) is actually slightly cheaper than the statistical average cost of triggering it through normal play. The provider prices it to be attractive enough that players buy it but expensive enough that the maths still work for the house.

Are bonus buys banned in the UK? Yes. The UKGC effectively banned them in 2019 under RTS requirement 14A, which prohibits features that encourage players to increase their stake. The bonus buy button shouldn’t appear on any UKGC-licensed casino. Some operators kept offering them anyway and the UKGC had to publicly name and shame six of them. If you’re seeing bonus buy options at a UK-facing casino right now, that casino is either unlicensed or breaking the rules – either way, run. The feature is still available in Malta, Curacao, Gibraltar, and most other jurisdictions. Some clever providers have found workarounds too – Relax Gaming’s Money Cart series is basically a bonus-only version of Money Train that triggers every 10 spins on average, technically sidestepping the ban while delivering a very similar experience.

What’s the most expensive bonus buy? Some Nolimit City slots go up to 800x or even higher. At a £5 stake that’s £4,000 for a single bonus round. The max win potential on these games can reach 50,000x which explains why people do it. Whether it’s sensible is a different question entirely.

Can I try bonus buys for free? Yes. Most slots have demo modes where you can buy bonuses with play money. It’s genuinely useful for understanding how a feature works and what kind of results it produces before you spend real money. Not the same emotional experience, obviously. But the maths are identical.

Written by someone who’s bought more bonuses than they should probably admit publicly, checked the RTP about half as often as they should have, and learned most of this the expensive way. If this article saves you even one bad 100x buy, it was worth writing.