How We Test.

A wagering requirement forces you to turn a bonus balance over a fixed number of times before it can be withdrawn. Each unit of that turnover surrenders the house edge, which is one minus the game's return to player. Multiply the two and you get the expected cost of completing the requirement, expressed as a share of the balance you are trying to release.

Set that cost equal to the balance itself and the equation resolves to a single threshold: the break-even wagering multiplier, which is 1 divided by the house edge.

This is the number we run against every offer before writing a word about it, and it is why our pages routinely conclude that an offer is not worth taking. Almost every welcome bonus in the New Zealand market sits above its break-even threshold. Saying so is not scepticism for its own sake — it is what the operator's own published figures produce when you multiply them together.

The wagering figure an operator advertises is meaningless until you know what it multiplies. Two conventions are in common use and they invert the ranking.

So every offer gets three numbers recorded rather than one: the multiplier on the cash bonus, what that multiplier applies to, and the separate multiplier on free spin winnings. An operator that publishes a low headline figure against the heavier base ranks below one publishing a higher figure against the lighter base, and we show the arithmetic rather than asserting the conclusion.

Every number on this site carries a source, and sources are not equal. We work down this order and record which tier each figure came from.

Two rules sit on top of that hierarchy. First, currency is part of the figure: a €20 threshold is not a NZ$20 threshold and we do not transcribe one as the other. Second, a terms page served on a lookalike domain is not the operator's terms — we have found three different operating companies named across domains carrying a single brand, and we now read the company name, registration number and licence number on the exact domain before quoting anything from it.

Any one of these 6 removes an operator from a page, whatever the commercial arrangement. Each is checkable by a reader in under 2 minutes, which is deliberate — a criterion you cannot verify yourself is a criterion you have to take on trust.

A methodology that never excludes anybody is decoration. On the most recent deposit tier we covered, 15 operators were assessed and 12 were removed before publication.

Separately, 2 operators are excluded from every list on this site rather than from a single page, on the basis of public complaint records showing withdrawals stalling past the operators' own stated processing windows and self-exclusion requests not being honoured. Those exclusions are named, dated and sourced on the NZ$1 deposit page.

These are commitments about our own output rather than claims about operators, and they are the ones worth holding us to.

We do not invent figures. No estimated numbers, no plausible-sounding approximations, no numbers included for the appearance of rigour. Where a figure cannot be sourced, the section is rewritten around one that can, or the gap is stated.

We do not invent sources. No citation to a study, regulator, author or report whose existence and content we have not confirmed. In a market where this happens routinely, a fabricated citation is more damaging than a missing one.

We do not claim tests we have not run. Language asserting a hands-on deposit, a stopwatch on a withdrawal or a verification carried out by us appears only where that physically happened and a record of it exists. Everything else is described as what it is: a calculation from published terms, or a report from a named source.

We do not sell placement. An operator cannot pay to be added, removed, or moved up a list. Rankings are set before commercial terms are discussed, and 0 of the 53 external links across our deposit cluster carry a tracking parameter, which is a claim you can verify by inspecting them.

We do not promise outcomes. No system, no strategy, no offer described as beating the house. Every bonus we cover is negative in expected value and each page says so.

Facts on this site are classified as stable or volatile at the point they are written, and the two are handled differently.

Every page also carries the same standing instruction, which overrides everything else we publish: where our figure and the cashier disagree, the cashier is correct.

Before publishing a named criticism of an operator, we put the specific claims to that operator in writing and allow 5 business days for a response. A reply, or the absence of one, is recorded on the page.

Any operator may contact us with evidence at any time. Where the record warrants it we publish a correction on the page itself rather than quietly editing it, and where a rating or complaint file has since changed we say so and re-date the section. Ratings and complaint records quoted on this site are dynamic; a figure read in July may not hold in October, and we treat that as our problem rather than the reader's.

Three people carry named responsibility for what appears here. Credentials are set out on each author page rather than summarised in marketing language.

We are paid by operators on a commission basis when a reader opens an account through our links. Two structural rules keep that from setting the order of a page.

First, ranking criteria are fixed before commercial discussion, and they are the ones published above rather than a private set. Second, the disqualifiers are absolute: an operator meeting any of the 6 conditions is removed whatever it pays, and the pages showing 12 removals from 15 assessed are the evidence that this happens rather than being asserted.

What we cannot claim is independence from the industry itself. We are an affiliate site and our revenue rises when readers deposit. The honest version of that is this: read our arithmetic, check it against the cashier, and treat any page that never tells you to skip an offer — including ours, if it ever stops doing so — as advertising.

The clearest worked examples sit across the 6 pages of our deposit cluster, where the same calculations are run against the same 3 offers at every tier and reach different conclusions at each.

• Minimum deposit casinos — all tiers compared
• $1 deposit casinos
• $2 deposit casinos
• $5 deposit casinos
• $10 deposit casinos
• $20 deposit casinos