UK lottery odds compared: which draw gives the best chance of winning

UK lottery odds compared: jackpot and any prize

The table covers every regular UK number draw: the five National Lottery games, each with its own page here including the new UK Powerball, and The Health Lottery's daily draw. The jackpot and any-prize columns are the operators' published figures for one line in one draw. The last column is ours: the price of a line multiplied by the jackpot odds, which shows how much jackpot chance each pound actually buys.

Two things stand out. Price and odds have to be read together: a £2.00 Lotto line buys two rounds, so per pound it gives exactly the jackpot chance of one round, 1 in 45.1m. And the gap between the top and bottom rows is enormous: a pound spent on The Health Lottery buys a top-prize chance about 552 times better than a pound spent on Powerball, though for a far smaller prize.

Which lottery has the best odds?

"Best" can mean three different things here, and each gives a different winner.

The best odds of a top prize

The Health Lottery's Big Win is the shortest top-prize shot, at 1 in 2,118,760, but the prize is £25,000, shared if more than one line matches. Among National Lottery games, Thunderball leads at 1 in 8,060,598 for a fixed £500,000, followed by Set For Life at 1 in 15,339,390, Lotto at 1 in 22,528,738, EuroMillions at 1 in 139,838,160 and Powerball at 1 in 292,201,338.

The best odds of winning anything

For the chance of any prize, Lotto now leads the number draws at 1 in 4.9 per line, because each line gets two rounds. Next come The Health Lottery at 1 in 9.7, Set For Life at 1 in 12.4, then Thunderball and EuroMillions, both published as 1 in 13, and Powerball at 1 in 13.18 by our count. Per pound the lead narrows: £10 of Lotto, five lines, wins about 1.08 prizes on average, against 1.03 for £10 of The Health Lottery.

The best return on what you spend

The third meaning is the share of stakes that comes back as prizes. The game rules put Thunderball's prize payout at 52.882%, and adding up its fixed prizes against the odds gives the same 52.88p in every pound. Set For Life's fixed prizes come to about 56p in the pound if the top prize is counted at its face value of £3.6 million. Lotto makes about 50% of sales available for prizes, the Allwyn prize fund for EuroMillions is 50% of the EuroMillions entry price, and Powerball pays out 41.2% on average. The Health Lottery says 34% of its takings across all its games go on prizes, and People's Postcode Lottery 40%. No UK lottery pays back more than it takes in.

So the honest answer to which lottery has the best odds is: Thunderball or The Health Lottery for a realistic top prize, Lotto for the chance of winning something, and Thunderball again for the share of your money that comes back. The lottery odds calculator works out any of these for the number of lines and draws you actually play.

What the odds of winning the lottery really mean

Numbers like 22.5 million are too big to feel, so turn them into time. If you bought one line in every draw, the average wait for a jackpot would be:

Another way to see it: one Lotto round has 45,057,474 possible lines. Buying one line every second, day and night, you would need 1.4 years to cover them all. And fifty years of Lotto, one line in every draw, gives a 0.023% chance of a jackpot, or roughly 1 in 4,333.

None of this means nobody wins. Across everyone who plays, big prizes land all the time: Allwyn expects the two-round Lotto to create around 345 millionaires a year. It means that for any one person, the odds of winning the lottery jackpot stay remote on every single ticket.

How lottery odds are worked out

Every figure on this page comes from counting combinations. A draw of k numbers from a pool of n can come out in C(n, k) different ways, and each is equally likely. Your line is one of them, so the jackpot is 1 in C(n, k).

Lower prizes count the lines that match exactly m numbers: C(k, m) ways to pick the right ones, times C(n − k, k − m) ways for the rest to be wrong. When a game draws extra balls from a second machine, as EuroMillions does with its Lucky Stars and Thunderball with its Thunderball, the two chances are multiplied. Lotto's Bonus Ball comes from the same machine as the main numbers, which changes the sum slightly, and since June 2026 Lotto's two rounds per draw roughly halve every figure.

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We worked out every tier of every draw this way and compared the results with the published tables. They all agree to within rounding. The operator mostly rounds up: Lotto Match 4 is 1 in 1,090.17 exactly and printed as 1 in 1,091, and Thunderball's any-prize figure is 1 in 12.38 exactly but printed as 1 in 13. The how we calculate the odds page lists the sources.

