Coral is the third of Britain’s three national betting shop brands and, since 2016, the sister brand of Ladbrokes within Entain. Its shops have a different footprint from the other two: fewer in Scotland, none in Northern Ireland, and a stronger presence in the towns of southern and central England. This page sets out what Coral’s own published data tells us about its shops, and the company facts a customer might want to check.
Shops at a glance
| Shops listed on BookieFinder | 1,111 |
| England | 1,004 |
| Scotland | 71 |
| Wales | 36 |
| Shops with published opening hours | 1,063 (95.7%) |
| Shops with no hours in the source | 48 |
| Shops open on Sunday | 1,060 |
| Most common weekday hours | 08:30 to 22:00 (147 shops) |
| Most common Saturday hours | 08:00 to 22:00 (187 shops) |
| Most common Sunday hours | 09:30 to 19:00 (95 shops) |
| Source | Coral shop locator, collected September 2026 |
Our Coral data comes from the company’s shop locator, which publishes an address, coordinates and seven-day hours for each shop. Coral’s source is the least complete of the three national brands on hours: 48 shops (4.3%) are listed with no opening times at all. On BookieFinder those shops show “Hours unavailable”, which is not the same as closed. If you know one of them, the report link on its page is the quickest way to help us fill the gap.
Where the shops are
| Town or city | Shops |
| London | 84 |
| Stoke-on-Trent | 20 |
| Birmingham | 16 |
| Southampton | 15 |
| Bristol | 14 |
| Nottingham | 14 |
| Reading | 14 |
| Bedford | 12 |
| Manchester | 12 |
| Glasgow | 12 |
The list looks different from William Hill’s or Ladbrokes’. London still leads, but with 84 shops rather than 136 or 186, and the rest of the top ten is made up of mid-sized English towns and cities: Stoke-on-Trent, Southampton, Reading and Bedford appear here and nowhere else. Coral’s 1,004 English shops represent 90% of its estate, a higher share than either rival. Search by postcode in the shop finder or browse the town pages.
Opening hours
Coral shops close earlier, on average, than William Hill or Ladbrokes shops. Of the 1,063 shops with hours, 381 (36%) close at 22:00 on weekdays, compared with 71% at William Hill. A further 203 close at 21:30 and 153 at 21:00, and a large group of 260 shops close at 19:00 or 20:00. Opening times are more uniform than closing times: 498 shops open at 08:30, 222 at 09:00 and 212 at 08:00.
Sunday hours at Coral are shorter still. The most common patterns are 09:30 to 19:00 (95 shops), 10:00 to 19:00 (92 shops) and 09:00 to 22:00 (77 shops), with a further 70 running 09:00 to 19:00. In other words, most Coral shops are closed by 19:00 on a Sunday. Check the shop page before setting out.
These are the standard hours Coral publishes. The locator does not include bank holiday or event-day hours, and no betting shop in Great Britain opens on Christmas Day.
Licence and regulation
Coral’s shops are operated by Coral Racing Limited (Companies House number 00541600), whose registered office is at One Stratford Place, Montfichet Road, London E20 1EJ. For Gambling Commission purposes, Coral’s betting shops are licensed under Ladbrokes Betting & Gaming Limited, account number 1611: each Coral premises on the Commission’s public register names Coral Racing Limited as the operator and Ladbrokes Betting & Gaming Limited as the licensee. Each shop also holds a premises licence from its local council, which is the body to contact about a specific shop’s licensing.
Because the licence is shared, regulatory action against the licensee applies to both brands. The most significant was the £5.9 million settlement announced by the Gambling Commission in July 2019 for anti-money-laundering and social-responsibility failings at Ladbrokes Coral between 2014 and 2017, before GVC acquired the group.
Ownership and history
Coral takes its name from Joe Coral, who began taking bets at London greyhound tracks in the 1920s and opened betting shops when they became legal in 1961. The business was bought by the brewer Bass in 1981, sold to Ladbrokes in 1998 and then, on the order of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, sold on to a management buyout in 1999. It merged with Gala bingo in 2005 to form Gala Coral Group.
Gala Coral and Ladbrokes merged in November 2016 to form Ladbrokes Coral Group, after the Competition and Markets Authority required about 360 shops to be sold to preserve local competition. GVC Holdings bought the group in March 2018 and became Entain in December 2020. The 2019 cut in the maximum fixed-odds betting terminal stake to £2 prompted closures across the group, and the Coral estate has since settled at a little over 1,100 shops.
Coral and Ladbrokes
The two brands share an owner, a head office, a Gambling Commission licence and much of their technology, but they keep separate shop networks, separate locators and separate hours, and they are frequently found on the same high street. BookieFinder lists them separately. See the Ladbrokes profile for that brand.
Online
Coral.co.uk operates online sports betting and casino games under the same licensee. This profile covers the shops and does not review the website. Any Coral offers we list appear on the offers pages, marked as commercial content with their conditions.
Corrections
If a Coral shop near you has moved, closed or changed its hours, or if you can supply hours for one of the 48 shops showing “Hours unavailable”, use the report link on that shop’s page. Read about how we verify shop data.