Online Slots UK: RTP, Volatility and Cost Per Session

The two numbers that price every session

Most players approaching an online slot for the first time look at one thing: the theme. Ancient Egypt, fishing boats, jewel clusters, megaways cascades. The theme is the packaging, and it carries no information about cost whatsoever. Beneath every reel set sit two figures that together determine what the game will take from a bankroll over any meaningful stretch of play, and neither of them appears in the marketing. This page is about those two figures, how they combine, and how to use them to choose a stake you can sustain.

The first figure is return to player, almost always written as RTP and almost always sitting between ninety-four and ninety-seven percent on a modern video slot. It answers a narrow question: over a very long run, what share of everything staked comes back to players as wins? A game publishing ninety-six percent keeps four percent of turnover in the long run. The second figure is volatility, sometimes called variance, and it is frequently expressed on a simple low, medium or high scale rather than as a number. It answers a different question: how unevenly is that ninety-six percent distributed? A low-volatility game pays small amounts often; a high-volatility game pays rarely and, when it does, pays large.

What surprises most readers is that these two numbers interact in a way the industry rarely spells out. RTP alone tells you the average cost of play. Volatility tells you the shape of that cost over a session of realistic length. A high-RTP, high-volatility game and a lower-RTP, low-volatility game can both model out at a similar loss over a hundred pounds of turnover, but the first will usually deliver that loss in a few steep steps with long flat stretches, while the second grinds it away almost imperceptibly. Neither shape is objectively better. What matters is matching the shape to the bankroll and the patience of the person holding it.

The reason this matters commercially as well as practically is that slots are the default game family for bonus clearing, and the reason is game weighting. Operators writing bonus terms nearly always weight slots at one hundred percent of face value, while table games and live dealer games are weighted at a fraction, sometimes as little as ten percent. A player with four thousand pounds of turnover to complete, which is what this costing takes as the standard load because that is what this part of the market asks, faces a very different bill depending on where that turnover happens. On slots at a four percent edge, the expected cost of the volume is around one hundred and sixty pounds. On a table game weighted at ten percent, the same bonus turns into forty thousand pounds of actual stakes, and even at a modest edge the expected cost multiplies accordingly.

That single comparison explains most of what follows. Slots are not the cheapest games in the casino per pound staked; blackjack and certain other table games usually carry a smaller house edge. But weighted against a wagering requirement, the slot’s full counting value makes it the cheapest route to completion, and so the majority of bonus turnover in this market happens on reels rather than on felt. Understanding what that turnover costs, hour by hour and stake by stake, is the practical skill this page sets out to teach.

A note on sources before the arithmetic begins. Every figure on this page is either published arithmetic, such as the definition of return to player, or a modelled assumption stated in the same sentence as the number it appears with. No figure describes any named operator’s current promotion, because terms move and a page that quotes one goes stale. Where a range is given, it is the range typical of the category as it stands at the time of writing, and readers should verify the two numbers that matter, RTP and volatility, on the game’s own information screen before staking anything.

The structure of what follows is deliberately simple. First, return to player: what the percentage measures, what it does not, and how to find it. Second, volatility: the three crude bands the industry uses and what each band does to a session. Third, the stake-versus-length trade, which is where most players lose control without noticing. Fourth, game weighting and wagering, which explains why slots dominate bonus play. Fifth, the licence gap as it applies specifically to slot players. Then a paper comparison of named brands, the calculator walk-through, and a short set of closing questions.

Return to player: what ninety-six percent really means

Return to player is the most misunderstood figure in gambling, and the misunderstanding always runs in the player’s favour, which is precisely why it persists. A slot publishing ninety-six percent does not return ninety-six pounds of every hundred deposited. It returns ninety-six percent of turnover, and turnover is not the deposit: it is every pound staked on every spin, including the pounds won and staked again within the same session. A hundred-pound bankroll played through at fifty pence a spin for several hours can easily generate several thousand pounds of turnover, and the game’s edge applies to all of it.

The way to think about it mechanically is this. Every spin of a modern online slot is an independent event resolved by a random number generator, and the published RTP is the average outcome of that event across its entire designed life, which runs to millions of spins. Over a thousand spins at fifty pence, the theoretical turnover is five hundred pounds, and the expected cost at a four percent edge is twenty pounds. That expectation is exact in aggregate and meaningless for any individual thousand spins, because the distribution of slot outcomes is enormously wide: a player can finish a thousand-spin block well ahead, well behind, or anywhere between, and both are consistent with the same long-run average.

