Rule 4 Deductions: What Comes Off, and Who Decides

It comes off the winnings, never the stake

Start here, because most of the confusion about this rule is really confusion about this one point. A deduction is applied to the profit on a winning bet. Your stake is returned in full, untouched. On a losing bet the rule has no effect whatsoever, which is why a punter can go years without noticing it exists and then meet it for the first time on the day it costs the most.

That makes the whole thing one line of arithmetic. Write your fractional odds as f — the 6 in 6/1, the 0.8 in 4/5 — and the deduction as d expressed as a decimal, so 40p in the pound is 0.40. The bet then settles as though you had taken a shorter price, and that price is exact:

A 6/1 shot with a 40p deduction becomes 1 + 6 × 0.60 = 4.60. A £20 stake returns £92 instead of £140. The £48 difference is not a fee and not a commission; it is the same 40 per cent of the £120 profit, seen from the other side. If you prefer to check a real slip rather than rearrange formulae in your head, our Rule 4 calculator does the same sum with the scale built in, and the odds converter will move you between the fractional and decimal forms the two documents use.

One number decides it, and it is not your horse

The single input to the scale is the price of the horse that was withdrawn, at the moment it was withdrawn. Not the price you took. Not the favourite. Not the size of the field. This is the part that makes the rule predictable rather than arbitrary, and it follows directly from what the deduction is for: a withdrawn horse was carrying a share of the probability in the market, and when it leaves, that share is redistributed to everything still running. The shorter its price, the larger the share it was carrying, and the more the remaining prices were flattered by its presence.

Hence the shape of the scale. A withdrawn odds-on favourite takes a great deal with it and the deduction is severe. A withdrawn outsider at longer than 14/1 was carrying so little that the rule charges nothing at all. If you have read our guide to how betting odds work, the logic is the familiar one of implied probability being redistributed, expressed as a lookup table so that it can be applied at speed in a betting ring.

The published scale, in full

This is the scale set out in the Tattersalls Committee rules on betting, reproduced in full rather than in the truncated form that circulates. Read the left column as the price of the withdrawn horse and the right column as the amount taken from each pound of your winnings.

Two details in that table repay attention. The bands are not evenly spaced, because they track implied probability rather than price: the gap between evens and 6/5 matters far more to a book than the gap between 10/1 and 14/1. And the bottom row is a genuine cut-off rather than a rounding convention — a withdrawal at 16/1 costs a backer nothing, however inconvenient the withdrawal may have been.

What it looks like on a real slip

Take an illustrative £20 win bet struck at 6/1, a price of £140 in returns if it lands untouched. The figures below are not quotes from any operator; they are the same bet run through each rung of the scale so that the shape of the damage is visible at a glance.

The row that surprises people is the last one. A 90p deduction leaves a 6/1 winner settling at 1.60, which is to say a £20 bet on a winning horse returns £32. It is still a profit, and it is still a long way from the £140 on the slip. That row is reached only when an odds-on favourite comes out, or when several withdrawals stack up to the ceiling.

The same reduction flows through a multiple, leg by leg, which is where a modest-looking deduction quietly does real damage: each affected leg is repriced before the legs are multiplied together. Our accumulator calculator and the comparison of full cover bets will show how far a single repriced leg travels through a Lucky 15 or a Yankee.

Four times a deduction does not apply

Knowing when the rule is silent is worth as much as knowing the scale, and it is the half that betting slips never explain.

Two withdrawals, and the ceiling that stops the bleeding

The rule text addresses multiple withdrawals in a single sentence, and it is worth quoting because of what it does not say:

That is a ceiling, not a method. The rule fixes the worst case at 90p and leaves the question of how two figures become one to the terms under which your bet was accepted. The ordinary treatment is additive: two withdrawals attracting 45p and 55p produce 100p on paper, which the ceiling cuts back to 90p, leaving a tenth of the winnings standing. On our illustrative 6/1 bet that is the £32 row above.

We are stating the limit of our own source rather than glossing over it. The rules on betting set the ceiling; they do not prescribe the combination. If two horses come out of a race you have a substantial bet in, the document that answers your question is the operator rules page, and the habit of reading it before rather than after is the same one we recommend in our guide to choosing a betting site.

Where the rule comes from, and why that matters

The deduction scale is not statute and it is not a Gambling Commission requirement. It is published by the Tattersalls Committee, a body whose rules on betting were written for the racecourse, and its preamble describes its own dispute jurisdiction in these terms: the Committee “will hear any betting disputes arising from the application or interpretation of these Rules on Betting or any other betting dispute emanating from on-course transactions”. When you bet online, the scale reaches you because your operator has adopted it into its own contract with you, and it is that contract which binds.

That distinction sounds academic until something goes wrong, at which point it becomes the most practical thing on this page — and it runs the opposite way to what most punters assume. The Tattersalls Committee is listed by the Gambling Commission as an approved alternative dispute resolution provider, described there as providing “an independent dispute resolution service where there is a disagreement between backer and bookmaker over the returns on a bet”. The service is free of charge, the outcome is binding, and a case cannot be brought more than twelve months after the operator has refused to resolve the complaint. A Rule 4 argument is, by definition, a disagreement about the returns on a bet.

The contrast with a complaint that goes nowhere is sharp, and worth carrying around. The Commission tells players plainly that an ADR provider “will not accept complaints regarding a customer service issue” or “the refusal to accept a bet or your custom”, because a gambling business “is free to decide who they accept bets from and on what terms”. That is why an argument about a refused cash out is so much harder to press than an argument about a settled bet: one is about an offer the operator was never obliged to make, the other is about money owed under a contract that has already been performed.

Two Commission requirements sit behind all of this. Licence condition 7.1.1 requires that the terms on which gambling is offered are not unfair within the meaning of the Consumer Rights Act 2015, that they are transparent and made available in an easily accessible way, that customers are notified of material changes before they take effect, and — since the fourth limb was added — that licensees commit no unfair commercial practice within the meaning of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. Social responsibility code provision 6.1.1 is what puts a free ADR route within eight weeks behind an unresolved complaint. Neither obliges an operator to apply the scale; both shape how the term doing so must be written and what happens when you dispute it.

Before you complain, four minutes of preparation

Most disputed deductions are not disputes at all: they are arithmetic done against the wrong base. The four steps below sort the real cases from the false alarms before anyone writes an email.

The other settlement rule that reprices a winning bet works in the opposite direction — it leaves the price alone and cuts the stake instead. If your selection tied for a place rather than losing ground to a withdrawal, our guide to dead heat rules has the same treatment, and the dead heat calculator the same sum. For each-way bets, where a deduction and a place term compound, the each-way calculator and our guide to outright betting and place terms are the right pair. Any term in this piece you have not met before is defined in the betting glossary.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

All four sources below were read on 19 September 2026. Every figure in the worked tables was recalculated independently rather than copied from any of them, and no odds on this page are quotes from any operator.

• Tattersalls Committee, Rules on Betting, including the Rule 4 deduction scale and the preamble on the Committee’s jurisdiction — tattersallscommittee.co.uk
• Gambling Commission, guidance page on the Tattersalls Committee as an approved ADR provider — gamblingcommission.gov.uk
• Gambling Commission, licence condition 7.1.1, fair and transparent terms and practices — gamblingcommission.gov.uk
• Gambling Commission, taking your complaint to an alternative dispute resolution provider — gamblingcommission.gov.uk