How we review casinos

How a page gets written

Every casino page on this site is built the same way, in the same order, from documents anyone can open. We start with the operator’s terms and conditions and read them end to end: who the licence holder is, which jurisdiction issued the licence, whether New Zealand residents are accepted, what the withdrawal limits are and what the bonus actually requires. Next comes the cashier page, because the list of payment methods an operator advertises to a European audience is rarely the list that works from New Zealand, and because the methods that stopped working matter more to a reader than the ones that never existed here.

Then we check the claim against the law rather than against marketing. New Zealand has no domestic online casino licence in force yet; the first ones are issued from 1 December 2026 under the Online Casino Gambling Act 2026, and until then every site that accepts a Kiwi player is licensed somewhere else. So a page says which overseas regulator issued the licence and what that regulator is worth to you if something goes wrong — which, honestly, is less than most sites imply.

Finally the page is dated and passed to a second reader. The date is the day the terms were last read. When an operator changes its bonus or leaves the market, the page changes and the date changes with it; when nothing has changed, the date still moves, because the re-reading is the work being reported. Pages we can no longer verify are removed rather than left standing with an old date.

What we can and cannot verify

• Verifiable, and stated: licence holder and jurisdiction, bonus wagering multiplier, minimum deposit, stated withdrawal limits and times, game studios present in the lobby, which payment methods the cashier lists for New Zealand, and the operator’s own published complaint route.
• Not verifiable, and therefore absent: how quickly a withdrawal actually arrives, how a support agent behaves at 2am, whether a bonus is «fair» in practice, and anything that would require an account and a deposit to find out. Where a competitor publishes such a number, ask yourself who measured it.

What we do not do

• Nobody here holds a casino account. No money of ours goes through an operator’s cashier, nothing on this site is a report of a play session, and no number here came from one. Where a figure appears, it comes from the operator’s own published terms, from the Gambling Act 2003, or from a Department of Internal Affairs (Te Tari Taiwhenua) publication, and the page says which.
• We do not score casinos out of five. A star rating implies a measurement we have not made. Pages list what an operator offers and what its terms say, and they name the thing we could not confirm instead of rounding it into a number.
• We do not publish invented authors. There are no bylines with portraits here. Pages are produced and checked by the editorial desk, and the date beside a page is the date it was last checked, not a decoration.
• We do not take money to change a conclusion. We are paid a commission when a reader opens an account through a link on this site. That pays for the work; it does not buy a placement, a ranking or a sentence.
• We do not tell you that offshore gambling is risk-free. Until licences are issued from 1 December 2026, every online casino that accepts New Zealanders is offshore, and that is the single most important fact on this site.

How the site is paid for

Most links to operators on this site are commercial. If you follow one, create an account and play, we may be paid a commission by that operator. This is the ordinary business model of a comparison site and it is worth being blunt about what it does and does not affect. It pays for the reading, the writing and the re-checking. It does not decide the order of a list, and it does not buy a sentence: an operator cannot pay to have a term removed from a page, and several pages here name operators we would not send a reader to at all.

Two practical consequences for you. First, treat every figure as something to verify before you deposit: bonus terms change without notice, and the date beside the figure tells you how old our reading of it is. Second, if a page and an operator disagree, the operator is right and we are out of date — tell us, and we will re-read the terms and change the page.

Gambling harm

Gambling is not a way to make money, and the Gambling Act 2003 restricts what may be advertised to New Zealanders for good reason. Nothing here is advice to gamble. You must be 20 or over to open an account with an offshore casino, deposit limits are worth setting before you play rather than after, and if gambling has stopped being entertainment for you or for someone close to you, the Gambling Helpline is free, confidential and available 24 hours: 0800 654 655 or gamblinghelpline.co.nz.