How Much of My Stake Do the Bookmakers Actually Keep?

Somewhere between about a tenth and a quarter of every pound, depending entirely on which race you pick.

That is not a guess. We measured the book on 230 races across seven festivals this summer, from Royal Ascot to Killarney, and the charge built into the prices moved that much between the cheapest kind of race and the dearest.

Put it on a tenner. In a small field of six or seven runners, roughly a pound of your stake is the bookmaker's charge. In a twenty-runner handicap it is closer to three. Same sport, same afternoon, same account, and one race takes nearly three times as much out of your money as the other.

The charge is not a fee you pay separately. There is no line on your slip for it. It is inside the prices you were offered, which is why almost nobody notices it and why we keep coming back to it.

Yesterday we showed that every price wins slightly less often than it says it will. This is the same fact, viewed from the other end: that shortfall, totalled across a race, is what the bookmaker keeps.

Add the race up and it comes to more than everything

Take the price of every runner in a race, turn each one into a percentage, and add them together.

In a fair book that total would come to exactly one whole. One of the horses is going to win, so the chances have to add up. What you actually find is a number comfortably above it. On the Ebor Festival card in August it averaged 28.1% over a fair book. At Galway it was 30.5%.

The excess is the charge, and it has two names that get confused constantly.

Overround is how much the book exceeds a fair one. Takeout is what share of all the money staked the bookmaker expects to keep. They are different numbers describing the same book: Ebor read 28.1% overround and 21.9% takeout.

If you only ever remember one, remember takeout, because it is the one denominated in your money. Overround is the more common word, which is unhelpful, and we will spend a whole piece on the difference later this month.

The important thing is that neither is hidden by anybody. It is arithmetic anyone can do on a printed racecard. It is simply that almost nobody does.

It moves with the number of runners, and very little else

Here is every one of those 230 races, sorted by how many runners were in them.

The relationship is close to mechanical. A bookmaker takes a slice on each runner they price, so more runners means more slices, and the slices at the bottom of the market are the fattest. A horse at 100/1 is marked as a one-in-a-hundred chance, and in a twenty-two-runner handicap there may be six of them.

That is worth sitting with, because it inverts how a big field feels. The twenty-runner handicap looks like the race with the most opportunity, since there are the most horses to choose between. It is the race where you are charged the most for choosing.

Tomorrow: why this arrangement means the bookmaker does not need to outguess you to come out ahead.

A word on all of this

None of these pages is a tip, and none of them describes a way to win. They describe what betting costs, which is a different and more reliable subject. If your betting has stopped being fun, BeGambleAware has free, confidential help, and the National Gambling Helpline is on 0808 8020 133.

Common questions

How much do bookmakers make on a horse race?

Measured across 230 festival races this summer, the charge inside the prices ran from around a tenth of stakes in the smallest fields to around a quarter in the biggest. It is not a fixed rate, and it varies far more by race than by bookmaker.

Is the charge taken from my winnings or my stake?

Neither, directly. It is inside the odds you were offered, so you never see it deducted. That is why the honest way to express it is as a share of everything staked into the race.

Is that the same as the bookmaker's profit?

No. It is what the book is set to keep if money lands across the runners in the proportion the prices imply. A bookmaker can and does lose on individual races when the wrong horse wins.

Which is the fairer number, overround or takeout?

Both are correct and they answer different questions. Overround says how far above a fair book the prices sit. Takeout says what share of stakes the book expects to keep. We publish both and never merge them into a single figure called "margin".

Do the exchanges charge less?

They charge differently, taking a commission on winnings rather than building a margin into the price. We exclude exchanges from these measurements for exactly that reason, because their prices are not comparable with a bookmaker's.