Penalty Betting Rules: Awarded, Scored, Missed and Retaken

The short version

• The Laws decide what happened; your operator’s rules decide what a bet does with it. A retake, a cancelled goal or an overturned award is fixed by Law 14 and the VAR protocol. Whether a cancelled kick counts as “missed” is fixed by the betting rules you accepted.
• Every Premier League penalty is checked by VAR. A penalty given on the pitch can be overturned, and one not given can be awarded after a review. The first decision is not always the one that stands.
• A retaken kick replaces the first one. A save followed by a retake is not a miss under the Laws, and a goal followed by a retake is not a goal.
• A penalty at the end of a half cannot be followed up. Once time has been extended for the kick, a rebound tap-in does not count.
• Shoot-out kicks are outside the match. They produce no penalty awarded, scored or missed for ninety-minute markets.

Awarded: when a penalty is given, and when it is taken away

The Premier League’s published VAR procedure is explicit: all penalties awarded are automatically checked, and the VAR also looks for penalties the referee did not give. The check covers two things — the incident itself, and any offence by the attacking team in the attacking possession phase, the passage of play that led to the penalty.

How a decision is reversed depends on what kind of decision it is. Factual matters, such as an offside or the ball having gone out of play earlier in the move, are passed on by the VAR, and the referee overturns the penalty. Subjective matters, such as whether contact was a foul or whether a handball was an offence, go to a pitchside review only when the evidence shows a clear and obvious error, and the final decision stays with the referee. If a penalty is overturned and the attacking team did nothing wrong, play restarts with an uncontested dropped ball for the defending team.

There is a 2026/27 addition that most bettors have not met yet. Under an IFAB trial approved in April 2026, which the Premier League lists in its guidance for this season, the VAR can review an attacking team’s offence that happens before a corner or free kick is taken, when it has a direct impact on, among other outcomes, a penalty kick conceded by the defending team. The IFAB names the offences it has in mind: holding, pulling, pushing and blocking. If the referee agrees after a review, the penalty is gone and the corner or free kick is retaken. A shirt-pull that went unpunished at the time can therefore cancel a penalty given a few seconds later. The same review can take a goal off the board, and what that does to each market is in our guide to disallowed goals and how bets settle.

For a Penalty Awarded bet this leaves two questions that only your operator’s rules can answer. First: does “awarded” mean the decision as it finally stood, or the moment the referee pointed to the spot? Second, for markets tied to a period of the match: which time counts — the minute of the foul, or the minute the penalty was finally given after a review that may have taken three? Both answers are written down in the football rules of any UK-licensed operator, usually under a heading for penalties or for VAR, and both are worth reading before a bet rather than after a disputed one.

The penalty that cannot be followed up

If a penalty is awarded at the very end of a half, Law 14 allows extra time for it to be taken and completed. The same passage then narrows what counts as completing it. Once additional time has been allowed, the kick is over when the ball stops moving, goes out of play, is played by any player (the kicker included) other than the defending goalkeeper, or the referee stops play for an offence by the kicker’s team.

Read that against the two ways a save can end. If the goalkeeper parries and the ball runs back to the kicker, the kick is completed the moment the kicker touches it: a follow-up goal does not count, and neither does one from a team-mate. If the goalkeeper gets a hand to it and the ball carries on into the net, it is a goal, because the goalkeeper is the one player whose touch does not end the kick. In normal time a rebound is live; in time added for the kick it is not. For over/under, correct score and anytime scorer bets, those are the difference between a winner and a loser.

The same law adds one more line: if a defending player, the goalkeeper included, commits an offence during that extended kick and the penalty is missed or saved, it is retaken. The half can therefore run on for two kicks, not one. How the rest of the added time is built, including the Premier League’s 2026/27 rule that a penalty counts as exact time from award to restart, is in our guide to added time and what your bet covers.

Cards, penalty takers and the injured player

Penalties produce cautions of their own, and card markets feel them. The kicker is cautioned for an illegal feint after the run-up, for offending at the same moment as the goalkeeper, and the player who takes the kick in place of the identified kicker is cautioned too. A goalkeeper whose offence forces a retake is only warned the first time in a match, and cautioned for any later offence. A warning is not a yellow card, so it adds nothing to a total-cards or booking-points line; the second one does.

One 2026/27 Premier League change bears on penalty-taker bets. The League now requires a player whose injury stops play to leave the pitch and stay on the touchline for at least a minute after the restart, but lists exceptions, and one of them is a player who is injured and will take the penalty kick. A fouled player who normally takes the team’s penalties is not forced off before the kick by the new rule.

For scorer markets in general — own goals, first scorer, void rules for players who come on late — see our goalscorer betting rules. A penalty goal is an ordinary goal for all of them; the only thing that makes it unusual is that the Laws can cancel it after it has crossed the line.

Shoot-outs are a different event

Law 10.3 states that penalties in a shoot-out are taken after the match has ended. So they are not penalties awarded in the match, and they add no goals to any market that counts them: a cup tie that finishes 1-1 and is won 5-4 on penalties is 1-1 for every ninety-minute bet. Shoot-outs carry their own markets, normally void if the tie never gets that far. The full reasoning, and a check on to-qualify prices, is in our guide to extra time and penalties.

Reading a Yes/No penalty price

Penalty Awarded is usually offered as a two-way market, which makes it one of the few places the operator’s margin sits in plain sight. Take an illustrative line, not a live one: Yes at 3.25 and No at 1.30. The implied probabilities are 1/3.25 = 30.8% and 1/1.30 = 76.9%, which add up to 107.7%. The 7.7 points above 100 are the margin. Taking it out proportionally gives a fair price of about 3.50 on Yes and 1.40 on No. Our margin calculator does that arithmetic for any line, and the odds converter switches between fractional and decimal if the prices are quoted in a different format.

A penalty market also sits badly inside a bet builder. “Penalty awarded” and “the usual penalty taker to score” are not independent events, and a builder that prices them as if they were is pricing something other than what you think you are buying. Our guide to bet builders and correlation explains why, and the Premier League 2026/27 guide collects the season’s other settlement rules in one place.

What this page does not cover

It names no operator and quotes no operator’s rules word for word. Those rules are the contract for a bet and differ between firms; the Laws decide what happened on the pitch, the operator decides what a bet does with it. It carries no live prices, no selections and no predicted line-ups. The VAR procedure described is the Premier League’s; other competitions use the same Laws but can apply VAR differently, or not at all.