Powerball odds: the UK version of the American draw, tier by tier

UK Powerball odds for every prize

Each line has five main numbers from 1 to 69 and one Powerball from 1 to 26, drawn from a separate machine, so the Powerball can carry the same number as a main ball. There are exactly 292,201,338 different lines. The draws, on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday (early hours, UK time), are the American ones. Nine tiers mirror the US game; the tenth, Match 2 without the Powerball, exists only in the UK.

Every published figure agrees with the exact one; the small odds are printed to one decimal place, so Match 3 appears as 1 in 579.8. Unlike the other National Lottery games, Powerball publishes no any-prize figure. Adding the ten tiers gives 1 in 13.18, and without the UK-only Match 2 prize it would be only 1 in 24.87.

How the Powerball odds are calculated

The white-ball machine picks 5 numbers from 69, which can fall in C(69, 5) = 11,238,513 ways, and the red-ball machine picks one Powerball from 26. Multiplied, that is 292,201,338 possible lines, one of which matches everything, so the jackpot figure is exact.

For a lower tier, count the ways your line can hit the right number of main balls. Take Match 4 + Powerball. Your four hits must come from the five numbers drawn, which can happen in C(5, 4) = 5 ways. Your fifth number must be one of the 64 that were not drawn, which gives 64 ways. That is 320 combinations of main numbers, and only 1 of the 26 Powerballs is yours.

The same pattern fills in every row: C(5, k) × C(64, 5 − k) ways to match k main numbers, divided by 11,238,513, then multiplied by 1/26 with the Powerball or 25/26 without it. The lottery odds calculator runs this sum for any number of lines, and how we calculate the odds sets out the method.

One result looks odd until you count. Matching no white balls but the Powerball (1 in 38.32) is more likely than matching one with it (1 in 91.98), because there are 7,624,512 ways to miss all five and only 3,176,880 ways to hit exactly one.

Shared prizes and what they are likely to pay

Only two UK Powerball prizes are fixed: £1,000,000 for Match 5 and £8 for the UK Match 2. The jackpot is shared with the US, and the other seven tiers each receive a set percentage of UK sales for the draw, split equally between everyone in the UK who matches. The percentages assume £1 = $1.25, to mirror the American prizes. A tier's share divided by its expected number of winners gives its average prize: sales of S buy S ÷ £4 lines, of which p × S ÷ £4 win, so the average is the share × £4 ÷ p.

These are averages, not promises: when more UK lines than usual match a tier, each gets less, and with far fewer UK lines sold than for Lotto, one or two winners can move a prize a long way. Adding the shares up also accounts for the whole payout. The jackpot takes 13.6% of sales and the seven shared tiers 18.5%. The fixed £1 million and £8 prizes, multiplied by their odds, come to 9.3% between them, 7.1% of it from the £8 alone. The total is 41.4%, within a fraction of a point of the 41.2% the rules give as the average payout.

AI

The jackpot shared across the Atlantic

The top prize is the American Powerball jackpot itself. Each UK line is an entry into the same pool as every ticket sold in the US, so a UK winner shares the jackpot with any American who matches the same numbers in that draw. The pool rolls over until someone wins, and it has no cap. Press coverage of the launch put the starting UK jackpot at about £12 million.

How it is paid matters as much as its size. The advertised figure is the total of 30 payments: one when you claim and 29 more, a year apart. A jackpot quoted at £300 million is therefore £10 million a year on average, not £300 million on the day. UK jackpots are paid at once; only Set For Life also pays its top prize over time, and it quotes the monthly amount.

A rolling jackpot makes the prize bigger, not easier to win: it stays 1 in 292,201,338 for every line. What rises is the chance of sharing, because big jackpots sell more tickets on both sides of the Atlantic.

What the Powerball odds mean in practice

Suppose you bought one line for every draw, three a week, which is 156 lines and £624 a year. You would expect to wait about 1,873,086 years, on average, for the jackpot. Over fifty years the chance of winning it even once is about 1 in 37,462. Even the fixed £1 million for Match 5 would take, on average, about 74,923 years of playing every draw.

The smaller prizes arrive much more often. With the any-prize chance of 1 in 13.18, those 156 lines would produce about 12 wins in a typical year, mostly the £8 Match 2 and the Powerball-only tier. At the 41.2% average payout the year's £624 would bring back about £257, much of the rest going into a jackpot almost nobody wins.

Powerball against the other UK draws

The table uses each game's published figures, apart from the Powerball any-prize odds, which we count ourselves. The last column puts the draws on a common footing: the top-prize chance for each pound, found by multiplying the jackpot odds by the price of a line.

Powerball has the longest jackpot odds and the dearest line, so per pound its top prize is by far the hardest to win: about 3.3 times harder than EuroMillions and about 145 times harder than Thunderball. What it offers in return is scale: the largest jackpots on sale in the UK. Every draw side by side is on our UK lottery odds page.

A £4 line in the small hours can feel like harmless fun, and for most people it is. If you find yourself chasing a jackpot or spending more than you planned, our responsible gambling page lists free, confidential help.

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