Finding the figure is usually straightforward on licensed sites. Game information screens, reached through the paytable or the small information icon, carry the theoretical RTP alongside the paytable and the rules of any bonus features. On some games the figure varies by configuration: a title might publish a base return of ninety-six percent with alternative settings at lower values, and the operator chooses which setting to run. This is the single most important reason to check the number on the specific site rather than assuming the headline figure applies. The same game, same artwork, same name, can run at two different returns depending on where it is played.

The range across the modern market is narrower than players expect. Most contemporary video slots sit between ninety-four and ninety-seven percent, with the bulk clustered in the middle nineties. Progressive jackpot games run lower, because a slice of every stake funds the jackpot pool, and the published figure often excludes the top prize entirely. Older three-reel games and some novelty titles can run lower still. The practical reading is that the difference between a ninety-four and a ninety-seven percent game, at the same stake, is a seventy-five percent increase in expected cost per hour of play, which is a very large difference hiding inside three percentage points that look interchangeable.

A worked comparison makes the point. A player staking one pound a spin completes roughly six hundred spins an hour at a typical reel speed, giving six hundred pounds of hourly turnover. At a ninety-seven percent return, the expected hourly cost is eighteen pounds. At a ninety-four percent return on an identically paced game, it is thirty-six pounds. Same stake, same speed, same hour of entertainment, and the expected bill has doubled because of a setting chosen by the operator. This is why the habit of checking the information screen before the first spin is worth more than any strategy discussion in any slot forum anywhere.

What RTP does not do is promise anything about a session, a day or a month. The long run in the phrase long-run average is genuinely long: mathematicians modelling slot outcomes generally treat hundreds of thousands of spins as the point where actual results begin converging on the theoretical figure, and no casual player completes that volume in a lifetime of weekends. Over the volumes a real player completes, variance dominates, and a game with a worse published return can outperform a better one for a year of play. The figure is a price tag, not a forecast, and treating it as a forecast is how the misconception that a machine is due a payout takes root.

That said, the price tag compounds in a way that matters for planning. Because every pound won and restaked carries the same edge, the effective cost of a long session rises faster than most players model. A player who intends to keep playing until the bankroll is gone, rather than until a fixed number of spins have completed, is volunteering the entire bankroll to the house edge in a sequence, and the expected duration of that sequence is calculable: it is the bankroll divided by the edge-adjusted hourly cost. That calculation, which the calculator on this page performs, is the honest answer to the question of how long a hundred pounds lasts, and it is usually a shorter answer than intuition suggests.

One further practical point closes this section. Licensed sites in the British market are required by their licence conditions to publish fair and material terms about the games they offer, and the information screen convention has become standard across the industry generally, which means the figure is nearly always findable wherever you play. The difference is not availability but supervision: where the operator holds a British licence, the published figure sits inside a regulatory framework that polices it, and where it does not, the figure is a claim. That difference is examined in its own section below.

Volatility: the shape of the loss

If return to player is the price of a slot, volatility is its payment schedule. Two games can publish identical returns while behaving nothing alike in a session, and the difference is entirely down to how the paytable distributes the money it gives back. A low-volatility game returns small amounts on a large share of spins, so the bankroll erodes gently and the session stretches. A high-volatility game returns nothing or little on the overwhelming majority of spins, concentrating the return in rare large hits, so the bankroll survives in long flat stretches punctuated by cliffs. Both games cost the same in expectation per pound staked. They feel nothing like each other to play.

The industry’s shorthand is three bands. Low volatility, sometimes labelled as frequent wins, describes games where a meaningful share of spins, often a quarter or more, return something, and where the largest single win on the paytable might be a few hundred times the stake. High volatility describes the opposite corner: most spins return nothing, the base game can drain a bankroll for hundreds of spins without a significant hit, and the paytable’s top prizes run into the tens of thousands of times the stake, reachable only through bonus rounds that themselves trigger perhaps once in several hundred spins. Medium covers the broad middle, and many studios now add very high as a fourth band for the extreme end.

