How NGR Is Calculated for Affiliate Rev Share: Bonus Costs, Gaming Duty and the Admin Fee, One Line at a Time

Somewhere in the terms of nearly every revenue share programme there is a sentence that goes more or less like this one. Net gaming revenue means all monies staked by referred players, less all winnings paid out to them, less bonuses and promotional costs, less gaming duties and taxes, less payment processing and chargeback costs, less an administration fee of so many percent. Hardly anybody reads it closely. It tends to sit about four pages into the terms, somewhere after the bit about using your logos and before the bit about payment thresholds, and partners scroll past it on their way to the percentage, which is the number they actually signed up for. The sentence has a lot more to do with what they get paid in a month than the percentage has, though.

We read a lot of these over here at MAP. When an operator moves a programme across to us, the commission plans have to pay out exactly what the old setup paid, so somebody on our side sits down with the NGR clause and a few old statements and works out how the one became the other. Usually the clause its self looks fine. What catches people is how it was applied, which deduction came off first, what finance counted as a bonus, which tax rate went in and on what total, and the partner never sees any of that written down. So we will go through the clause a phrase at a time, more or less how a partner does it on the fourth of the month when the statement turns up a bit lighter than they expected.

The first part rarely causes a row. A partner's players staked so much over the month and won so much back, and the difference between the two is the gross gaming revenue, the house's take with nothing knocked off it yet. That bit is simple enough. On a slots brand the figure tends to be a fairly steady small slice of the stakes, month after month, on account of the maths inside the games evening its self out over enough spins. A sportsbook is a different animal. One weekend where the favourites all come in can turn a sports partner's gross negative inside a Saturday afternoon, through nothing the partner did or failed to do. That goes a long way to explaining why negative carryover causes so much more ill feeling on sports deals than it ever does on casino ones.

There is one snag in it, though. A player deposits fifty pounds on a Friday night, takes thirty pounds of bonus on top, and has lost the whole eighty by Sunday afternoon. The house is fifty pounds better off in real money, since the thirty only ever existed inside the casino's own system. Some platforms count only real money stakes in the gross, so the bonus has already been left out at that point. If the bonus line further down the clause then takes the thirty off again, the partner pays for that bonus twice over, and nobody ever sat down and decided they should. We see that more often than you would think. Nearly always by accident, too, and usually from two different people setting up two halves of the same sum a year or so apart.

Jackpot games add a small complication. On a progressive slot a little of every spin goes into the jackpot, and that money is gone from the house whether somebody wins it this month or two years from now. Plenty of operators take those contributions off the gross, and partners do not usually mind, as long as it shows on the statement as a line of its own with a figure next to it.

Bonus is the biggest deduction on most statements and it is the one partners ask about first. Finance teams do not all agree on when a bonus turns into a cost. A lot of them take it off the moment it lands in the player's account, the full thirty in the example above, even though most bonus money gets lost back in play and never costs the house a penny in cash. Count only what players manage to turn into real money and withdraw, and the figure comes out a good deal smaller and a lot closer to what the bonus really cost you. A fair few operators settle somewhere in the middle and count it as it gets wagered. The clause will usually just say bonuses and leave it there, so the partner has no way of telling which of those happened.

Promotional costs can be almost anything. Free spins go in there, cashback, loyalty points that got cashed in, prize draw money, and if the clause is loose enough it can run to the Christmas hampers the VIP team sends out. Your CRM people decide how much of that goes out, and when they plan a spring reactivation campaign they are thinking about players and not affiliates, which is fair enough, it is their job. The trouble turns up about a month later. A partner opens the statement, finds the net well down on the month before, and has no idea a big reload offer went out to players they sent you two years ago.

It is worth explaining to the partner, and ideally before they have to email and ask. The reload is what keeps their players playing. Players who keep on playing are the whole of where the lifetime value in a revenue share deal comes from, out in month eighteen and month thirty, so the bonus cost is partly an investment in their income as much as in yours. In our experience most partners are fine with that once somebody has told them, and told them first. Nobody enjoys working it out for their own selves from a number that dropped with nothing written beside it.

Nobody argued much about this one for years, it was the dull line, and the rates barely changed. Then the UK Budget in November 2025 put remote gaming duty up from twenty one percent to forty percent, from April 2026, and the dull line stopped being dull more or less overnight. If your clause deducts duties and taxes as they apply, every UK partner on revenue share took a cut from April without one word of their agreement changing. Some of them noticed straight away. From what we have seen, some operators swallowed the increase for existing partners and only wrote it into new deals. Others passed it straight through on the very next statement. The partners concerned will remember which was which for a good while yet.

