Most players count the wrong holidays. A withdrawal request put in on a Friday afternoon does not wait for your local bank holiday the following Monday, it waits for whatever is happening in the jurisdiction where the operator’s finance and support teams are based. If you are playing at HighSpin, that jurisdiction is Costa Rica, and the public holidays that stall your cashout are the Costa Rican ones, not the ones printed on your wall calendar. This checklist walks through the timing traps that actually move a payout, from the moment a request enters a pending withdrawal state to the point funds land in your account or wallet.
Start the clock where the operator actually sits
HighSpin is operated by Fortaprime SRL, a company registered in Costa Rica. That single fact reshapes every timing assumption you might make about a HighSpin withdrawal time. The finance team that reviews and approves cashouts, the support agents who chase missing documents, and the compliance staff who sign off on KYC are all working to a Costa Rican calendar. When you sit in Manchester or Leeds and see a bank holiday looming, that has no bearing on the approval queue. When Costa Rica takes a day off, the queue stops moving even if your own bank is wide open.
It helps to think of a HighSpin payout time as two separate clocks running in sequence. Operator approval is the first clock, and it covers the internal review of your request: checking that wagering requirements are met, that your identity documents are in order, and that the withdrawal itself is not flagged for manual review. Payment network settlement is the second clock, and it starts only after the first clock has finished. Both clocks can be paused by a holiday, but they are paused by different holidays. The approval clock pauses for Costa Rican public holidays because that is when Fortaprime SRL staff are away from the desk. The settlement clock pauses for holidays in the payment network’s own processing calendar, which is a separate matter entirely.
Players routinely conflate the two. They see a pending withdrawal sitting untouched across a UK bank holiday Monday and assume the operator is slow, when in fact the Costa Rican team was at work and the request may have cleared approval on the Sunday. The delay was downstream, in the card network or the bank’s own batch processing. Knowing which clock you are watching is the difference between a useful support ticket and a frustrated one.
Map Costa Rica’s public holidays before you request a cashout
Costa Rica observes a set of national holidays that will directly affect HighSpin’s support and finance functions. The ones worth marking in your diary include 1 January (New Year), 11 April (Juan Santamaria Day), Good Thursday and Good Friday during Holy Week, 1 May (Labour Day), 25 July (Annexation of the Party of Nicoya), 2 August (Virgin of Los Angeles), 15 August (Mother’s Day), 15 September (Independence Day), 12 October (Cultures Day), 2 November (All Souls’ Day), and 25 December (Christmas). Several of these are moved to the nearest Monday under Costa Rican law, which means the actual day off can shift by a day or two from the nominal date. Holy Week in particular can absorb Thursday and Friday, and in some years the whole week runs at reduced capacity.
If you put in a HighSpin cashout request on the eve of one of these dates, expect the approval clock to stop until the team is back. A request submitted on 14 September, the day before Independence Day, is unlikely to see operator approval until 16 September at the earliest, and if that falls on a weekend, you are looking at the following Monday. That is before the payment network has even been asked to move the money.
There is a second layer most players never consider: Costa Rican holidays that fall on a Tuesday or Thursday often trigger a long weekend by decree, with the holiday shifted to the adjacent Monday or Friday. This is not a quirk you can reliably predict from a generic holiday list, so it pays to check a current Costa Rican government calendar in the week you plan to withdraw rather than relying on last year’s dates.
Build a request-timing checklist that survives weekends
Weekends are the most common source of avoidable delay, and they interact with holidays in ways that compound. A Friday request that misses the approval cut-off does not simply wait until Monday, it waits until Monday in Costa Rica, which may be a holiday, which pushes it to Tuesday, which is when the settlement clock finally starts. Each day of slippage multiplies. The checklist below is designed to keep you ahead of that cascade rather than reacting to it.
First, submit withdrawal requests early in the Costa Rican working day, ideally before midday local time. Costa Rica is on Central Standard Time, six hours behind UK time in winter and seven in summer. A request put in at 6pm UK time on a Thursday is landing at noon in San Jose, which is workable but tight. A request at 10pm UK time is landing at 4pm, near the end of the working day, and is far more likely to roll into the next business day. If you want the approval clock to start the same day, submit in the UK morning.
Second, complete KYC verification before you request a cashout, not after. KYC verification is the biggest cause of payout delays at any operator, and HighSpin is no exception. If your account is unverified when you request a withdrawal, the request enters a pending withdrawal state and sits there while the compliance team asks you for proof of address, a clear photo of your ID, and sometimes a selfie or source-of-funds document. Each back-and-forth adds a day, and if a Costa Rican holiday falls in the middle of that exchange, the delay stretches further. Upload your documents at the point of deposit, not the point of withdrawal, and you remove the single largest variable from the equation.
