CPA Qualification Criteria Explained: Baseline Deposit, Wagering and the Qualifying Window

The email tends to arrive on the second or third working day of the month, once the statements have gone out. A partner sent you forty one first depositors in September, by their own count, and the statement pays them for twenty six. They would like to know where the other fifteen went, and they would like to know fairly soon, since they have very likely already told somebody what September was worth to them.

Over here at MAP that is the CPA conversation operators bring to us more than any other. It nearly always comes back to the CPA qualification criteria, the conditions a referred player has to meet before the CPA is actually owed. Most programmes use some mix of three. The player deposits at least a set amount, which is the baseline deposit. They wager a set amount, usually in real money. And they do both inside a set number of days, the qualifying window. None of the three is hard to write down. The disputes come from players sitting just either side of one of them. The player who deposited a pound under, say, or the one who hit the wagering figure on day thirty one, or the one who turned out to have had an account all along. Fifteen missing players are usually a few of each, mind you.

Say the deal puts the baseline deposit at twenty pounds. A player registers on a Tuesday, deposits ten to try the place out, likes it well enough, and puts in another fifteen on the Thursday. Whether that player qualifies comes down to something most contracts leave out, which is whether the baseline means the first deposit on its own or everything deposited across the window added together. Read one way the player is five pounds short and never qualifies at all. Read the other way they cleared it on Thursday afternoon. Both readings are reasonable enough, and the partner will have gone and assumed whichever one pays them.

Currency does the same thing more quietly. A baseline written in pounds, for a player depositing in euros or Canadian dollars, gets converted at some rate on some day. So a player who put in what looked like exactly the right amount in their own money can come out a few pence short in yours. Then there is the player who deposits fifty, withdraws forty the same evening and never comes back. Technically they cleared the baseline. Some programmes count deposits net of withdrawals inside the window for exactly that player and some do not, and again it is mostly not written down anywhere.

The baseline is there to make a fake account cost money. If an account can qualify on a five pound deposit, somebody running thirty of them off a handful of phones gets paid a CPA thirty times over for very little outlay. That is more or less the whole business model of a lot of the fraud that comes through, truth be told. Set it too high, though, and you lose real players in markets where people deposit small, along with the partners who send them. That cost is slower and quieter, but it is there all the same.

A wagering condition asks the player to actually play, to stake a set amount before the CPA counts. It does more against bonus hunters than anything else on the list. A player who only came for the welcome offer tends to do the minimum and leave, and a decent figure in real money is something they will not go and bother reaching. The rows start over what counts towards it. A player staking bonus money is not risking anything of their own, so most deals count real money only, though plenty of clauses never actually say so. Some ways of playing barely move a balance at all, a roulette player covering red and black on every spin for instance. A condition that counts every game the same can be met by somebody like that, who has risked next to nothing on account of the bets cancelling each other out. Sports has its own version in bets at very short odds.

January changed this for UK programmes in a way not everybody has caught up with yet. Since the nineteenth of January 2026 the Gambling Commission has capped bonus wagering at ten times the bonus, where thirty or forty times used to be ordinary. If your qualifying event was written as the player finishing the welcome bonus wagering, the bar under that event dropped a long way overnight. A player who would have given up halfway through a thirty times requirement now gets to the end of it. Nobody touched your affiliate terms. The qualification just got easier to reach, for honest players and for anybody farming accounts as well.

Most windows run thirty, sixty or ninety days, and the arguments over them are nearly all about the day the clock starts on. Partners tend to assume it starts at registration. Operators often mean the first deposit. A player who registers on the first of the month and deposits on the twentieth has either ten days left or thirty, depending on which. If they reach the wagering figure on day thirty five, they are either comfortably inside or well out of it.

Then there are the clocks themselves. The platform records events in UTC, your affiliate manager reads the report in London and the partner might be sitting in Malta or Ontario. A player who qualified at twenty past midnight on the last day can land either side of the line depending on whose midnight it is. Month end has its own version of this. A player who deposits on the thirtieth of September and finishes wagering on the third of October qualified in October, so the CPA goes on the October statement. The partner counted them as a September first deposit, though, so what they see is one player missing in September and one extra in October, a month apart on two different statements, and they decide the first one went and got lost somewhere between your platform and theirs.

Some of the fifteen will never have been new at all. A player who had an account with you back in 2022, closed it, and opened a fresh one through a partner's link this autumn is not a new customer, and most deals say as much. A player who clicked through one partner in August and another in September is new, but only one of those two partners gets the CPA, and which one depends on how your attribution is set up. And every so often the player turns out to be the partner, or the partner's cousin, or nine accounts sharing two phones and one card. The ways that gets caught are in our piece on affiliate fraud detection. On the CPA side of it the window is what buys you the time, since a conversion that scored badly can be in front of somebody before any money goes out on it.

A few players fall at checks that have nothing to do with the deal. They turn out to be under age, or self excluded, or living somewhere you do not hold a licence. In the UK most of these never get as far as a deposit. Operators there have had to verify a customer's age and identity before they can deposit or gamble since 2019, so they hardly ever show up as first deposits in the first place. In markets where the checks can come later, at the first withdrawal say, a player can deposit, wager, qualify on paper and then fail verification a fortnight after the CPA went out. That is the very case clawback clauses got written for.

Every part of CPA qualification is a trade-off, and you make it each time a CPA deal gets written, whether or not anybody in the room thinks of it that way. A high baseline, real money wagering and a short window cut out most of the fraud and the bonus hunters. They also cut the number of honest first deposits that ever turn into paid CPAs, and good partners notice that inside about two months. Loose criteria do the opposite. Where operators tend to come unstuck is setting one set of criteria for the whole programme back when it launched and leaving it there for years, so that a sportsbook in one market and a slots brand in another get held to the same baseline and the same window, even though their players deposit and play nothing alike.