The practical consequence of high volatility is that bankroll sizing stops being a nicety and becomes a requirement. Consider the arithmetic of a game whose bonus feature triggers on average once per three hundred and fifty spins. A player with fifty pounds at fifty pence a spin has a hundred spins of runway, which is less than a third of the average wait, meaning that on more than half of all sessions the player will never see the feature the game is actually built around. The same game with a two hundred pound bankroll gives four hundred spins, which straddles the average trigger point and produces a fundamentally different experience of the same title. Neither experience is wrong; the point is that the second requires four times the money for the same hour of entertainment, and that cost is invisible in the game’s published return.

Variance of this kind also explains a pattern every regular slot player recognises: the long flat stretch followed by the sudden recovery. When the return is concentrated in rare events, the session’s bankroll curve looks like a staircase descending slowly while nothing lands, then lurching upward when a feature finally triggers well. This is not the game being generous or cruel in sequence; it is exactly what a concentrated distribution looks like sample by sample. Players who understand this tend to set session limits and hold to them, because the alternative, chasing the recovery through the flat stretch, is the single most reliable way to convert a planned one-hour session into a bankroll gone by lunch.

Where is the volatility figure published? Less consistently than return to player, is the honest answer. Studios state it on their own game pages and information screens, usually as the low, medium, high band, and independent databases collate it. Some operators list it in their game filters. A reader who cannot find a published band can estimate it crudely from the paytable: the ratio of the top prize to the stake, and the frequency-weighted shape of the smaller prizes, reveal the design. A game whose top line runs to five figures of stake multiples is high volatility by construction, whatever the label says, because the money for those prizes has to come from the spins that pay nothing.

The interaction between volatility and wagering requirements deserves its own sentence, because it catches bonus players specifically. A player clearing turnover on a high-volatility game experiences wild swings in the bonus balance: long grind, then a feature that doubles the balance, then a descent again. On a low-volatility game the balance declines smoothly toward the expected cost. Neither affects whether the turnover completes, but the psychology differs enormously, and players who mistake a volatility-driven swing for a change in their fortune make different, and usually worse, decisions about stakes and session length. Knowing which band a game sits in before starting is as much a protection as knowing the return.

Putting the two numbers together gives the working formula this page keeps returning to. Expected cost per hour equals hourly turnover, which is stake times spins per hour, multiplied by the house edge, which is one minus the published return. Volatility then decides whether that expected cost arrives as a smooth slope or a cliff face, and therefore how large a bankroll the session needs to survive to its planned end. Everything else on this page, the tables, the chart and the calculator, is that one formula dressed for use.

Stake size against session length

The chart on this page models the relationship players feel but rarely quantify: how long a fixed bankroll lasts at each stake size. The model takes a hundred-pound bankroll, a four percent house edge, which is the figure this costing uses because it corresponds to a mid-nineties published return, the common case across the market, and fixed spin rates. At twenty pence a spin the modelled session runs twelve hours. At fifty pence it runs six. At a pound it runs three, and at two pounds it is down to an hour and a half. Halving the stake doubles the entertainment, which sounds obvious written down and is constantly ignored in practice.

The curve’s shape carries the lesson. It is not a straight line: the steepest savings come from the first cuts in stake, and the curve flattens as stakes rise, because the relationship is a simple division. Session length equals bankroll divided by expected cost per hour, and expected cost per hour is stake multiplied by spin rate multiplied by edge. With those three numbers fixed, every halving of stake doubles the runway, which means a player who wants a four-hour session from a hundred pounds has a clear target: roughly twenty-five pence a spin at typical reel speeds, on a mid-nineties game.

Spin rate deserves its own accounting because modern games vary widely in pace. A classic three-reel title at a quick autoplay setting can complete a thousand spins an hour. A feature-heavy video slot with cascading reels, animated win celebrations and slow bonus introductions can run at three or four hundred. The difference is a factor of two or three in hourly turnover at the same stake, which is the same as doubling or tripling the stake while the player watches a spinner count. Players who want long sessions should play slowly and choose deliberately paced games; players who set autoplay to maximum are choosing, whether they mean to or not, to multiply their cost per hour.

Turbo modes and quick-spin options are worth naming specifically. Most modern slots ship with a setting that removes the spin animation delay, and it typically raises the achievable spin rate by thirty to fifty percent. At a fixed stake, that is a thirty to fifty percent increase in expected hourly cost, selected with one button in a settings menu. There is no rule against it, and some players prefer the pace, but the cost consequence should be a conscious choice rather than a default inherited from whoever played the game last on the shared device.

