Flutter Entertainment has opened a review that could close up to 100 Paddy Power betting shops across Britain and Ireland by the end of the year, putting around 400 jobs at risk and cutting roughly a fifth of the brand’s high street estate.
Paddy Power currently runs 506 shops, 310 in the UK and 196 in Ireland, employing more than 2,300 people. Around 1,374 of those roles sit in the UK and 935 in Ireland.
A Flutter UK and Ireland spokesperson said the company had not taken the decision lightly.
“We are incredibly proud of our high street estate, and it remains a key part of our business in communities across the UK and Ireland,” the spokesperson said. “Unfortunately, we have had to take the extremely difficult decision to conduct this review.”
Affected staff will be offered redeployment where possible.
The odd part about the tax argument
Flutter pointed to rising energy costs, rents and business rates, fierce competition, economic uncertainty, customers moving online, and what it called a material impact from the higher gambling taxes announced in last year’s UK Budget.
That last point deserves a closer look, because betting shops were not the target of those tax rises.
Remote gaming duty went from 21% to 40% in April 2026. A new remote betting duty of 25% arrives in April 2027. Both apply to online activity. General betting duty on shops stayed at 15%, and the new online rate specifically carves out horse racing bets, pool bets, spread betting and self service betting terminals.
So the shops are not paying more tax. They are closing because the money that used to subsidise the marginal ones is disappearing somewhere else in the business.
Flutter has estimated the tax changes will knock roughly $320 million off adjusted EBITDA in 2026 and around $540 million in 2027 before mitigation, with first order mitigation of about $85 million and $201 million respectively. When a hole that size opens up, every shop that only just washes its face suddenly does not.
The wider group numbers show the same squeeze. Flutter’s UK and Ireland revenue rose 4% year on year to $971 million with iGaming up 7%, but the group posted a $296 million net loss for the quarter.
This is not the first round
Paddy Power closed 57 shops in October 2025, affecting 247 staff, split roughly evenly between the UK and Ireland with one in Northern Ireland. Before that it shut 21 underperforming Irish shops in 2023.
It is also far from alone. Evoke closed around 230 William Hill shops in April, and Betfred announced 132 closures with more than 600 jobs going in July. Across the sector, more than 3,000 betting shops have shut since 2019 and over 15,000 jobs have gone with them.
The pattern is consistent. Operators are not abandoning retail as a concept. They are cutting the tail: shops with weak footfall, expensive leases or overlapping catchments, and keeping the ones that still pull.
Racing is the collateral damage
The most pointed reaction came from the sport that depends on those shops.
Betting and Gaming Council chief executive Grainne Hurst and Arena Racing Company chief executive Martin Cruddace warned that every closure takes something out of the sport’s funding base.
“Every closed shop means a little less prize money, a little less investment in the sport and, ultimately, greater difficulty in exporting one of Britain’s great sporting products,” they said.
The maths behind that is stark. A single betting shop contributes roughly £30,000 a year to racing. Across the estate, shops put around £140 million a year into the British sport. Close 100 of them and you have taken about £3 million out of the pot in one move, and that is before counting the Betfred and William Hill closures already banked this year.
The BGC also flagged that proposed affordability checks could cut levy income by a further £13.2 million a year, and warned that more than 70,000 customers could drift toward unlicensed sites where nobody pays a levy, a duty or a licence fee.
That argument has been made for years and has become easier to dismiss as lobbying. It is harder to dismiss when the closure announcements keep arriving on schedule.
What actually happens next
The review runs to the end of 2026. Nothing is confirmed until it concludes, and the phrase “up to 100” is doing some work: the final figure could land well below that if lease negotiations or local performance shift.
Staff consultation is the immediate process, and Paddy Power has committed to redeployment where it can offer it. In practice, redeployment in retail betting usually means moving to another shop in the same area, which is harder to arrange when the closures cluster.
For the towns involved, the effect is the familiar one. A betting shop is often one of the last units on a struggling parade that still opens six days a week and employs local people on permanent contracts.
The read
Retail betting in the UK and Ireland is being managed down rather than shut down. Operators want a smaller, more profitable estate, and the tax changes have accelerated a decision most of them were already circling.
The uncomfortable part for policymakers is the sequencing. The Budget raised duty on online gambling, and the visible casualties have been high street jobs and racing prize money. Whether that was the intended outcome is a question the industry will keep asking loudly, and the government will keep being asked to answer.