Affiliate Payouts: Thresholds, Payment Methods and Self-Billed Invoices

A partner's commission gets written down three times every month, by three different hands, and hardly anybody reads all three side by side. The statement says what the partner earned. The invoice says what you are paying them for, and on most iGaming programmes the operator writes that one as well. Then the partner's bank writes the last version, the amount that actually turned up in the account, and that is the only one of the three the partner pays any real attention to.

Most months the three agree closely enough that nobody notices. When they do not, it usually arrives as a screenshot from a banking app with one line of text under it, and somebody in finance loses a morning working out which of the three moved and why. Over here at MAP we help a lot of programmes set up their affiliate payouts, and nearly all of those lost mornings come out of the same few gaps between the figures. How the first figure gets worked out on revenue share, the NGR sum sitting behind the statement, is in our piece on how NGR is calculated for rev share. This one picks the figure up once it is on the statement and follows it the rest of the way to the partner's account.

The statement total is what the partner earned in the month. It is quite often not what they get paid that month, on account of a few things that sit between the two. Partners know about every one of them in principle, mind you, and forget about them on the day.

Negative carryover is the big one on revenue share. A month where the players won more than they lost leaves a hole. On a programme that carries it forward, the next good month fills that hole before any commission comes out of it, and our explainer on negative carryover lays out the sums. CPAs wait too. A player who deposited on the twenty eighth may not have cleared the baseline by the time the month closes. So the CPA shows as pending and gets paid a month later, or never if the player does not play through, and why that happens gets its own piece, on CPA qualification criteria. On top of that, plenty of programmes hold the last few days of activity back until chargebacks have had a chance to come through. A deposit that comes back off a card three weeks later is far easier to sort out before anybody has been paid on it.

None of that is wrong, and most of it is written into the terms. The trouble is that the statement shows one total in big type and the parts that are waiting in smaller type underneath it, and the partner reads the big type and goes and plans their month around it.

Every programme has a line below which it does not send money. Anything under it stays on the partner's account and gets added to the following month, and the one after that, until the running total goes past the line and goes out in one payment. Bank charges are most of the reason. Forty euros sent by international wire can cost a fee at your end and another at the partner's, and somewhere between the two it turns into something closer to twenty, which helps nobody and makes paperwork for both sides.

Where the line goes is your call. A hundred is common, in whichever currency the programme pays in, and a lot of programmes set a higher one for wires than for e-wallets, since a wallet transfer costs a fraction of what a wire does. What matters more than the number, mind you, is that the partner can see how close they are to it. A partner who knows they are on three hundred and eighty against a line of five hundred will wait another month quite happily. A partner who expected a payment and did not get one, with nothing telling them why, writes in.

The balances that stop moving are the awkward ones. A partner who sent a handful of players two years ago and then went quiet can sit at sixty three euros for good, on account of nothing ever arriving to push them over the line. Some programmes pay those out once a year whatever the amount, and some pay them on request. Others have a clause saying a balance under the threshold lapses after twelve months with no activity, which is the sort of clause worth having a lawyer look at before you lean on it. Any of those can work. Having no rule at all does not, because then the decision gets made by whoever answers the partner's email that week, and it gets made differently every time somebody asks.

As far as most finance teams are concerned, commission has to be invoiced before it can be paid, and waiting for partners to send invoices of their own is a slow way to run a payment cycle. They come in late, or in a dozen different layouts, or with last month's total on them, or made out to a company in your group that changed its name a year ago. So most iGaming programmes self-bill. You raise the invoice in the partner's name from the figures on the statement and send them a copy with the payment, and the partner does not raise one at all.

In the UK, HMRC attaches conditions to self-billing, and none of them is hard, though all of them are easy to let slide. There has to be a written agreement with each partner, in place before the first self-billed invoice goes out. In it the partner accepts that you will raise their invoices and agrees not to issue VAT invoices of their own for the same work. The agreement needs a start date and an expiry date, and HMRC advises reviewing it every twelve months. Each invoice is marked as self-billing, and HMRC suggests a line on it saying the VAT shown is the partner's output tax due to HMRC. You keep the name, address and VAT registration number of every partner you self-bill. And you must not issue a self-billed VAT invoice for a partner who is not VAT registered, or who has cancelled their registration. That is the one that catches programmes out, since the only way you hear about a partner deregistering is the partner remembering to tell you.

Inside the EU the outline is much the same. The VAT Directive lets a customer draw up invoices for its supplier where the two have agreed it beforehand and there is a way for the supplier to accept each one, and the invoice has to carry the words self-billing. Each member state adds its own details on top, so a programme with partners in six countries is really keeping up six slightly different versions of the one idea. Most of the work in self-billing, truth be told, is keeping each partner's details current, the legal name and registered address and VAT number, on account of the invoice only ever being as right as the details it was made from.

