Back the same horse in the same race with the same stake and you can still be paid three different amounts. It depends on which price your bet is tied to: the price you took when you struck the bet, the official Starting Price returned when the race went off, or the Betfair Starting Price generated on the exchange at the same moment.
Most punters never think about this. They see 7/2 on a board or an app, the horse wins, money arrives, done. But the gap between these three settlement routes is real, it is measurable, and over a season it adds up to more than the odd length. Racing is decided in lengths. Betting is decided in minutes — and sometimes in the small print of how your bet settles.
This piece walks through how each of the three prices is actually produced, what changed about the SP in 2020, and what the published evidence says about which one has tended to pay more. None of it will turn losing bets into winning ones. Most punters lose over time whichever price they settle at, and nothing here changes that. What it changes is whether the bets you do have are paid at the best available version of the price.
What the Starting Price actually is now
The SP is the official price at which off-course bets are settled when no price was taken. It is overseen by the Starting Price Regulatory Commission, an independent body known as the SPRC, and since June 2020 it has been generated not from the on-course betting ring but from a sample of major off-course bookmakers.
Under the rules the SPRC introduced in May 2022, the sample was drawn from seven brands: bet365, Betfred, Ladbrokes, Paddy Power, Sky Bet, Unibet and William Hill. Coral was left out because the SPRC judged its prices too similar to those of Ladbrokes, its stablemate within Entain. To qualify, a firm's prices must be freely available to UK customers, must carry each-way terms derived from the win-only price, and the firm must account for at least 1% of the UK market for betting on British racing. The rules allow the sample to run from a minimum of six firms up to a maximum of 24, and they were revised again in July 2024.
The method itself is simple. At the moment the race starts, each sample firm's price for each runner is recorded. The SPRC's own description: the prices are ordered from longest to shortest, the list is divided into two equal halves, and the SP is the shortest price in the half containing the longest odds — in effect a median. A validator checks for technical problems before the returns are confirmed.
So when your bet settles "at SP", you are being paid at roughly the middle of what seven large firms were quoting at the off. Not the best of them. The middle.
How it used to work, and why it changed
For most of betting history the SP came from the racecourse. Returns had been generated from the on-course market since the 18th century: sample bookmakers in the ring, their boards read at the off, the SP struck from what they were offering. The theory was that the ring was a genuinely competitive market — real bookmakers taking real money against each other in public.
Covid ended that. When racing resumed behind closed doors in June 2020, there was no ring to sample, so the SPRC switched to off-course prices as a stopgap. In March 2021 it made the change permanent, noting that on-course betting by then accounted for only about 1.4% of the total money bet on British racing. A market that small, the argument ran, could no longer claim to represent the whole.
Did the change help or hurt the punter? The Horseracing Bettors Forum tracks the overround per horse — the margin baked into the SP returns, spread across the field. On its figures, the on-course SP ran at roughly 1.85% to 2.1% per horse in the years before Covid, while the off-course version started lower, around 1.7% in the summer of 2020, and has since drifted between about 1.7% and 1.9%. In a twelve-runner race, 1.9% a horse means a book of roughly 123% — and if that number means nothing to you, read reading the overround first, because it is the single figure that tells you how expensive a market is. The HBF's sharper criticism is not the level but the control: a handful of firms now set the margin on the returns they themselves pay out at, and the overround has moved around in ways the on-course ring never quite managed.
The board price: what you take is what you get
The second settlement route is the one you choose yourself. Take 7/2 (4.50) on the morning show, or off the boards at the track, and your bet settles at 7/2 whatever happens afterwards — SP can come in at 5/2 or drift to 9/2 and your return does not move.
Taking a price is a position. You are saying the current quote is bigger than the price this horse will go off at, or at least bigger than it deserves. Sometimes the market agrees with you and the horse shortens; sometimes it laughs at you and the horse drifts. The one standard exception is a withdrawal: if a rival is taken out after you bet, a Rule 4 deduction can be applied to your winnings to rebalance the book. That is a proper subject in its own right — see Rule 4 deductions — but the short version is that an early price is fixed against the market and not against the race conditions.
Best Odds Guaranteed: the one-way option
Best Odds Guaranteed — BOG — is the product that changes this calculation. With BOG, you take a price, and if the SP is bigger, you are paid at SP instead. You get the better of the two numbers. Take 7/2, watch it shorten to 5/2: you keep 7/2. Take 7/2, watch it drift to 9/2: you are paid at 9/2.
