Review Methodology

Our scores reflect what we found on the day of the test — operators change bonuses, payment rails, support hours and licence terms, and a review from six months ago may not reflect what you will see today. The last-tested date in the page footer is the ground truth. We re-test every reviewed operator at least once a quarter and more often if a reader flags a change. Scores are not a prediction of your personal experience; your result depends on the games you choose, the bets you place and the payment method you use.

We do not score operators we have not personally tested with a funded account. We do not score operators that offer only cryptocurrency banking (because we cannot verify that a withdrawal to a cold wallet is reversible or that KYC was performed on the way in). We do not score white-label clones of operators we have already reviewed — a clone inherits the parent's score and we say so at the top of the page.

Each operator is scored out of five on seven weighted criteria. Welcome offer and ongoing promotions account for twenty percent (we look at wagering requirements, max-bet rules and game weighting, not just the headline amount). Game range covers pokies, live casino, table games and jackpots (fifteen percent). Payments cover deposit methods, withdrawal timings and AUD support (twenty percent). Licensing and dispute history is fifteen percent. Support quality is ten percent. Responsible-gaming controls and advertising language is ten percent. Mobile experience is the final ten percent. Totals are rounded to one decimal place.

Weights are reviewed every six months and may change in response to market or regulatory shifts (a new licensing regime, a widespread change in deposit methods, a reader survey). Any weight change is announced in the methodology changelog at the bottom of this page and takes effect for every operator at the next scheduled re-test — we do not re-score older reviews under new weights without a fresh test, which would be unfair to operators who have improved since the first review.

Take a hypothetical casino with a 100% welcome bonus up to A$1,000 and 100 free spins, PayID and Visa deposits, four-hour e-wallet withdrawals, a Curacao licence with no outstanding complaints, 24/7 live chat answered in under three minutes, deposit limits available before the first deposit, and a mobile site that passes our 390-pixel checks. That operator would score roughly 4.2 under our rubric — strong across every heading, with a small deduction for Curacao rather than a tier-one licence. A score above 4.5 requires near-perfect execution across every heading.

For contrast, a hypothetical operator with a 300% bonus but a 70× wagering requirement, deposits only via credit card, 72-hour withdrawals, an unresponsive licence authority, support hours limited to European business hours, no deposit limits before first deposit, and a mobile site that fails our 390-pixel checks would score around 2.4. That operator would not be published as a review; we would list them in our "Not recommended" footnote with a one-paragraph explanation.

Scores are not a shopping scale — they are a professional opinion. A 3.5 is "worth considering" if the bonus terms suit you; a 4.0 is "comfortable to recommend to a friend"; a 4.5+ is "near the top of what the Australian market offers". We do not publish scores below 3.0 as a review; if an operator falls below that bar we remove them from our list and explain why in a short note. A low score is not a legal judgement — it is our editorial view on how an operator stacks up against the alternatives.

We also publish per-criterion scores for each reviewed operator, not just the overall score, so readers whose priorities differ from ours can re-weight the numbers themselves. For example, a reader who cares only about withdrawal speed can compare the Payments score across operators; a reader planning long sessions can compare the Mobile and Responsible-Gaming scores. The overall score is a convenience, not a verdict.