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How much does your bookie keep?

Every bet you place has a price built into it. Type in what you usually bet and how often, pick your bookmaker, and this page tells you in dollars what your bookmaker keeps over a year.

Australian bookmakers, cheapest first

This is what each Australian bookmaker is charging right now on who-wins bets, across every game we track. The smaller the number, the more of your money stays yours.

Australian-licensed bookmakers only. Betting exchanges and overseas sites are left out. Figures refresh through the day.

What does "keeps" mean?

A bookmaker prices both sides of a game so that the two prices together are a little worse than an even, fair deal. That gap is the bookmaker's cut. It is not a fee you see on your statement — it is baked into the price you took.

So if your bookmaker's cut is 5 cents in the dollar and you bet $25 five times a week, you bet $6,500 over a year and about $325 of it is the bookmaker's cut, before anything you win or lose on the actual results.

Does this mean I lose that much?

Not exactly. Some weeks you win, some weeks you lose. The cut is the headwind running underneath all of it. Two people with the same luck and the same bets, one at a cheap book and one at an expensive one, end the year hundreds of dollars apart.

Can I do anything about it?

Yes, and it is the one part you control. Betting with a cheaper bookmaker, and taking the best price on offer instead of the first one you see, both shrink the cut. Betting on who wins rather than on player markets shrinks it too — player markets cost a lot more.

• Check more than one bookmaker before you bet.
• Stick to simple who-wins bets more often than exotic ones.
• Know what your book charges: the table above is measured, not advertised.

Where these numbers come from

We record publicly shown pre-match prices for research. For each game, the prices a bookmaker shows on both sides are turned into a single number: how much more than a fair market the pair adds up to. That is the cut. A bookmaker appears above once we have at least 30 of their games priced. The daily record, with a free download, is the Margin Index, and the full quarterly report is State of the Vig 2026.

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Published under CC BY 4.0. Journalists and researchers are welcome to quote or chart these figures with credit.

Suggested citation:

Bet Better (2026). How much does your bookie keep? Australian bookmaker cost calculator. https://betbetter.world/studies/how-much-does-your-bookie-keep

More: Bookmaker ratings by real cost · What shopping around is worth · Australian gambling statistics