Premium Bonds odds: your chance of a prize and what Bonds really pay
Premium Bonds keep your savings safe and share out the interest as prizes, from £25 to £1 million, in a draw every month. The odds for each £1 Bond are 21,000 to 1. The calculator below turns that into your chance of a prize, the average return and, more usefully, what a typical holder with the same Bonds actually receives. Figures are from the NS&I monthly prize allocation for the September 2026 draw.
How to use the Premium Bonds calculator
Enter how much you hold in Premium Bonds, anything from £25 to the £50,000 limit, and how many monthly draws you want to look at. The panel updates as you type. When the page first loads it shows £1,000 over a year of twelve draws.
The large figure is the chance of winning at least one prize in that time. Below it are the average winnings, which always come out at the prize fund rate of 4.35% a year, and the typical winnings: the median, the amount that half of all holders with the same Bonds would beat and half would not. The typical return is that median as a yearly rate. The last three boxes give the chance of winning nothing, the chance of a prize of £1,000 or more, and the chance of one of the two £1 million jackpots.
What the Premium Bonds odds mean
Every £1 Bond is a separate entry in every monthly draw it is eligible for. NS&I sets the odds, currently 21,000 to 1 for each Bond, and the prize fund rate, currently 4.35% a year. The two numbers fix the size of the draw: the number of prizes is the number of eligible Bonds divided by 21,000, and the money shared out each month is one twelfth of 4.35% of all the Bonds. In the September 2026 draw that meant 6,529,868 prizes worth £497,086,175, which checks out: £497,086,175 × 12 ÷ (6,529,868 × 21,000) = 4.35%.
Holding more Bonds gives more entries, in direct proportion. A single £25 holding has a 0.1% chance of a prize in a month, about 1 in 840. £1,000 of Bonds held for a year gives 12,000 entries, so you would expect 0.57 prizes. The chance of at least one is 43.5%, because some holders win twice and others not at all. The calculator takes one minus the chance of every entry missing, and models the winnings as rare events (a Poisson distribution), the standard tool when many entries each have a tiny chance.
The winning Bond numbers are chosen by NS&I's random number generator, known as ERNIE. Bonds count once held for a whole calendar month, so Bonds bought in November first enter the January draw, and after that every Bond has the same chance in every draw.
The Premium Bonds prize table
The prize fund is divided into three bands. The higher band, from £5,000 up to the 2 monthly prizes of £1 million, takes a tenth of the money. The medium band, the £500 and £1,000 prizes, takes another tenth. The lower band, the £25, £50 and £100 prizes, takes the remaining four fifths. The table shows the September 2026 allocation and the chance that a single £1 Bond wins each prize in one draw.
| Prize | Number of prizes | Share of all prizes | Share of the money | Odds per Bond, 1 in |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| £1,000,000 | 2 | <0.1% | 0.4% | 68.6 billion |
| £100,000 | 95 | <0.1% | 1.9% | 1.4 billion |
| £50,000 | 192 | <0.1% | 1.9% | 714,204,313 |
| £25,000 | 381 | <0.1% | 1.9% | 359,913,984 |
| £10,000 | 954 | <0.1% | 1.9% | 143,739,233 |
| £5,000 | 1,909 | <0.1% | 1.9% | 71,831,969 |
| £1,000 | 19,882 | 0.3% | 4.0% | 6,897,054 |
| £500 | 59,646 | 0.9% | 6.0% | 2,299,018 |
| £100 | 2,365,010 | 36.2% | 47.6% | 57,982 |
| £50 | 2,365,010 | 36.2% | 23.8% | 57,982 |
| £25 | 1,716,787 | 26.3% | 8.6% | 79,874 |
| Any prize | 6,529,868 | 100% | 100% | 21,000 |
The table has a clear shape. 98.7% of all prizes are £25, £50 or £100, and together they take 80.0% of the money. The average prize is £76.12. But nobody ever wins an average prize: the most common single amounts are £50 and £100, and the average is pulled up by a small number of very large ones.