In the US it varies even more from state to state. Pennsylvania taxes online slot revenue at fifty four percent, which is a very large bite out of the gross. The neighbouring states that license online casino tax it at their own rates, and quite different ones. If you run one rev share plan across every state you hold a licence in, partners end up getting a smaller cut of the gross on Pennsylvania players than on players just over the border, and nobody planned it that way. The partners with a lot of Pennsylvania traffic are usually the first to spot it, often before the operator has. There is more on the US side of all this in what operators keep getting wrong about casino affiliate marketing in the US.

We also see the tax worked out the wrong way quite a lot. The fair thing to deduct is the duty that was actually paid on those players, calculated the way the tax office calculates it. What often ends up on the statement is a flat percentage taken off whichever total was nearest to hand in the spreadsheet. Those two can come out a good way apart, and it is the partner who ends up carrying the difference.

Every deposit costs something to take in. A percentage on a card, a fixed fee on some of the wallets, something else again on a bank transfer, and the whole bill arrives from the payment providers as one lump for the entire operation. You can charge each partner for what their own players' deposits actually cost, card by card and wallet by wallet, which takes a while to set up but is hard for anybody to argue with. The easy way is to pool the lot and spread it over the programme in proportion to revenue. Do that and a partner whose players all pay by cheap bank transfer ends up covering some of the card fees run up by somebody else's players. Neither is wrong as such, mind you. The clause ought to say which one you do, though.

Chargebacks are simpler to deal with, since you know exactly which partner sent the player who charged back. If a player charges back a deposit, taking that out of the referring partner's net is fair. It helps with affiliate fraud as well. A partner sending you players on stolen cards sees the chargebacks come off their own commission, and before long it stops being worth their while. Pooling chargebacks across the programme does the reverse of that. An honest partner ends up paying part of the cost of somebody else's stolen cards, and whoever sent those players gets to keep most of what they were paid for them.

The admin fee is the catch-all, and there is a perfectly respectable reason for it existing. A casino has plenty of costs you cannot pin on any one player. The platform has to be paid for, and the support team, and the compliance people, and the game studios take their own share of what their games bring in. You could split all of that out partner by partner every month, but the statement would run to several pages and nobody would get to the end of it. Lots of operators find it easier to put one percentage on to cover the lot.

Partners grumble about the admin fee more than any other line, even when it is a small one. Usually it is because they cannot see what it is for. It gets worse when some of the same costs have already come off further up the statement. Provider fees get taken off as a line of their own, say, and then there is an admin fee whose stated purpose, if anybody ever went and looked it up, includes provider fees. Partners notice that sort of thing eventually. They mention it to other partners, and it comes up in the affiliate forums, and truth be told it follows your brand round for longer than seems quite fair. The easy fix is to decide for each cost whether it gets its own line or goes in the fee, and then write that down in the terms.

Then there is the order the deductions come off in, and this one catches out people who have run programmes for years. If every deduction were a fixed amount it would not matter which came first, but some of them are percentages, and a percentage of a big number is bigger than the same percentage of a smaller one. Take an admin fee of fifteen percent. Off the gross, it takes a bigger bite than the same fifteen percent taken off what is left once the bonus and the duty and the payment costs have gone, on account of the base being bigger. Duty charged as a percentage works the same way, and so does a payment charge worked out as one. Very few of the clauses we read say anything at all about the order. In practice finance takes things off in whatever order the spreadsheet was built to do it, by somebody who has quite possibly left the company since.

It is easier to see with a month of numbers in front of you. None of these figures come from a real partner, mind you, they are made up to show the shape of the thing, but the shape is one we see. Say a partner's players lose fifty thousand pounds to the house over a month. That fifty thousand is the gross, and the table below runs the same month through three versions of the clause. Column one is a modest looking deal on a light clause. Next to it sits a far more generous looking headline, with every deduction in the clause applied and the admin fee taken last. And the last column is that same generous deal again with one thing changed, the admin fee moved up to come off the gross first.

Look along the bottom row. The partner on the bigger percentage ends up with less of every pound the house made than the partner on the smaller one, and the third column drops again just because the admin fee moved up the list, with the rate in the agreement exactly the same. Partners who have been at this a while work that bottom number out for every operator they send players to, whether you give it to them or not, and the bigger affiliate groups will often have a spreadsheet set up for it. So if you are the operator with a high headline rate and a long list of deductions, they will have noticed, and it has probably had a say in which casino ends up at the top of their pages. We went into how CPA, rev share and hybrid deals compare in our CPA vs revenue share vs hybrid guide.

Most NGR arguments start with what the clause means. The software side of it only starts to matter once a programme has been going a few years and has picked up three or four versions of the clause along the way. Partners who joined back in 2021 are still on the old wording. The ones who signed after the duty went up are on the new. A handful of the big ones negotiated their own.

