Payout fees at the online sportsbooks and betting sites
Consider this scenario - after a week or two of cunning betting strategy you have finally managed to double your bankroll. Happily heading to the cashier of your favorite online sportsbook, you hit the withdrawal button, ready to start spending your winnings. All is great, until you find out that the payout fee on your $500 withdrawal would come to $100... Nearly 20% of your profit gone in an instant. If you think that this is rather thin, then you haven't read some of the horror stories out there. When it comes to offshore sports betting, there are few things worse than the exorbitant fees some sportsbooks charge for the privilege to get your own money. It comes to show you how important it is to avoid the rogue sportsbooks and bet online only with the best sports betting companies.
That said, payout fees, even at the best sportsbooks, are here to stay, but there are ways you can avoid paying a dime in banking and processing charges - in the end, it's up to the bettor to decide whether they want to pay a fee or not. How is that? Well, let's quickly recap what one should expect to face when withdrawing their winnings from a good sportsbook. The numbers below are averaged across a few sportsbooks, thus they may differ slightly (up or down) from what you are used to at your preferred betting site.
- Payout Method >>> Payout Fee
Check: $60-$100
Bank Wire: $100+, % of payout
Bitcoin: No Fee
Bitcoin, the newest and already most popular funding method at
the betting websites, is pretty much the way people can avoid paying
those pesky payout fees. But it's not all roses with Bitcoin either.
While no decent sportsbook will charge you a penny in payout fee when
you use Bitcoin (or any other crypto-currency they accept), you will not
be able to get out paying, if you want to use your money offline. The
simple truth is that you will still end up paying fees to the Bitcoin
exchange of your choice, when it's time to sell your Bitcoins and get
your money. Sadly, often it may be times more costly when you cashout
via Bitcoin, compared to other methods. Don't forget that all exchanges
will charge you a fee for selling the Bitcoin and an additional for
getting the fiat currency to your bank (via wire, ach or check).
If you are a long-term bettor, with a betting strategy stretching
throughout the course of a whole season, then using Bitcoin and paying
the fees to the crypto exchange once, at the end of the season, may be a
perfectly good idea. But if you are one of the millions of people who
deposit and withdraw money from their betting account weekly or a couple
of times per month, then those Bitcoin fees will add up rather quickly.
At this point, a courier check may be the better option, especially when you consider that the best sportsbooks do offer one free payout. Depending on the sportsbook, the free payout may be available once a week (5Dimes, for example, $60 thereafter), or at Bovada Sports, for example, one gets a free payout only every 90 days, otherwise a $100 fee would be charged for any check after. Shopping around for a sportsbook based on those fees could also prove beneficial. Comparing the payout fees we just mentioned and you can easily see that if you are a bettor who loves to move their money around a lot, 5Dimes is a better option than Bovada. You can follow this link to read more about which sportsbooks offer free payout to their customers.
Then there is the bank wire option, however, very few customers would be able to take advantage of this cash-out method. All of the top sportsbooks recommended on our home page offer bank wire, but they are neither advertised nor accessible for all but selected few VIP customers. High rollers at the offshore sportsbooks can get their massive winnings using bank wire, but those payout fees easily exceed $100, when you consider that there are often based on a percentage of the payout amount.
As you can see, one way or another, the bettor will end up paying some fee in order to cashout their winnings. Whether charged directly by the sportsbook in payout fees, as is the case with a bank check, or indirectly to a crypto exchange, as it would be with Bitcoin, a complete elimination of fees remains impossible. A sensible bettor, however, would take this into account when shopping for a betting site, thus saving quite the change over the long run.