Bankroll division across sessions is the other lever. A player with a hundred pounds for the month faces a choice: one long session, four short ones, or twelve brief ones. Because the expected cost is proportional to turnover regardless of how it is split, the arithmetic does not care, but the behaviour does. Shorter sessions with fixed end points are far more likely to finish when planned, because a session that ends at a decided number of spins has an unambiguous stop, while a session that ends when the money runs out has none until it is too late. The casino’s own reality-check reminders, where they exist, work with this grain rather than against it.

A note on what the model leaves out. The chart assumes a smooth grind, which is the behaviour of a low-volatility game. On a high-volatility title the same bankroll at the same stake will frequently not last the modelled duration at all, because the game concentrates its cost into stretches of nothing followed by large events; a player can be wiped out at the two-hour mark of a six-hour model, or still be holding most of the bankroll at hour eight after a big feature. The modelled figure is the average of those outcomes, and volatility determines how often reality lands far from the average. Players sizing a bankroll for a high-volatility game should multiply the modelled requirement, a figure of three to four times being a defensible rule of thumb, or accept that many sessions will end before the planned time.

There is also a stake-sizing discipline specific to bonus clearing. When the objective is completing a turnover requirement rather than maximising session length, the optimum is usually the lowest stake that still completes the requirement inside its expiry window. Turning over four thousand pounds at twenty pence a spin takes twenty thousand spins, which is beyond any expiry window at a realistic pace; at a pound a spin it is four thousand spins, roughly seven hours of play, feasible across a fortnight of evenings. The expiry window, not the bankroll, often sets the minimum workable stake for a bonus, and reading the expiry before the first spin is therefore part of stake selection, not a separate task.

Finally, the maximum-bet rule that sits inside most bonus terms. A common condition is a cap of five pounds per spin while bonus funds are active, and exceeding it even once is routinely treated as grounds to void the balance and its winnings. The cap is printed in the terms, which makes it enforceable, and it sits in a document most players never open, which makes it effective. A player sizing stakes for bonus play should find that figure first and keep every spin under it with a margin, because an accidental overbet on an autoplay setting that runs past a balance transition from cash to bonus funds is one of the most common and most avoidable ways to lose a completed turnover.

Why slots clear wagering cheapest

Game weighting is the term for the share of face value a given game contributes toward a wagering requirement, and it is the reason this page exists inside a bonus-focused site rather than a games encyclopaedia. The convention across the market is simple: slots count at one hundred percent, meaning every pound staked on reels reduces the outstanding requirement by a full pound, while table games, live dealer games, video poker and various instant-win categories count at fractions, commonly between zero and twenty percent. The terms publish the percentages, usually in a table within the general bonus conditions.

The arithmetic of why this makes slots the cheap route deserves working through. Take a bonus requiring four thousand pounds of completed turnover, which is the standard load this costing assumes because that is what this part of the market asks. On slots, the requirement is literally four thousand pounds of stakes. On a roulette table weighted at ten percent, each pound staked reduces the requirement by ten pence, so completing it requires forty thousand pounds of actual stakes. Even though the house edge per pound on that table might be half the slot’s edge, the volume multiplies by ten, and the expected cost multiplies with it: at a two-point-seven percent edge on forty thousand pounds of roulette, the expected cost is one thousand and eighty pounds, against one hundred and sixty pounds for the same requirement on a ninety-six percent slot. The game with the smaller edge costs nearly seven times as much to clear with, purely because of the weighting.

Reading that table, the exceptions teach the rule as clearly as the main case. Blackjack at a half-percent edge would clear the requirement for two hundred pounds if it counted fully, which is exactly why operators weight it down to ten percent or exclude it: a full-weighting blackjack clearance would be nearly free entertainment relative to its expected value. Slots keep their full weighting because their four percent edge already delivers a healthy margin on any volume. The weighting structure is not arbitrary; it is the operator’s defence against the game families that would otherwise make bonuses beatable, and it funnels bonus play toward the reels by simple price signalling.

