Flutter to cut up to 1,400 UK and Ireland jobs over gaming tax rise

Flutter Entertainment plans to cut up to 1,400 jobs in its UK & Ireland business, about 15.6% of the 9,000 people it employs there. The owner of Paddy Power, Sky Betting & Gaming and Betfair committed to the restructuring plan on 20 October 2026, according to a Form 8-K it filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission the same day.

The company began notifying affected employees on 20 October. The plan covers staff in the UK and Ireland and UK&I staff at Flutter hubs, including Porto in Portugal and Cluj-Napoca in Romania. Its press release also names Leeds and Dublin.

The details

• Flutter estimates pre-tax charges of about $80m to $90m, mainly cash spent on severance, benefits and related costs.
• It also expects non-cash charges for stock-based compensation, which it says cannot yet be reasonably estimated.
• The company expects to substantially complete the plan by the end of 2026, with charges falling in the fourth quarter, subject to legal and employee consultation requirements.
• The press release says the plans are subject to consultation, so the final number of redundancies may differ from “up to 1,400”.

Flutter says the cost was already included in the updated guidance it issued with its results for the quarter ended 30 June 2026. At that point it raised its guidance for restructuring, transaction and integration costs to $500m.

Why it matters

Flutter links the cuts to the UK tax increases announced in the Autumn 2025 Budget. According to the release, iGaming duty rose 19 percentage points to 40% from April 2026. Duty on sports betting, excluding horseracing, rises 10 percentage points to 25% from April 2027.

In a footnote, Flutter says the total adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) impact of the 2027 changes to UK iGaming taxes is $540m, which it expects to offset with $201m of first-order mitigation. The release says this restructuring forms part of its first-order cost mitigation.

Kevin Harrington, chief executive of Flutter UK & Ireland, said the group “cannot fully absorb a rise of this magnitude without reducing our fixed cost base”.

The big picture

The filing comes less than three weeks after Flutter’s chief legal officer, Don Liu, resigned and the company secretary took over on an interim basis.