Odds & Margins
Margin index, October 2026: how much bookmakers kept on football
Median margin on the 1X2 full-time result, 31 daily readings: Betflag 9.90%, Betsson 10.38%, bwin 9.01%, Netwin 8.89%. Against September it rose for all three operators measured in both months.
Published 14 November 2026
In October 2026 the median margin on the football 1X2 full-time result was 9.90% for Betflag, 10.38% for Betsson, 9.01% for bwin and 8.89% for Netwin: OddSonar measured it from the operators' official feeds in 31 daily readings, from 1 to 31 October, over an average listing of 1,385 football matches a day.
The margin is the share of the stake a bookmaker keeps whatever the result. Operators are in alphabetical order, here and in every table of this piece: this is a measurement, not a ranking, and the same measurement changes a lot from one competition to another, as shown further down.
The month across the whole listing
| Operator | October 2026 | Valid days | Matches a day (median) | September 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Betflag | 9.90% | 31 | 888 | 8.99% |
| Betsson | 10.38% | 30 | 1,323.5 | 9.87% |
| bwin | 9.01% | 20 | 555 | – |
| Netwin | 8.89% | 31 | 683 | 8.30% |
Median of the daily median 1X2 margins, matches not yet started. A day counts for an operator only if it priced at least 100 matches that day. Readings from 1 October at 04:19 to 31 October at 01:59, Italian time, one a day.
Where the series has gaps, we say so. Betsson is missing on 10 October. bwin enters our readings on 7 October and does not appear from the 10th to the 14th: its 20 days do not cover the whole month, and for bwin there is no comparison with September. Eurobet has been in the comparison since 10 November: we have no October data for it.
Three things the month says
First: against September the margin rose for all three operators measured in both months. Betflag goes from 8.99% to 9.90%, Betsson from 9.87% to 10.38%, Netwin from 8.30% to 8.89%. The gap between the month's highest and lowest figure is 1.49 percentage points.
Second: the whole listing costs more than the main leagues. The listing holds hundreds of matches from lower divisions, and that is where the margin widens; in the five major leagues the month's medians sit between 3.90% and 7.50%.
Third: the order between operators changes with the competition. Across the whole listing bwin sits below Betflag and Betsson; in the five major leagues it has the highest figure of the four, from 7.19% in the Bundesliga to 7.50% in Ligue 1; in the Champions League it drops to 5.66%, below Betflag and Betsson. Asking which operator keeps least in general leads to a wrong answer almost everywhere.
Competition by competition
| Competition | Betflag | Betsson | bwin | Netwin |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Serie A | 6.52% (20) | 6.51% (21) | 7.22% (15) | 3.90% (19) |
| Premier League | 6.66% (21) | 5.73% (21) | 7.43% (16) | 4.86% (21) |
| LaLiga | 6.99% (21) | 6.59% (21) | 7.32% (15) | 4.99% (20) |
| Bundesliga | 6.85% (20) | 6.53% (21) | 7.19% (17) | 4.91% (19) |
| Ligue 1 | 7.00% (16) | 6.62% (18) | 7.50% (12) | 4.96% (18) |
| Champions League | 6.96% (18) | 5.78% (20) | 5.66% (16) | 5.01% (21) |
| Europa League | 7.04% (18) | 6.57% (19) | 5.80% (6) | 6.03% (17) |
| Conference League | 9.20% (15) | 8.76% (16) | 9.57% (7) | 7.96% (14) |
| Serie B | 7.23% (16) | 9.80% (21) | 9.05% (17) | 5.06% (15) |
| Championship | 7.79% (20) | 5.75% (19) | 7.43% (15) | 7.21% (15) |
| Eredivisie | 7.94% (19) | 5.78% (21) | 7.33% (8) | 7.96% (16) |
| Primeira Liga | 8.02% (16) | 8.72% (15) | 8.56% (8) | 7.85% (15) |
The per-competition measurement starts on 11 October: until the day before, the archive grouped matches by the feed's name, and «Serie A» also swept in leagues from other countries. We do not use those ten days. In brackets, the days out of 21 on which the operator priced at least 8 matches of that competition: only those days enter the median. Competitions follow the Index's order, not margin order.
Netwin has the lowest figure in the row in nine competitions out of twelve; in the Championship and the Eredivisie it is Betsson, in the Europa League bwin. The widest gap is in Serie B: 9.80% for Betsson and 5.06% for Netwin, 4.74 points.
Where the number is thin
bwin's cells in the Europa League (6 days), Conference League (7), Eredivisie and Primeira Liga (8) rest on few days: they are indications, not solid measurements, and we leave them in the table saying so rather than removing them. European cups play few dates a month, so for the other operators too there are fewer days than in the leagues.
One more caveat: a match stays in the listing for several days before it is played, so the average 1,385 matches a day are not 1,385 different matches. The measurement is the margin of the listing as it stood each day, not a count of the month's matches. And until 9 October matches in progress were not yet excluded: readings fall at night, when few are played, but the rule fully applies only from the 10th.
How we measure it
For each match we turn the three full-time result prices into implied probabilities (1 divided by the price), add them up and subtract 1. Each day we take the median per operator, across the whole listing and per competition; the month's figure is the median of those daily medians. Matches in progress are left out. Betsson and StarCasino share the group's prices and count as one operator.
Free to cite with attribution to OddSonar (oddsonar.com). The full daily series, by operator and market, can be downloaded as CSV from the Index page.
Today's margins, the month-by-month series and the CSV: Margin index
The margin calculation in full: What the bookmaker's margin is, and how to measure it on a 1X2
Why the same operator costs differently from one league to another: How much the margin changes between leagues
Keep reading
- Low odds or high odds: where the bookmaker keeps more
Across 12,459 matches in the five big leagues, backing every outcome priced between 5 and 10 lost 13.3% of the stake; below odds of 1.50, 1.7%. The margin does not weigh the same on every price.
- How live odds work, and why books can't be compared in running
In running the price is rebuilt at every event, and not every book publishes one: mid-match the gap between two operators measures not the price but the distance from one left standing at kick-off.
- How to work out implied probability from decimal odds (with examples)
It takes one division: 1 divided by the price. What that number really says, why a market's outcomes add up to more than 100%, and how to normalise them before comparing.