Whether VAT goes on a partner's commission at all, and who accounts for it, comes down to where the partner is, where you are, and what each of you is registered for. Between businesses in different countries it is often the operator that accounts for it under the reverse charge, rather than the partner charging it. Whether you can then recover it depends on how your own gambling income is treated, and that treatment does change. Malta, for one, began treating gambling and betting services supplied in Malta as taxable from the first of October 2026. Advisers there have been telling operators it affects how much of the VAT on costs like marketing they can claim back. That is a question for your tax adviser. No commission statement can answer it, ours included.

What the programme can settle, and should, is the plain question of whether the commission rate includes VAT. A thirty percent revenue share with VAT inside it is a different deal from one with VAT added on top, and the clause that decides which is usually a single line, written years ago by somebody who has since left.

US partners come with forms of their own. A partner based in the US gives you a W-9. One based outside it gives you a W-8BEN or W-8BEN-E, depending on whether it is a person or a company, and US operators file a 1099-NEC for the US partners they paid over the threshold. That threshold went from six hundred dollars to two thousand for payments made from 2026, with inflation adjustments from the year after. State regulators want paperwork too, and in New Jersey the commission plan decides which kind. A partner on revenue share or a hybrid deal needs an ancillary casino service industry enterprise licence, while a partner on flat fees only has to register as a vendor. The state by state picture is in our guide to US casino affiliate marketing, and the time to have that paperwork in hand is before the first payment run, not after it.

This is the figure people mean when they say a payment came in short, and quite often nothing went wrong at your end whatsoever. Two thousand euros left your account, one thousand nine hundred and eighty one arrived, and the nineteen went to banks that neither of you deals with.

International wires carry an instruction saying who pays the charges. OUR means the sender pays all of them, and BEN means the partner does. SHA, which a lot of banks use unless told otherwise, means each side pays its own bank. The partner's side also pays whatever the banks in the middle take, and that comes straight off the amount as it passes through them. So a partner paid by SHA wire gets the commission less whatever that particular route cost on that particular day, and nobody can tell them the figure in advance. Paying OUR mostly fixes it, at a price, which is why plenty of programmes go and set a higher threshold for wires instead, so the charges end up a smaller slice of each payment.

Domestic payments are a good deal simpler. Faster Payments inside the UK and SEPA transfers in euros arrive as they were sent, near enough. E-wallets such as Skrill and Neteller are popular with partners who get paid by programmes in several currencies, or who live somewhere a bank wire is slow or dear. Some programmes pay in crypto as well, and for a licensed operator that tends to raise questions on the compliance side, so it is worth knowing where those questions land before crypto goes into the terms.

Currency is the other thing that moves the third figure. A statement in euros paid to a partner whose account is in pounds gets converted somewhere, either by you before it leaves or by the partner's bank when it lands, at whatever rate and margin that bank happens to use. If the partner's terms say they are paid in euros the conversion is theirs to worry about, though they will still write in about it the first time it happens. Paying each partner in their own currency takes the question away altogether.

Every so often an email comes in from a partner's usual address, a few days before the payment run, saying they have moved banks and asking for the new details to be used this month. Most of the time it is genuine. Now and again the partner's mailbox has been got into, or the address is one letter off the real one, and the new account belongs to somebody else entirely. The payment goes out to them, the real partner writes in a week later asking where their money is, and by then it is generally long gone.

The defence is dull, and it works. A change of bank details gets checked by phone, on a number you already had on file, never one given in the email asking for the change. Plenty of programmes hold new details for one payment cycle before using them, which gives the real partner a month to notice anything odd. The banks have started helping as well. Confirmation of Payee in the UK, and Verification of Payee on euro transfers in the eurozone since October 2025, compare the account name with the name you typed in. A mismatch warning on a partner's new details is a reason to go and pick up the phone your own self before anything else happens.

Who you are paying matters as much as where the money goes. A partner whose name turns up on a sanctions list cannot be paid, and in the UK the civil penalties for breaching financial sanctions have been strict liability since June 2022, so not having known is no defence. On a UK licence the Gambling Commission also holds you responsible for the third parties you contract with, affiliates among them, which makes knowing who a partner actually is a licensing matter as much as a finance one. Screening partners when they join, and again before they get paid, is a short job. Explaining a payment to a designated person afterwards is a very long one.

Here is one made-up partner followed through a single month, with figures invented for the purpose. The partner is on revenue share plus CPA, is paid in euros by international wire with shared charges, banks in pounds, and has a threshold of five hundred euros. VAT is left out, since it depends on where everybody is.

