eCOGRA (eCommerce and Online Gaming Regulation and Assurance) has been monitoring various aspects of the online gambling industry since as far back as 2003. This non-profit organisation is in fact an internationally accredited testing agency and one of their areas of expertise is to calculate on a monthly basis the average return to player percentages at various online casinos. This is also known simply as the RTP %. It tells us how much the casino keeps as profit, but it also tells us how much the casino is paying back to its players.

If for example the RTP % for All Games at a casino is 97.29%, for, let’s say December, this basically reveals that 97.29% of all wagers in the casino were returned to the players and the casino operator kept the remaining 2.71% as profit. In other words, if players wagered AU$8,000,000 (with the same 97.29% RTP), the players would have received AU$7,783,200 in winnings and the casino would have kept the remaining AU$216,800 for themselves.

eCOGRA monitors most Microgaming powered online casinos and they publish this information on a monthly basis, but the latest info is generally published at least two months after the month under review has passed. Therefore you could only read the December casino payout reports at some point in February, and so on. Let’s just take a quick look at some of the January 2014 online casino payout percentage reports for several top Australian online casinos.

At Royal Vegas Casino, we can see that in January the RTP % for Table Games was calculated at 99.57% and for Poker Games it was 98.43%. For Slot Games (Pokies) it was 95.76% and for All Games combined, it was 96.83%.

At Jackpot City Casino, the results were as follows. For All Games combined, the RTP % was 96.49%. For Table Games it was 96.77%, for Poker Games it was 95.03% and for Pokies it was 96.47%. At Riverbelle Casino, the RTP % for All Games combined was 95.55%. For Table Games it was 97.12%, for Poker Games it was 97.33% and for Pokies it was 95.45%.

At Gaming Club Casino, the RTP % for All Games was 96.11%, for Table Games it was 97.19%, for Poker Games it was 98.03% and for Pokies it was 95.89%. At Spin Palace Casino, the RTP % for All Games was 95.58%, for Table Games it was 97.41%, for Poker Games it was 97.60% and for Pokies it was 95.28%.

From these results you can clearly see that there is very little difference between these casinos when comparing the average RTP % for certain game categories and that most of these results tend to be somewhere between 95.00% and 99.00%.