That is the job the commission plans do over here at MAP. Each of those partners goes on a plan, set by brand, by geo or for the one affiliate, so the 2021 partner and last month's signing both get paid off the same month of play without anybody in finance keeping a second spreadsheet to remember who is on what. The plans will do rev share tiered, flat or progressive, or CPA, CPL, or a mix of those if that is what a partner agreed to. Negative carryover is a choice you make on the plan, on or off. The figures each plan is worked on come over from your platform through the integration, stakes and wins and bonus and the whole of it. We set that integration up for you while you are onboarding, and there is no charge for it. It matters for NGR more than most things, because if a bonus field gets mapped wrong on the first day, every statement after it is wrong too until somebody spots it.

Invoices come out of the self-invoicing built into MAP, using the same figures as the financial reports, so nobody is trying to make two different exports agree at the end of the month. If a partner wants to check the sums their own way, they can pull the data through the API into whatever BI tool they use, and that tends to settle a doubtful partner quicker than an email from the affiliate manager does. Any change to a plan goes on the audit trail. As for what MAP its self costs, it is one flat price, nothing charged per click and no lock in.

Some of it is down to you, though. MAP pays out on the clause you give it. If that clause counts bonus at the credited amount, the platform will count it at the credited amount every month without fail, and the partner is no better off than they were with the old spreadsheet.

It also depends on the data your platform sends over. If the duty number coming from your side is a rough rate on the wrong total, or the jackpot contributions never get sent across at all, MAP will do the sums correctly on figures that were wrong to start with. Somebody on your side needs to own that feed. The operators who have the least trouble tend to be the ones who check the first two or three statements by hand against their own finance numbers, line by line, before any money goes out.

Then there is changing the clause for partners who are already signed up, to pass the new UK duty on, say. That is a legal question as well as a relationship one, and your own lawyers are the people for the legal half of it, not us. We have seen a few of these go smoothly and a few go badly, and the partners who took it well had mostly been told weeks before. In writing, usually, with a worked example attached, and not by finding out from the statement its self.

When an operator asks us whether their NGR clause is a fair one, we usually suggest a quick sum before anything else. Take the biggest partner on rev share and pull last month's statement, put the gross gaming revenue at the top, list the deductions under it in the order finance really took them off, which is not always the order the clause gives them in, and divide the commission paid by the gross. That one figure is what the partner is really on. Some operators then go and find a competitor who publishes their terms, and a lot of them do, and run the same month through that clause on the back of an envelope. It does not take long. If your real share comes out lower than theirs even though your headline rate is higher, there is a fair chance the better partners worked that out a while ago. It might go some way to explaining where their best traffic went this year.

If the answer bothers you, bring the clause and a month of numbers along to a demo and we will walk that month through MAP with you, plan by plan. Everything else the platform does is on the features page. For a brand new programme the NGR wording is one of the first things to settle when setting up a casino affiliate programme. If you are moving a programme over from another platform, the clause and every older version of it need to come across with you, and we covered how to do that in migrating an affiliate programme without losing your history. Three hundred and more brands across Europe, North America and APAC run their programmes on MAP at present.

What is the difference between GGR and NGR

The gross figure is simply what referred players staked less what they won back, with no costs taken out at all. Net gaming revenue is what is left once your terms have taken their deductions off, normally bonus, tax, payment costs, chargebacks and the admin fee. Rev share gets paid on the net, which is how two deals with the same headline rate can end up paying a partner quite different money.

Should the admin fee come off first or last

We do not know of any rule that says which. Partners are happier when it comes off last, after everything else, and taking it off the gross first costs them a fair bit more, as the example further up shows. Whichever way you do it, write it into the terms, because otherwise each partner will assume whichever version suits them.

Can we pass the higher UK remote gaming duty on to existing rev share partners

It depends what your terms already say about tax and about changing the agreement, and your lawyers are the right people to ask. If the clause already takes off duties and taxes as they apply, the April 2026 increase came through on its own and there is nothing to change. If it does not, you will need to give notice under your variation clause, and it is worth sending each partner a worked example of what it does to their numbers before the first statement lands.

Do sub-affiliate overrides get worked out on NGR as well

Quite often the master affiliate's override is a percentage of either the sub-affiliate's commission or the net revenue that sub's players generated. If it is worked on the net, every deduction in this article comes off the override as well, so the terms need to say which of the two it is. There is more on how those deals fit together in our guide to master and sub-affiliate structures.

What happens to a negative month

That depends on the plan the partner is on. In MAP you switch negative carryover on or off for each plan, so sportsbook partners might carry a bad weekend into the next month while casino partners on a different plan start every month at zero. Either way it needs to be in the terms in plain words.