Three of those lines belong to the operator, and every one of them says one thousand nine hundred and fifty. The partner sees about one thousand six hundred and sixty pounds and a deduction nobody explained, and from where they are sitting each of those differences could just as easily be you. A line on the statement saying how the payment was sent, in which currency and on which charge option, answers most of it before anybody asks.

On MAP the operator picks the payment methods the programme offers and sets the payment thresholds to suit. Negative carryover is an option you switch on or off rather than a policy you are stuck with, so a programme can offer it on one deal and not on the next. Commission is worked out from whatever plan each partner sits on, CPA, CPL, flat or tiered revenue share, hybrid, or a bespoke plan built for one partner on their performance and placements. How a tier moves the statement figure is in our piece on tiered commission structures. From there the platform's own self-invoicing system produces the invoice that settles the commission, so nobody spends the start of the month chasing partners for paperwork.

Programmes can report and pay out in any currency their brands operate in, which is the simplest way round the conversion problem above. Earnings and payment history are kept in the financial reports, so the answer to why this month's payment was smaller than last month's is generally sitting in there already. Alerts can be set for whichever events your team cares about, and the built-in inbox and bulk messaging mean a moved run date, over a bank holiday say, reaches every partner at once rather than one email at a time. Everything else the platform does is laid out on our features page.

A few parts of an affiliate payout are nothing a platform can do for you. Bank charges are set by banks, and on an international wire some of them are set by banks partway along the route that neither you nor the partner picked. Software can record how a payment was sent and on which charge option. What the route cost is something nobody knows until it has been paid.

Tax and VAT are decisions for you and your advisers. A platform can produce a self-billed invoice from the details it holds, but whether VAT belongs on it, at what rate, and who accounts for it are questions about your business and the partner's. Any commission system claiming to settle those for you would be guessing, and it would be your name on the return.

And the checks on people stay with people. Ringing a partner to confirm new bank details, screening names against a sanctions list, collecting a W-9, keeping each self-billing agreement inside its dates, these are jobs for somebody on your team with the time set aside to do them properly. What the platform changes is how much of that person's month goes on arithmetic instead.

Take last month's payment run and put three figures side by side for every partner on it, what the statement said, what the invoice said and what the partner's bank received. The last column you can usually get by asking your five or six biggest partners for a screenshot of what arrived. Most rows will line up apart from bank charges. The ones that do not are worth understanding. They nearly always trace back to one of a handful of places, a carryover the partner forgot about, a CPA still pending, a threshold, a currency, or a wire route with an intermediary bank on it. While the export is open it is worth sorting the balances sitting under threshold by age, just to see how old the oldest one is. Then count how many partners changed their bank details in the last six months, and how each of those changes got checked.

If filling in the three columns took longer than the payment run did, a demo built on your own commission plans and payment terms will show you that same run on MAP. Moving partners over from another platform means settling what they are owed on the old one first, which is covered in our guide to migrating an affiliate programme. Our checklist for choosing iGaming affiliate software has the payment questions to put to any vendor before you sign. And on a brand new programme the payment terms are best written at the same time as everything else in our casino affiliate program setup guide.

What is a payment threshold in affiliate marketing

It is the smallest balance a programme will pay out. A partner whose commission is under it keeps the balance on their account until later months take it past the line, and then it goes out in one payment. Thresholds stop bank charges eating small payments, and many programmes set a higher one for wires than for e-wallets.

What does self-billing mean for affiliate commission

The operator raises the invoice for the partner's commission on the partner's behalf, using the figures on the statement, and the partner does not send one of their own. In the UK that needs a written self-billing agreement with each partner before the first invoice, every invoice marked as self-billing, and the partner's VAT details kept up to date.

When do casino affiliate programmes pay commission

Most affiliate payouts go out monthly, for the month before, once it has closed and the statement has been checked. The exact date varies by programme, and some hold back the most recent activity until chargebacks have had time to come through. The date belongs in the terms, along with what happens when it lands on a weekend or a bank holiday.

Why did an affiliate receive less than their statement showed

Usually one of four things. Part of the balance was held back by negative carryover, a pending CPA or the threshold. VAT was treated differently from the way the partner expected. Bank charges came off an international wire sent with shared charges. Or the payment was converted into another currency when it arrived. Lining up the statement, the invoice and the bank receipt shows which one it was.

Which payment methods do iGaming affiliate programmes use

Bank transfer is the usual one, domestic where possible and international wire where not, with e-wallets such as Skrill and Neteller close behind. Some programmes pay in crypto too. The operator normally decides which methods are on offer, often with a different threshold for each, and partners pick from them when they set up their account.