What the Terms Take From a Balance That Is Sitting Still

A balance you are not playing with looks like the safest thing in the account. In the terms of several of the operators UK players are routinely pointed towards, it is the one thing being actively charged. Not the deposit, not the wager, not the withdrawal — the money that stays.

This page is about those clauses specifically: what they charge, what triggers them, how the definitions are written, and how they interact with the limits that decide how fast the balance can leave. Every quotation is from the operator’s own terms, read in August 2026.

What each operator charges an idle account

Operator	What the clause says	Shape of the charge
Mirax	“a monthly administrative fee of a minimum 25 EUR”	Monthly, minimum stated, no maximum stated
BitStarz	“a monthly administrative fee of a minimum 5 EUR”	Monthly, minimum stated, no maximum stated
Wild.io	“$10 or cryptocurrency equivalent … as long as the balance remains positive”	Monthly, runs until the balance is gone
Metaspins	$10 or the equivalent	Monthly
7BitCasino	“a minimum 0.4 mBTC”	Monthly, denominated in coin
KatsuBet	“0.00014 BTC or the equivalent in another currency”	Monthly, denominated in coin
Cloudbet	“Up to 5% handling charge on withdrawals”, plus suspension of accounts inactive over 12 months	Percentage of the exit, not of the balance
mBit Casino	At 36 months inactive the account is “Abandoned” and “any account balance will be forfeited minus administrative fees”	Removal of the balance
KatsuBet	“if we are not able to reach you (by email or phone) in 180 days as from the date of the request for withdrawal, your account remains closed and funds forfeited”	Removal of the balance, counted from your own withdrawal request

Read the second column rather than the third and a pattern appears. Four of the six monthly fees are written as a minimum. A minimum with no stated maximum is not a price; it is a floor with the ceiling left to the operator.

What a monthly minimum does over a year

The arithmetic is small enough to do in your head, which is exactly why it is worth doing. Mirax’s stated minimum of 25 EUR a month removes 300 EUR from a dormant balance over twelve months. BitStarz’s 5 EUR minimum removes 60 EUR. Wild.io’s $10 removes $120, and its clause says nothing about stopping short of zero — it runs “as long as the balance remains positive”, which describes a process rather than a charge.

On a four-figure balance those numbers are an irritation. On the sort of residual balance that people genuinely forget — thirty pounds left after a session two years ago — the fee is the whole of it, and the account reaches zero on its own.

Nothing in these clauses requires the operator to tell you it has started.

Who decides that an account is inactive

Every one of these clauses depends on a definition written by the party that benefits from it, and the definitions are not interchangeable.

• Inactive is usually measured from the last login or the last wager. Logging in without playing may or may not reset it, depending on which of the two the clause names — and the clauses in this set are not consistent about which.
• Dormant is the state the fee attaches to, and it is reached by the passage of time alone.
• Abandoned, in mBit’s wording, is a further state after 36 months at which the balance is forfeited rather than merely charged.
• Closed is different again: Cloudbet reserves the right to suspend accounts inactive for more than twelve months, which is a restriction on access rather than a charge, and getting the account reopened is then a support process rather than a right.

Four words, four different consequences, and no operator uses them all the same way.

Why the fee and the cap have to be read together

A fee that runs monthly is only a problem if the money cannot leave quickly, and the same terms usually govern how fast it can.

Mirax is the clearest illustration because both numbers are in one document: a monthly administrative fee of a minimum 25 EUR on a dormant account, and a withdrawal cap of 0.14 BTC a week — an identical cap to KatsuBet’s, down to the decimal, because both brands are run by the same company. The fee accrues on a monthly cycle. The exit is metered on a weekly one. A balance large enough to take two months to withdraw is a balance that is charged while it queues.

Operator	Cap on withdrawals
KatsuBet, Mirax	0.14 BTC per week, 0.56 BTC per month
7BitCasino	0.16 BTC per week, 0.64 BTC per month
mBit Casino	3 BTC per 7 days, 10 BTC per 30 days
Wild.io	$100,000 per 7 days, $200,000 per 30 days
TrustDice	1,000,000 USDT per month
Bitz	Any single win capped at $300,000, payable “in equal parts within 90 days”

Across the wider library of 100 brands the picture is the same and thinner: only 14 operators publish a cap at all. Six of those write it per week, five per month, two per day and one per individual withdrawal; eight are denominated in euro, three in dollars, two in USDT and one in either. Two figures with different periods are not comparable, and a table that ranks them side by side without the period is telling you almost nothing.

The 86 that publish no cap have not promised there isn’t one. Several of them set it by verification tier, which means the number exists and is simply not shown before you deposit.

The charge that applies on the way out

Cloudbet’s clause is the odd one in this group because it is not a fee on stillness at all: up to a 5% handling charge on withdrawals. Applied to a 2,000 EUR payout that is up to 100 EUR, and the words “up to” mean the operator is reserving a range rather than quoting a price.

Worth noting what this is not. It is not a network fee. Blockchain transaction costs are small, public and paid to miners or validators rather than to the casino; on the networks these operators use they are pennies. A percentage of the withdrawal amount is an operator charge that happens to be collected at the moment a network fee would be.

What actually protects a balance

Not much, and none of it is clever. The four things that matter are all decisions taken before the money is left sitting.

1. Find the inactivity clause before the cap. It is usually in a different section from the withdrawal terms, often under “Dormant Accounts” or inside the general account provisions, and it is the clause most likely to apply to you eventually.
2. Withdraw the remainder rather than leaving it. A residual balance is the specific thing these clauses are written for.
3. Keep the registered email working and monitored. Under the KatsuBet wording that is not housekeeping — it is the condition the forfeiture turns on.
4. Save the terms as they read on the day you deposit. They can be amended, and several operators in this set make an amendment binding the moment it is published rather than when you are told.

That last point is not a footnote to this page; it is the mechanism that makes every figure above provisional, and it has its own page. The related question of what stops a payout in the first place is covered in why the delay is the operator and not the chain, and where UK players stand legally is set out in crypto gambling and UK law.

Questions people actually ask

Are dormancy fees legal?

They exist in regulated markets too, in a much more constrained form. What separates these clauses is the drafting: a stated minimum with no maximum, definitions the operator controls, and no notification requirement. On the British licensed market the Competition and Markets Authority spent 2018 removing exactly this kind of open-ended discretion. Offshore, nothing has removed it.

Does logging in stop the clock?

It depends on whether the clause counts a login or a wager, and the terms in this set differ on that point. Where the clause names activity rather than access, opening the site and closing it again does nothing.

Can a fee take an account below zero?

None of the clauses we read creates a debt owed by the customer. Wild.io’s runs “as long as the balance remains positive”, which is a stopping point rather than a limit on the total taken. The realistic outcome is an account that reaches zero, not one that goes negative.

Why do KatsuBet and Mirax have identical caps?

Because they are the same operator. Both name Scores55 Tech B.V., Curaçao registration 162990, under licence OGL/2024/1307/0748 — as do 7BitCasino and mBit Casino. Four brands, one company, one authorisation, and terms that differ mainly in the numbers.

Written by James Whitlock, Editor-in-Chief. Terms, licence numbers and company records read in August 2026. More about how this site works.