Most of the large firms offer it on UK and Irish racing — bet365, William Hill, Ladbrokes, Coral, Paddy Power, Sky Bet, Betfred and Betfair Sportsbook among them — but the terms differ and they matter. bet365 and Paddy Power apply it from 8am on the day of the race; William Hill from 10am, and on the win part only. Some firms require an opt-in. None of them applies it to ante-post bets, and BOG never applies to the Betfair Starting Price. Check the current terms with the firm you use, because these things change without ceremony.
What BOG does to your expected return is straightforward: with it, taking a price can never pay less than settling at that firm's SP, and will sometimes pay more. It is a one-way option, and the bookmakers know exactly what it is worth — which is why it is a promotion rather than a right, why the qualifying windows exist, and why accounts that use it too well tend to find it quietly withdrawn. One caution on the name: the "guarantee" is about which of two prices settles your bet. It guarantees nothing about the result. Horses with the best price in the world still get beaten, and usually do.
Betfair SP: the exchange's version of the off
The third price comes from a different machine altogether. The Betfair Starting Price is produced on the exchange at the off by matching the pool of SP backers against SP layers and the unmatched offers in the live market. No bookmaker sets it and no margin is built into it; a BSP market typically adds up to very close to 100%. Instead, Betfair takes a commission on net winnings.
That commission depends on the package you hold. Under My Betfair Rewards, the no-frills Basic package has charged 2% on winnings, with the standard package at 5% and a promotions-heavy tier above that; Betfair has adjusted these rates over time, so check the live figure before you compare anything. From January 2025 the old Premium Charge on the most profitable accounts was replaced by an "Expert Fee" that only applies above £25,000 of annual gross profit — a threshold that is simply not relevant to the ordinary punter.
The structural point is the one to hold on to. Industry SP is the middle of prices that each contain a bookmaker's margin. BSP is the clearing price of a market where backers and layers meet with no margin at all, and the cost is taken afterwards as a percentage of winnings. Those are different objects, and they behave differently.
What the record shows — and a worked example
The published comparisons point the same way. A Geegeez analysis of two full years of UK racing, 2023 and 2024, found that BSP was higher than the industry SP for 97.5% of all runners. The gaps were not trivial: horses returned at even money (2.00) averaged about 2.14 at BSP, and horses returned at 9/1 (10.00) averaged about 12.61. Commission narrows those gaps but, on the figures above, does not close them: knock 5% off the winnings and the even-money average still stands at roughly 2.08, and the 9/1 average at roughly 12.03. The tendency is weakest at very short prices, where the margin per horse is thinnest, and widest among outsiders — where, it should be said, both prices routinely overestimate the horse's real chance.
Here is the same bet settled all four ways. A £10 win bet, board price 7/2 taken in the morning, official SP returned at 3/1, BSP of 4.60.
| How the bet settles | Price | Return on £10 | Profit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Board price taken, no BOG | 7/2 (4.50) | £45.00 | £35.00 |
| Industry SP | 3/1 (4.00) | £40.00 | £30.00 |
| BSP, net of 2% commission | 4.60 | £45.28 | £35.28 |
| BSP, net of 5% commission | 4.60 | £44.20 | £34.20 |
More than five pounds of difference on a single £10 winner, depending on nothing but the settlement route. And if the horse had drifted instead — say the SP came back 9/2 — the plain board price still pays £45, but the same bet with BOG pays £55. The horse ran the same race in every row.
Over large samples, BSP has tended to sit above the industry SP even after commission, and Best Odds Guaranteed pays the better of your price and SP. Against a BOG bet at the same firm, plain SP can never pay more — it is the default, not the choice.
Taking early versus waiting
So when does taking a price beat waiting for the off? With BOG, the question mostly answers itself: against the same firm, a BOG price can never settle below that firm's SP, so the only real cost of taking it early is exposure to a Rule 4 deduction if the market loses a runner. Without BOG, taking early is a genuine judgement call — you are betting on the direction of the market as well as the horse, and the market moves for reasons worth understanding in their own right; going and market moves covers why prices shift as they do.
Waiting for BSP is a different judgement again. You give up the chance to lock a price, and you accept commission, in exchange for a settlement mechanism that the record says has paid more than industry SP far more often than not — particularly in mid-range and bigger prices. What you cannot do is have BOG on it.
None of this is a reason to bet more, or to bet at all. The overround, the commission and the simple difficulty of the game mean that losing remains the normal long-run outcome at SP, at BSP, and at every board price in between. But if you are going to have a bet anyway, there is no virtue in letting it settle at the middle of seven bookmakers' quotes when better-paying versions of the same price exist. Know how each of the three is made, read the terms that apply to your account, and make the settlement route a decision rather than an accident.