Third, check your wagering requirements are fully cleared before you request. A cashout request made with bonus funds still in play will be held or partially forfeited, and the review that follows adds time. The operator’s terms spell out the wagering multiple and the contribution rates for different game types, and a few minutes spent confirming your bonus is complete saves days of pending withdrawal limbo.
Fourth, choose your withdrawal method with the two clocks in mind. Crypto payouts settle in minutes once approval is given, because the blockchain does not observe banking days or holidays. Card payouts follow banking days, which means a card withdrawal approved on a Friday afternoon in Costa Rica may not settle until Tuesday or Wednesday depending on the card network’s batch schedule and any holidays in the card issuer’s country. If speed matters and you are comfortable with crypto, the settlement clock effectively disappears. If you prefer cards, budget for the extra days and do not treat a Monday holiday in your own country as the reason for the delay, because it usually is not.
Fifth, keep a note of the exact time and date you submitted the request. When you contact support, this timestamp is the anchor for any conversation about a HighSpin withdrawal time that has run long, and you can refer to https://uk-highspin.com/withdrawal-time/ for guidance. Without it, you are relying on memory and the operator’s own logs, and the conversation becomes circular.
Read the pending withdrawal state for what it is
When you hit the cashout button, your request enters a pending withdrawal state. This is not a queue position; it is a status that means the operator has received the request and has not yet approved it. HighSpin publishes no processing times, so there is no published service level agreement telling you how long pending should last. That absence is itself useful information: you cannot hold the operator to a published standard, so you have to manage timing yourself through the checklist above.
The pending state is where most of the perceived delay lives. It is also where the operator’s internal checks happen. If your account is verified, your bonus is cleared, and your request lands on a Costa Rican working day, pending should clear relatively quickly. If any of those conditions is unmet, pending becomes a waiting room with no visible clock. The practical move is to treat pending as a signal to check your own house is in order rather than to refresh the page.
One more trap: some players submit a second withdrawal request while the first is still pending, assuming the first is stuck. This can trigger additional review and slow both requests. Submit once, note the timestamp, and wait for the status to change.
Separate operator delay from network delay when chasing a payout
When a HighSpin payout time runs long, the first question to answer is which clock has stalled. The approval clock is the operator’s responsibility, and its delays trace back to Costa Rican working days, KYC backlogs, and manual review. The settlement clock is the payment network’s responsibility, and its delays trace back to card network batch schedules, banking days in the receiving bank’s country, and the receiving bank’s own holiday calendar. A card withdrawal can clear operator approval on a Tuesday and still not land until Friday because the card network batches on a different cycle. That is not an operator delay, and treating it as one wastes everyone’s time.
The way to tell them apart is the status of your request. If it is still pending, the approval clock is running and you should be looking at Costa Rican holidays and your own KYC status. If it has moved to approved or processing, the approval clock has finished and you are now waiting on settlement. At that point, the relevant holidays are the ones in your own country and in the card network’s processing calendar, not Costa Rica’s. A UK bank holiday Monday can genuinely delay a card settlement that was approved the previous Friday, because the receiving bank is closed. The Costa Rican holiday delayed the approval; the UK holiday delayed the settlement. Both are real, but they are not interchangeable.
If you are chasing, contact support with three pieces of information: the timestamp of your request, the current status, and confirmation that your KYC is complete. That gives the agent everything they need to check the approval clock without a back-and-forth. If the request is already approved, ask for the settlement reference or the payment provider’s transaction ID, which lets you chase the network directly if needed.
There is also a regulatory angle worth knowing. HighSpin has no UKGC licence, so the dispute routes you might use with a UK-licensed operator do not apply here. The operator is registered in Costa Rica and regulated under that jurisdiction’s framework, which means your practical recourse is the operator’s own complaints process and, if that fails, the relevant Costa Rican authority. This is not a reason to avoid the site, but it is a reason to be disciplined about timing and documentation, because you cannot lean on a UK regulator to speed things along.
For players who find their gambling is causing stress, the usual support routes remain available regardless of where the operator is licensed. GamCare, BeGambleAware, and Gamblers Anonymous all offer free, confidential help, and their resources are worth knowing about before a slow payout turns into a source of anxiety. The operator also posts updates on X under the handle HighSpin_Slots, which is worth checking for service notices around holiday periods, though it is not a substitute for the checklist above.
The practical wrap-up is straightforward. Before you request a HighSpin cashout, verify your account, clear your wagering, check the Costa Rican holiday calendar for the coming week, submit in the UK morning so the request lands in the Costa Rican working day, and choose crypto if you want the settlement clock to disappear. After you submit, note the timestamp, watch the status, and remember that a pending withdrawal is waiting on San Jose, not on your local bank. Do those things and the timing traps stop being traps and start being a schedule you can plan around.