Prize tiers and payout structures

Two lines with the same odds can pay very different sums, because UK lotteries pay prizes in three ways. Fixed prizes pay a set amount whatever happens: all nine Thunderball tiers, and every Lotto tier below the jackpot, from £1 for Match 2 to £1,000,000 for Match 5 + Bonus Ball. Pari-mutuel prizes give each tier a share of the money and split it between everyone who matches: every EuroMillions tier works this way, so a popular combination pays less per winner. Shares of sales set a prize as a percentage of what the draw took, as in Powerball's lower UK tiers.

Jackpots mix these. The Lotto jackpot is 8.88% of draw sales, shared between the winners of both rounds, with at least £1 million per winner guaranteed. The EuroMillions jackpot rolls over up to a cap of €250 million. Set For Life's top prize is a fixed £10,000 a month for 30 years, and Powerball's jackpot is pooled with the US game and paid over 30 years. The prize column is on each game's own page: Lotto odds, EuroMillions odds, Thunderball odds, Set For Life odds and Powerball odds.

Where the money goes: 55p in the pound

The Gambling Commission publishes what happens to each pound spent on the National Lottery. For April 2024 to March 2025, across all games including scratchcards, the split was:

The official table joins the operator's costs and profit into one 7p figure, so there is no separate published profit number for that year. A figure of 56p that circulates for prizes is a projection from the licence, not what was actually paid. Lotto on its own is a little lower than the average: its fixed prizes return 36.45p per pound and the jackpot another 8.88p.

Winning myths: lucky numbers, hot balls and more lines

Lucky and unlucky numbers. Every line has exactly the same chance. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 is as likely as any other set of six. What your choice can change is the prize: on a shared tier, numbers many people pick, such as birthdays, mean more winners splitting the same pot.

Hot and cold numbers. A ball that has not come up for months is not "due", and one that keeps appearing is not "hot". The machines have no memory, so each draw starts fresh.

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More lines per draw or more draws? Ten different Lotto lines in one draw give a jackpot chance of 1 in 2,252,873.95. One line in each of ten draws gives 1 in 2,252,874.18. The two are the same to within a quarter of a line in two million, and they cost the same. The single draw edges it only because different lines in one round can never both hit the jackpot, so none of the chance is wasted on a double win.

Rollovers improve the odds. They do not. A rollover makes the prize bigger; the number of possible lines stays exactly the same.

Syndicates: more lines, smaller shares

A syndicate pools money to buy more lines, and shares any prize. Ten people buying ten Lotto lines together have ten times the chance of a jackpot that one line has, about 1 in 2,252,874 per draw, but each would get a tenth of it. For every member, the chance per pound and the average return per pound are exactly what they would be alone.

Scratchcards and postcodes against the draws

Scratchcards and instant games advertise much shorter odds than any draw. The National Lottery's 83 online Instant Win Games show overall odds between 1 in 2.28 and 1 in 2.98. That figure counts every prize, including the many that just return the price, and each card has its own prize table and print run. We could not read the official list of shop scratchcards, so we give no range for them; the scratchcard odds page explains what the printed figure means.

People's Postcode Lottery is different again. It costs £12.50 a month for 20 draws, your postcode is your ticket, and the operator says the odds of any prize are better than 1 in 4. Because winners are drawn by postcode rather than by numbered balls, those odds are averages published by the operator, not something you can count. The postcode lottery odds page explains how that works.

Premium Bonds are the odd one out: NS&I pays their interest as prizes in a monthly draw, at odds of 21,000 to 1 for every £1 Bond, and you keep what you put in. Our Premium Bonds odds page has a calculator for what a holding is likely to win.

How UK lotteries are regulated

The National Lottery is run by Allwyn under the fourth National Lottery licence, which started on 1 February 2024; Camelot ran it before. The licence is awarded and policed by the Gambling Commission, which also publishes the pence-per-pound breakdown above.

Since 1 October 2021 the minimum age for every National Lottery product has been 18. That rule sits in the National Lottery Regulations, as changed by SI 2021/1009, rather than in the Gambling Act. Society lotteries are separate: they raise money for causes and are run by or for charitable bodies, such as Postcode Lottery Ltd on behalf of 20 Postcode Trusts, or The Health Lottery. The Health Lottery states that players must be 18 or over; we could not confirm People's Postcode Lottery's minimum age from the page we checked.

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To check that a lottery is genuine before you pay, look for the operator's name and its Gambling Commission licence, then find that name on the Commission's public register.

Lottery odds are a price list, not a promise. A ticket is a small, fun gamble for most people, and it should stay that way; if it is becoming more than that, the responsible gambling page has free support and the warning signs to look for.

Next: the calculator and the big two draws

UK lottery odds: questions people ask