Are Slot Bonus Buys Worth It? We Tested 687

Are slot bonus buys worth it? We bought 687 of them to find out. The 2026 FluxPlays Bonus Buy Test found that the typical buy returned 48% of its price, and only one in four made a profit.

Between 15 October and 9 November 2026 we ran test sessions on 471 slots, using their official free-play versions. In 305 of them the game sold a bonus, and we bought it, usually one purchase of each option on offer. That came to 687 purchases, costing $193,451 in play money. $149,391 came back.

No casino, no real money and no cherry-picking: every result below comes from the test records published on our reviews.

These figures are a frozen snapshot taken on 9 November 2026. They will not change as we publish more reviews. You can check them yourself in the game-by-game data, which lists all 687 buys.

Are slot bonus buys worth it? The short answer

The 2026 FluxPlays Bonus Buy Test covered 687 buys across 305 slots. It found:

The typical buy returned 48% of its price. Half of all buys did worse than that.
Only one buy in four made a profit: 168 of 687, or 24.5%.
Half of all the money that came back came from 48 buys, just 7% of the total.
Overall, $1 spent returned 77 cents. Remove the ten biggest results and it falls to 63 cents.
Paying more did not change the typical result. The median stayed between 43% and 50% at every price level.

How much does a slot bonus buy usually pay back?

Bar chart of 687 slot bonus buys: 519 lost money or broke even and 168 made a profit

Returned, compared with the price paid	Buys	Share
Less than a quarter of the price	194	28.2%
A quarter to a half	166	24.2%
A half up to break-even	159	23.1%
More than the price, up to 2x	105	15.3%
2x to 5x the price	49	7.1%
More than 5x the price	14	2.0%

Three out of four buys lost money, and more than half lost at least half of what they cost. Seven paid nothing at all.

Then there is the other end. Our best result was Barn Beats, where a $200 Bonus Premium paid $6,440, or 32.2 times its price. Only two of the 687 buys paid more than 10x. The other was the Gator Hunters 2 Lucky Draw, $285 into $2,923.85.

Why did bonus buys return less than the listed RTP?

The slots in this test have a median listed RTP of 96.26%. Our buys returned 77.2%. That gap does not mean the listed figures are wrong.

RTP is an average over millions of rounds, and a large part of it sits in rare, huge results that 687 buys will mostly never reach. A sample this size is exactly where the average falls short and the typical outcome looks worse than the headline number. Our RTP guide goes through how the figure works.

You can see how much a few rounds matter by removing them. Take away just the ten biggest wins and the return falls from 77.2% to 62.7%.

Does a more expensive bonus buy pay better?

Bonus price	Buys	Total returned	Median buy returned	Made a profit
Under 50x	24	61.1%	48%	12.5%
50x to 99x	121	88.3%	48%	22.3%
100x to 199x	252	79.6%	50%	25.8%
200x to 499x	182	105.2%	47%	23.6%
500x and above	108	63.1%	43%	27.8%

The total column jumps around from 61% to 105%, and that is mostly a handful of large wins landing in one band and not another. The median barely moves. Whether a bonus cost 60x or 600x, the middle result was a little under half the money back.

Do some providers' bonus buys pay better?

Provider	Buys	Total returned	Median buy returned
Pragmatic Play	201	73.4%	46%
Nolimit City	162	63.7%	46%
Hacksaw Gaming	115	90.0%	49%

Totals vary, medians do not. We would not read the differences here as one provider paying better than another.

Is buying a bonus better than spinning for it?

The same 471 slots also got a base-game test, nearly always 100 spins at $1. That is 47,400 spins in all, and they returned 94.0% of what was staked. 27.8% of spins paid something, and free spins triggered naturally once every 166 spins or so.

Base spins and bought bonuses are not the same kind of bet, and the two samples are not comparable round for round. The difference does show how a bought bonus concentrates a session's outcome into one event. For more on the trade-off, see our guide to how bonus buys work.

How we tested, and what this cannot tell you

Every game ran in its official free-play version, with play money.
We usually bought each option once, at the bet the game was tested on, nearly always $1.
Results were logged during play and reconciled against the game's closing balance.
Free-play versions can run a different RTP setting from the version at a given casino.
One purchase of a bonus is a single result, and 687 buys is a small sample for games built around rare wins. These numbers describe what happened in our tests. They do not predict what a bonus will pay.

Each game's full results, including every buy, are on its review. The full data file has one row per buy. If you use these figures, please credit the 2026 FluxPlays Bonus Buy Test and link to this page.