Within the slots family, further discrimination is common. Progressive jackpot games are often excluded from bonus play entirely or weighted down, because their published returns run lower and their jackpot contribution diverts stake money from the wagering pool. Some terms exclude specific high-return titles or a named list of games. Others cap the stake that counts toward wagering, or void winnings where the excluded list was touched during active bonus play. The five-figure reading order from the general bonus guide applies here with one addition: find the weighting table and the excluded list before deciding which game carries your turnover.

Volatility interacts with the clearing task in a way worth choosing deliberately. A player clearing four thousand pounds on a high-volatility game experiences the wild balance swings described earlier, and the swing risk runs both ways: enough sessions finish far above expectation that the cap, where one exists, becomes a live constraint, and enough finish far below that the balance empties before the turnover completes, forfeiting the bonus and everything attached. Low-volatility games grind the requirement down smoothly, which is statistically the most reliable route to completion even though it is the less exciting play. A reader whose objective is the withdrawable cash rather than the entertainment should weight the game choice accordingly, and a reader whose objective is the entertainment should not be clearing a bonus at all.

Expiry and pace interact with stake size here, as the previous section noted. The realistic plan for a four-thousand-pound requirement inside a fourteen-day window is roughly three hundred spins a day, which at a pound a spin is about thirty minutes of play daily. At fifty pence it is an hour. The player who models this before opting in knows within a minute whether the offer fits their life, and the player who does not model it discovers the answer at day twelve with two thousand pounds of turnover outstanding. The calculator on this page runs the session side of that model directly: bankroll, stake, edge, sessions, and the hours each session lasts.

One structural honesty point closes the section. Clearing a bonus on slots is the cheapest route in the sense of lowest expected cost for the requirement, but cheapest is not free, and for most offers the expected cost of the turnover exceeds the value of the bonus credit. The one hundred and sixty pounds of expected cost against a hundred-pound bonus, from the standard case, is the typical shape. Offers exist where the arithmetic lands in the player’s favour, generally no-wagering structures where there is no turnover to clear and the credit arrives as cash or spins whose winnings are paid directly, and those are the structures worth finding. Where turnover exists, the weighting table tells you which game family clears it at minimum expected cost, and on this market that family is almost always the reels.

The licence gap for slot players

Slots are the game family where the difference between a licensed and an offshore operator is most concrete, because the game’s own published return is the thing at stake. On a site holding a Gambling Commission licence, issued under the Gambling Act 2005, the published RTP sits inside a supervised framework: the licence conditions require fair terms and the publication of the material conditions of any promotion, and the game configuration the player sees is the configuration the regulator’s technical standards police. On an offshore site the same game may run at a different return setting, and the only verification available is the operator’s own claim on its own screen.

The mechanism is worth explaining because it is invisible at the moment of play. Studios build slots with configurable return settings: one title, several published percentages, the operator choosing which to deploy. A licensed operator’s choice is constrained and auditable; an offshore operator’s choice is whatever maximises its margin, and the player has no independent means of checking which setting is running. Two sites can host the identical game and the identical paytable while the underlying return differs by two or three percentage points, and nothing on the reels shows it. The information screen is a promise about configuration, and onshore that promise is supervised while offshore it is not.

The wider protection gap applies as it does across this site’s guides, and it is stated once here rather than repeated through the page. Operators licensed only offshore cannot lawfully hold a British licence or advertise into this market, and playing there forfeits what a British licence carries: registration with GamStop, the national self-exclusion scheme whose exclusions run a minimum of six months and which no licensee may accept wagers from during an active exclusion; deposit limits and the Commission’s requirements on reality checks and self-assessment tools; dispute resolution through an approved alternative dispute resolution body; and the British payment-protection and affordability rules, including the credit card gambling ban in force since April 2020. None of that machinery reaches an offshore cashier, and the honest framing is not that such sites break the rules but that they sit where the rules do not reach.

For slot players specifically, two of those gaps bite hardest. The first is affordability: slots are the fastest-turnover game family in the building, and a player can stake more money per hour on reels than on any table at comparable stakes, which makes the British requirements around affordability and friction more relevant to slots than to any other category. An offshore site carrying none of that friction is precisely where a fast game and a fast cashier meet, and the design of the combination is not accidental. The second is self-exclusion: anyone who has taken a GamStop exclusion and then finds slot play available on an offshore site has not found a loophole, they have found the gap in their own protection, and the honest response is to close the tab.

