What Are Bonus Buy Slots?

A bonus buy lets you skip the wait. Instead of spinning until scatters land, you pay a fixed multiple of your stake and go straight into the free spins round. It is one of the most popular slot features of the last decade and one of the most misunderstood.

Two claims about bonus buys are repeated on almost every page written about them. The first is that the UK banned them. The second is that the bought feature pays worse than triggering it naturally. Neither survives contact with the primary sources, and the thing that genuinely costs players money is a term most guides never mention.

What Is a Bonus Buy?

A bonus buy, also called a feature buy, is a button that purchases direct entry to a slot’s bonus round. You choose it instead of spinning the base game and hoping to trigger the feature the usual way.

Most games that offer one now offer several, priced by how good the round is. A standard free spins entry sits around 100x stake. An enhanced version with more spins or a higher starting multiplier costs several times that.

There is also a cheaper middle option worth understanding, because it is not a buy at all. Hacksaw Gaming’s BonusHunt FeatureSpins, priced at around 3x to 5x stake, does not grant the bonus. It raises the probability of triggering it on the next spins. You can pay it and get nothing, which is a fundamentally different bet from a guaranteed entry.

What a Feature Buy Costs

Prices below come from the games’ own rules screens rather than review sites. Costs are given as a multiple of total stake, so a 100x buy on a €0.20 spin costs €20.

Nolimit City carries the most expensive buys in the market, with top tiers running into four figures times stake. At the other end, an entry-level buy on a low stake is genuinely small money. The multiple is what matters, not the currency amount, because the multiple is what stays constant as you change your bet.

Prices this high are also why the UK Gambling Commission took an interest. Its 2020 notice to operators recorded one game “charging more than £3,000 to enter the bonus feature”, which is the figure that made the mechanic a regulatory topic rather than a design one.

Do Bonus Buys Have a Lower RTP?

Almost every guide says yes. The games’ own rules screens say otherwise.

Games with a buy option carry a separately certified RTP for each purchase mode, and it is published in the game information panel alongside the base figure. Here are three Pragmatic Play titles, quoted from their rules text.

All three buys are equal to or better than the base game. Relax Gaming’s Money Train is widely reported to rise from 96.2% to 98.0% on the buy, though Relax publishes no figures itself, so treat that one as reported rather than confirmed.

The direction varies by game and the size of the gap is trivial. There is no support for a general rule that buying is worse value. What changes is not the percentage, it is the shape of the bet: paying 100x stake for one round compresses a long session into a single outcome, so the same RTP arrives with vastly more variance attached.

Bonus Buys and Casino Bonuses: the Expensive Part

This is where buying a feature genuinely costs people money, and it has nothing to do with RTP.

Many casinos exclude bonus buy games from bonus play entirely, listing them alongside jackpot slots as excluded categories. Where they are not excluded, a second clause usually catches them anyway: the maximum bet rule.

Do the arithmetic. A typical wagering requirement comes with a maximum bet of around €5 while the bonus is active. A feature buy priced at 100x stake reaches €5 at a base stake of five cents. Buy at any normal stake and you have placed a single bet many times over the limit, which most terms allow the casino to treat as a breach, voiding the bonus and everything won with it.

That happens silently. No warning appears, the round plays normally, and the problem surfaces at withdrawal. It is one of the most common ways a legitimate win gets refused. Whether slots count toward wagering decides whether the spend counted at all, and the wider terms in bonus only vs deposit + bonus.

The rule is simple: while a bonus is active, do not buy features unless the terms explicitly permit it.

Are Bonus Buy Slots Banned in the UK?

Not by a rule that names them, which is worth stating precisely because almost every page on this subject gets it wrong.

There is no provision in the Gambling Commission’s Remote Gambling and Software Technical Standards or its Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice that prohibits feature buys. What exists is a news notice from 17 January 2020, in which the Commission said operators were being “reminded” that products must meet transparency and safety standards, noted that six operators had been found offering feature buy-ins, and pointed to two existing requirements: RTS 3A, on rules being available before a customer commits to gamble, and RTS 14A, on products not encouraging customers to chase losses or increase their stake. All six operators removed the feature.

So the practical outcome is real, the mechanism is not a ban. The Commission read existing rules as catching the mechanic and operators complied.

Since then a second and blunter barrier has arrived. From 9 April 2025 a maximum stake of £5 per online slots game cycle applies to players aged 25 and over, and from 21 May 2025 a £2 limit applies to players aged 18 to 24. A buy priced at 100x stake cannot be reconciled with a £5 cap on what a player may risk in a game cycle. The Commission’s published guidance does not directly address feature purchases, so that is a reading of the rule rather than a stated regulatory position, but the arithmetic leaves very little room.

Where Else Are Bonus Buys Unavailable?

Germany is the clearest case, and again the mechanism is a stake cap rather than a named prohibition. Under section 22a of the 2021 State Treaty on Gambling, the stake may not exceed one euro per game. A buy at 100x is impossible under that ceiling.

Beyond those two, the picture is murkier than most guides admit. Dutch licensed lobbies do not carry bonus buys, but we could not locate any Kansspelautoriteit rule, decision or statement addressing feature buys specifically. The regulator’s 2022 enforcement action concerned pre-purchased spins running without a player decision, treated as autoplay, which is a different mechanic often confused with this one. Belgium’s 2024 restrictions target promotional bonuses, not in-game buys. Sweden has no prohibition, though Play’n GO has publicly campaigned for one.

The reliable takeaway is that availability follows your licence, not the game. If the buy button is missing from a title you have used elsewhere, that is usually your market rather than the casino. and which licence covers you decides what your account is allowed to see.

Which Studios Make Bonus Buy Slots?

• Pragmatic Play ships the highest volume of them, usually with multiple tiers at 100x, 150x and 500x, and publishes an RTP per mode in the rules screen.
• Nolimit City builds the most expensive and most extreme buys on the market, matched to games designed around very high ceilings.
• Hacksaw Gaming pairs conventional buys with BonusHunt FeatureSpins, the cheaper probability-raising option rather than a guaranteed entry.
• Relax Gaming built the Money Train series around the buy, and it remains the most cited example of a buy with a materially higher reported RTP.
• Big Time Gaming uses a variable price instead of a fixed one. Its Feature Drop mechanic starts at a set price that falls as you collect symbols, so waiting makes the buy cheaper.
• Push Gaming and Print Studios both offer buys across much of their catalogues.

One studio is a deliberate exception. Play’n GO pledged in 2021 never to produce bonus buy games, a position its chief executive says has cost the company hundreds of millions of Swedish kronor in foregone revenue. Whatever you conclude about the mechanic, a studio turning down that much money to avoid it is a data point worth having.

Is Buying the Bonus Worth It?

On expected value, it is close to neutral. The certified RTP of the bought round is broadly the same as the base game, so over a large number of buys you would expect roughly the same return as playing normally, minus nothing and plus nothing.

What changes completely is the distribution. A hundred spins at €0.20 and a single €20 buy cost the same and carry the same expected return, but the first gives you a hundred chances to be wrong and the second gives you one. Bankrolls that survive the first can be gone in a minute under the second, which is why buys suit players who have decided in advance how many they will make and at what stake.

The reasons to avoid one are more concrete than the maths. A bonus is active on your account. The casino runs a lowered configuration of the game. Or the buy price has stopped feeling like money, which is the point at which the feature is working exactly as designed and the session has stopped being one. Availability is a market question rather than a casino one, so the offers and features available where you are is the honest place to check before assuming a title is missing. Availability is decided by the operator and the market rather than by the studio, so the casinos grouped by software provider are the quickest way to see who carries the studios that build them.

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