The price and the criteria have to be read together as well. A two hundred pound CPA on loose criteria and a two hundred pound CPA on tight ones are different prices for different things, and partners compare them that way even when the sign up page does not. Whether either price makes sense comes back to what a qualified player is really worth to you over time, which is what FTD value vs LTV gets into. Whether CPA is even the right model for a given partner is the subject of our guide to CPA, revenue share and hybrid deals, and if a partner is weighing your CPA against a rev share offer, how NGR is calculated is the other half of that comparison.

In some places you do not get a choice of model. New York and Massachusetts both stopped sportsbooks paying affiliates on revenue share in 2023, so for a sportsbook licensed there CPA is the deal, and the qualification criteria are most of what is left to negotiate. There is more on the American side in our piece on casino affiliate marketing in the US.

Here is how that September email might break down once somebody goes through the list player by player. The numbers are invented, the hundred and fifty pound CPA included, but the mix is a believable one.

Laid out like that, most of it is not really in dispute. The partner might push back on the two late ones, and on the five under the baseline if the contract never said whether deposits add up. The returning customers and the failed verification they will usually accept on sight. The email was mostly about a statement that said twenty six with nothing written next to it, and the partner filling the gap with the least flattering explanation going. Operators who send a reason for each player along with the statement get a lot fewer of these emails, in our experience, and the ones they do get are shorter.

CPA on MAP comes standard, tiered or progressive, so a partner can climb to a better rate as their qualified numbers grow. The commission plan a partner sits on can be set by brand, by geo or for that one affiliate. That is how a sportsbook in Ontario and a slots brand in the UK end up on different baselines inside the one programme. The deposits and the wagering come across from your platform server to server on MasterPostback™. So whether a player qualified gets decided on your platform's own figures, and not on a pixel that may or may not have fired. Setting that up does not need a developer on your side. Our account managers go through the integration with you during onboarding, which takes five days on average.

The AI and machine learning scoring looks at conversions as they come in and picks out the ones that look like fraud, so a suspect account is in front of somebody before the CPA on it goes out rather than after. Payouts and invoices are scheduled off the same figures. And with 248 reports in the platform, the list of who qualified and who did not is something your affiliate manager runs rather than something they build in a spreadsheet the night before the statements go.

The criteria themselves are yours to set. MAP will hold a partner to a twenty pound baseline exactly as written, and if twenty pounds is the wrong figure for that market it will be wrong every month, very consistently, until somebody changes the plan. The same goes for the words the contract never defined. If nobody decided whether deposits add up across the window, the plan still has to be set up one way or the other. It is somebody on your side who makes that call, and who tells the partners which way it went.

It also runs on the events your platform sends. A real money wagering condition needs real and bonus stakes to arrive as separate figures, and if they come across as one number there is no splitting them afterwards. That tends to come out in the first week of setup, which is a far better week to find it in than the first month end.

And no platform has the conversation with the partner for you. When a rejection gets disputed the evidence is all there, the deposit amount, the timestamp, the fraud score. Whether to pay the two late ones anyway as a bit of goodwill is a commercial call, though, and a good few operators go and do exactly that for partners they want to keep.

Say you take last month's CPA rejections across the whole programme and sort them by reason, then by partner. Usually one reason is doing most of the work, and it is often not the one anybody expected. A partner whose rejections are nearly all under the baseline may simply be sending players from somewhere people deposit small. Late qualifiers bunched up on one partner usually mean the window suits casino play and that partner sends sports bettors. The pile worth worrying about is the one with no reason recorded against it at all. That is the one the emails come from, on account of a partner on the other end having no way to check it their own self.

If that turns up something you would rather not have found, a demo with a month of your own rejections is the quickest way to see how the same players would sit on MAP. The features page has the rest of the platform on it. Bringing a CPA programme across from another platform means the old qualification rules have to come with it, which we went through in our guide to moving a programme between platforms. Over three hundred brands use MAP now, in Europe, North America and APAC.

What is a baseline deposit in a CPA deal

It is the smallest amount a referred player has to deposit before the partner's CPA can be paid, twenty pounds or ten euros or whatever the deal says. Whether that means the first deposit on its own or everything deposited across the qualifying window is worth spelling out, since that one word causes more disputes than the figure ever does.

Does bonus money count towards the wagering condition

Most deals are written in real money stakes only, on account of bonus funds costing the player nothing to risk. Where a deal does count bonus play, the UK's ten times cap on bonus wagering since January 2026 has made that condition a good deal easier to meet than it was when the deal was signed.

How long should a qualifying window be

Thirty, sixty and ninety days all turn up regularly. Casino players tend to deposit and play quickly, so a shorter window catches most of them. Sports bettors can sit on an account until their season starts, and a window that closes in August can miss a player who was always going to bet in September. Whichever length you pick, the terms ought to say whether it runs from registration or from the first deposit.

Can a CPA be clawed back after it has been paid

Where the terms allow for it, yes, usually when the player turns out to be fraudulent, a duplicate, or fails verification after the fact. Partners dislike clawbacks and the money is slow to come back, which is why plenty of operators would sooner keep the window long enough to check a player before paying than chase the CPA afterwards.

Can sportsbooks in New York pay affiliates on revenue share

Not under the rules the New York State Gaming Commission brought in during 2023, which ended revenue share deals with affiliates and left CPA in place, and Massachusetts did much the same that year. In those states the qualification criteria on a CPA deal carry most of the commercial weight, since there is no revenue share to balance them against.