Average return and typical return
This is the part most Premium Bonds articles leave out. The 4.35% rate is what the whole fund pays out, so it is also the average return on any holding. The typical holder does worse, because the average includes the big prizes that very few people ever win. The median, the result in the middle, is the better guide to what you can expect. The table below runs the calculator for six holdings over one year.
| Holding | Chance of any prize | Chance of nothing | Average winnings | Typical winnings | Typical return |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| £100 | 5.6% | 94.4% | £4 | £0 | 0.00% |
| £1,000 | 43.5% | 56.5% | £43 | £0 | 0.00% |
| £5,000 | 94.3% | 5.7% | £217 | £150 | 3.00% |
| £10,000 | 99.7% | 0.3% | £435 | £350 | 3.50% |
| £25,000 | over 99.9% | under 0.001% | £1,087 | £925 | 3.70% |
| £50,000 | over 99.9% | under 0.001% | £2,175 | £1,900 | 3.80% |
Two patterns stand out. With small holdings, the typical result is simply nothing: someone with £1,000 in Bonds has a 56.5% chance of a blank year, so the median is £0 even though the average is £43.50. As the holding grows, the small prizes become regular enough to add up, and the typical return climbs towards the average, from 3.00% on £5,000 to 3.80% on the maximum £50,000. It never quite reaches 4.35%, because part of the fund always goes to the few big winners.
That is the honest comparison with a savings account. A fixed rate pays every saver the same. Premium Bonds pay the same total but spread it unevenly, and most holders get a little less than the headline figure in exchange for a very small chance of a much larger prize. Prizes are free of UK Income Tax and Capital Gains Tax, which narrows the gap for people who pay tax on their savings interest.
Premium Bonds against the lottery
Premium Bonds are not gambling in the ordinary sense: you can cash in your Bonds for what you paid, so the stake is never lost. What goes into the draw is the interest you would otherwise have earned. A lottery line is the opposite: the whole stake is spent, and only part of it comes back as prizes. The National Lottery draws return roughly half of what they take, some a little more and some less, as our UK lottery odds page shows.
Take £1,000. Held in Premium Bonds for a year, it stays £1,000 and brings back £43.50 on average, with a 43.5% chance of at least one prize. Spent on 500 Lotto lines at £2 each, it is gone, and on average about half comes back as prizes. The jackpot is where the lottery wins. A £1 million prize on £1,000 of Bonds for a year is 1 in 5,713,635, while a Lotto jackpot from 500 lines, each entered in both rounds, is roughly 1 in 45,057. The lottery buys far better jackpot odds per pound; the Bonds keep the pound.
This page is not financial advice, but it shows what the headline rate hides. If what draws you to Premium Bonds is the thrill of the monthly result rather than the savings, our responsible gambling page has free help for anyone who feels that thrill turning into a habit.
More lottery odds
Premium Bonds odds: questions people ask
What are the odds of winning a Premium Bonds prize?
21,000 to 1 for each £1 Bond in each monthly draw, from the September 2026 draw. That is the chance for one Bond; with £1,000 of Bonds you hold 1,000 chances a month, which gives a 43.5% chance of at least one prize in a year.
How much will £1,000 in Premium Bonds win in a year?
On average £43.50, which is the 4.35% prize fund rate. But the typical result is nothing: there is a 56.5% chance of no prize at all in twelve draws, so the median holder of £1,000 wins £0.
Why do most people earn less than the Premium Bonds rate?
Because the average includes the big prizes, and very few holders win one. 98.7% of prizes are £25, £50 or £100, and the rare prizes of £1,000 and more lift the average above what a typical holder receives. With £10,000 the average is £435 a year, while the median is £350.
What are the odds of winning £1 million on Premium Bonds?
There are 2 jackpots a month, so each £1 Bond has about a 1 in 68.6 billion chance in a draw. Even the maximum £50,000 holding has only a 1 in 114,273 chance of a jackpot in a year.
Can you lose money on Premium Bonds?
You cannot lose what you put in: the Bonds can be cashed in for their full value, and they are backed by HM Treasury. What you can lose is the interest a savings account would have paid, because a Bond that wins nothing earns nothing.
Are Premium Bonds gambling?
Not in the usual sense. You keep your stake, and only the interest is shared out as prizes by random draw. Premium Bonds are a savings product from NS&I, not a licensed gambling product. The prize draw still works like a lottery, so the odds are worth knowing.
When do new Premium Bonds enter the draw?
After they have been held for one whole calendar month. Bonds bought in November, for example, first enter the January draw. The calculator assumes your whole holding is already eligible.
Are Premium Bonds prizes taxed?
No. NS&I says prizes are free of UK Income Tax and Capital Gains Tax. That matters most to people who already use up their personal savings allowance, because interest from an ordinary savings account may then be taxed.
Does holding more Bonds improve the odds?
Each £1 Bond is one more entry, so the chance of a prize rises with the holding and the average return stays at 4.35%. What changes is how close you are likely to get to that average: with £5,000 the median is 3.0% a year, and with £50,000 it is 3.8%.