The tax position deserves its usual precision. Winnings of a British player from a British-licensed operator are not taxed as income, because the operator pays duty on its profits within the British framework. Winnings from an offshore operator sit outside that settled arrangement, and while most recreational balances never raise the question, the treatment of a substantial one depends on the operator’s own structure and jurisdiction, and the tax-free assumption is not guaranteed the way it is onshore. Slot play produces more frequent and sometimes larger individual wins than table play, which makes the point marginally more live here than elsewhere on the site.

Nothing in this section tells a reader what to do, because the decision belongs to the reader and the arithmetic elsewhere on the page serves whichever choice is made. What it does do is fix the price of the choice in the currency that matters: supervision. A published return that is checked, a promotion whose material conditions must be published and fair, a register that follows the player across every licensed site, and a complaints route that answers in English under British law, are the four things a licence buys, and they are exactly the four things an offshore slot session goes without.

Named brands on paper

Names orient a comparison, so the table below carries a spread of operators from the public pool: brands holding UKGC licences shown as the British baseline, and brands treated as offshore at the time of the check shown with the label that reflects it. Every figure is a category-typical range compiled from operator-published terms at the time of writing, not a quote of any single promotion, and none of the licensed rows are claimable at the offshore offers this site’s board carries. The rows are text rather than links, and slots-relevant columns, such as the no-wagering structures several licensed brands run, are visible in the welcome-offer column.

The figures are category-typical ranges compiled from operator-published terms at the time of writing, not quotes of any single live promotion. The UKGC rows are the British baseline shown for comparison, and none of them are claimable at the offshore offers on this site’s board.

The pattern worth reading out of the table is the wagering column in the licensed group clustering lower than the offshore group, and the two structural notes beside it. Several licensed brands now run spin-led or low-wagering welcomes, where the value arrives as spins whose winnings are paid as cash, and those structures remove the entire turnover apparatus this page has been costing. Offshore rows run wider ranges and larger headline figures, which is what an unsupervised promotion can phrase, and their fastest payout rails are crypto rather than domestic wallets. Neither group is endorsed here; the comparison’s value is the two shapes side by side.

For a slots reader specifically, the payout window column deserves emphasis alongside the wagering column. Slots produce more frequent withdrawals than table play at equivalent budgets, because wins are smaller and banked more often, so the cash-out speed shapes the experience more than in any other category. The licensed rows cluster at one to two days, driven by domestic rail settlement, while the offshore crypto rows clear in hours once approval lands, with the standing caveat that approval is the stage where offshore windows stretch. Choosing a cashier is part of choosing a game family, not a separate decision made later at the banking page.

Working the session calculator

The calculator on this page runs in session mode, prefilled with the model this page has used throughout: a hundred-pound bankroll, a fifty-pence stake, a four percent house edge and ten sessions, because those figures reflect a mid-nineties published return at a stake typical of casual play in this market. Change any field and the model reruns. Its two honest uses are pricing a game you have open in another tab, where you have read its return off the information screen, and testing how sensitive your planned session is to the stake you have in mind.

Read the output as three numbers. The first is expected cost per session, which is turnover multiplied by edge: at the prefill, roughly six hundred spins an hour at fifty pence gives three hundred pounds of hourly turnover and a twelve-pound expected hourly cost, so a two-hour session models at twenty-four pounds. The second is bankroll duration, the figure the chart models: how long the money lasts at that pace on average. The third is the number of sessions the bankroll survives at the planned frequency, which converts the single-session answer into a monthly reality.

The edge field is the one to adjust most carefully, because it is the one players guess at. Take it from the game’s information screen by subtracting the published return from one hundred: a ninety-six percent game is a four percent edge, a ninety-four percent game is six. Volatility does not go into the calculator, because it does not change the expected cost, only the distribution around it, and the model reports averages. If you are sizing a bankroll for a high-volatility game, multiply the duration figure by three or four before relying on it, for the reasons the volatility section set out.

What the calculator does not model is anything about outcome. It cannot tell you whether a session wins or loses, and no figure on this page can, because the outcome of any realistic volume of spins is dominated by variance rather than by expectation. What it tells you is the price of the ticket: what an hour of a given game at a given stake is expected to cost, how long a given bankroll should last, and how the answer moves when you change the stake. That is the whole practical content of return to player and volatility combined, expressed in hours and pounds instead of percentages, and it is the number to compare against what you would happily pay for any other evening’s entertainment.