Flutter Entertainment plans to make up to 1,400 redundancies in its UK and Ireland (UKI) business, citing the higher UK gambling taxes announced in last year’s Autumn Budget. The plans are subject to consultation.
Staff in Leeds and Dublin will be affected, as will UKI employees working from Flutter’s hubs in Porto, Portugal and Cluj-Napoca, Romania. The UKI business accounts for 9,000 of the group’s 28,500 employees worldwide.
The 19% increase in online gambling duty came into effect in April. Flutter said the job cuts form part of the “first-order cost mitigation” already reflected in its guidance.
Kevin Harrington, Chief Executive of Flutter UK & Ireland, said:
“My immediate focus is providing the necessary support for all of our impacted colleagues and guiding our teams through what we know is going to be a difficult and challenging period for all concerned. The material increase in betting and gaming duties announced in the UK Budget last year has fundamentally changed the economic model of the regulated betting and gaming industry in the UK while helping to fuel the unlicensed, unregulated market.
As we warned a year ago, we cannot fully absorb a rise of this magnitude without reducing our fixed cost base and therefore must restructure our business so that we can best position ourselves for the future. We remain confident that we are well placed to benefit from share gains given our position as the largest scale operator in the UK.”
Implementation will cost between $80M and $90M. That amount was included in the guidance Flutter updated with its Q2 results, and the costs will be booked in Q4 2026.
The industry has warned further job losses could follow if Chancellor John Healey raises Machine Games Duty in next week’s Budget, a move Entain and The Rank Group oppose.
