The best UK lottery odds

The United Kingdom includes Northern Ireland, where gambling regulation has been devolved under the auspices of the Betting, Gaming, Lotteries and Amusements (Northern Ireland) Order 1985. So, although you can play The National Lottery’s Lotto and Thunderball or The Health Lottery’s draw games (The Big Win, All or Nothing and QuickWin) throughout England, Scotland and Wales, you can’t do so in Northern Ireland. You also can’t play society raffles like the People’s Postcode Lottery there.

This is a technicality, but one we need to preface before getting down to the business of telling you what you want to know, which is: “What lottery has the best chance of winning?”, “What lottery should I play?” and “What lottery offers the best value?”

Well, to cut to the chase:

Lottoland, a company that specialises in comparing lotteries from all over the world, in an online article called Which lottery is the easiest to win? has pronounced that:

“The UK lottery with the best odds is the Health Lotto, with jackpot odds of 1 in 2,118,760.”

The article predates our main draw being named The Big Win (and we've never been called The Health Lotto), but the odds Lottoland cites remain unchanged - and which are, to this day, over 21 times better than hitting the jackpot on the actual Lotto.

The Big Win has five draws a week, Tuesday to Saturday at 7.45pm, costing £1 a line to enter with a regular £25,000 jackpot and two extra Superdraws a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, with an additional £100,000 up for grabs (with exactly the same odds of winning the bigger jackpot as the regular one). 

To win our jackpot, you need to match 5 numbers from 1-50. The odds of winning a minor prize are as low as 1 in 16 (match 2) and 1 in 32 (match 1 + bonus ball), in both cases, the prize is a free ticket, the lowest odds for winning any monetary prize is is 1 in 224, (match 2 + bonus ball = £5, match 3 = £10).

The odds of 1 in 2.1 million are approximately FOUR TIMES better than 1:8,060,598, the odds of hitting the jackpot on Thunderball. This is The National Lottery game with the best jackpot odds, with nearly double the chance of hitting its jackpot as Set for Life (1:15,347,470).

Lotto, Britain’s biggest lottery, with jackpots in the millions, has odds of 1:45,057,474 for hitting the jackpot. That makes you over 21 times more likely to win The Health Lottery’s Big Win than the Lotto, and you can play it twice for the price of one ticket on the Lotto (Lotto costs £2 and all of The Health Lottery’s draw games cost £1 to play). Of course, the price of the stake doesn’t affect the odds of winning, but why pay more than a quid?

EuroMillions, the lottery with by far the biggest jackpots to be won in the UK (and this is one you can play in Northern Ireland) has astronomically low odds of winning the top prize, 1:139,838,160. That said, with a record jackpot of over £206 million (won on December 8, 2023), it’s no wonder players are willing to buy a ticket, even if they are 140 times more likely to be struck by lightning than win the jackpot…

While Lottoland is right that The Big Win is the British lottery with generally and readily available tickets with the best odds of hitting the jackpot, we feel we should point out that there are a significant number of smaller society lotteries that do offer the chance to win their jackpot with better odds than us.

Many don’t have top prizes larger than a couple of thousand pounds, and others only operate by subscription, but it would be remiss of us not to mention that you can win the £25,000 weekly top prize on the Asthma + Lung UK Lottery by matching all six numbers and as these are all between 0 and 9, the odds of doing so are 1:1,000,000.

Age UK run a weekly draw with effective odds of 1:185,000 and Ty Hafan’s Crackerjackpot has odds of just 1:30,000, but most of the winners pick up between £10 and £500.

A perhaps more typical example of a society lottery with better odds than The Big Win is the Scottish Children’s Lottery, which has odds of 1:1,906,884 of landing their £25,000 top prize, although you can only play for this by subscription.

What about People’s Postcode Lottery?

People’s Postcode Lottery is a popular way to gamble in Britain, but despite its name, it’s not actually a lottery – it’s a regular series of raffles that can only be played by subscription. For a fixed monthly fee (currently £12) players participate in every draw, which take place daily. Each player’s postcode is their ‘ticket’ and what they win is dependent on the specific draw as well as how many other people in the same postcode have subscribed. It is therefore impossible to calculate fixed odds for winning PPL draws as there are too many variables in play.

PPL themselves have calculated that “As a guide, 24.04% of playing postcodes won a prize from July’s draws.” [This refers to July 2024]

The best lottery odds for any prize

When considering lottery odds, it’s important not to forget about secondary prizes.

These secondary prizes may not be very much, and often result in no more than a free play, but at least any sort of win is better than nothing.

Perhaps surprisingly, given that the odds of winning the jackpot are the lowest of any lottery you can play in the UK, the odds of winning any prize on the EuroMillions are a much healthier 1 in 13, the same as for Thunderball.

Set for Life is slightly better with a 1 in 12 chance of at least winning something for a £1.50 stake.

But in the ‘any prize’ category it’s another Health Lottery game that comes out on top. All or Nothing, our £1 game with draws every Tuesday and Friday is unique for paying out a £25,000 jackpot if you match all your numbers or if you match none of them! But it also pays out for 10 out of 13 outcomes, with the result that the odds of winning something is a best-in-class 1:4.5! It has the best odds of any lottery game you can play in Britain, and that’s official!

Spare a thought for QuickWin, another Health Lottery game – offering a live online virtual lottery draw every 3 minutes with a £25,000 jackpot to be won in every single one of them. It boasts a very healthy 1 in 6 chance of winning any prize for your £1 stake, and would be top of the pile… if it weren’t for All or Nothing!

The best lottery for value

Value in UK (or British) lotteries is quite hard to quantify – try telling a new multi-millionaire that their £2.50 ticket wasn’t worth it once their numbers have come up!

It ultimately rests on an individual player to decide what they are willing to stake in the hope of winning a large prize with a comparatively small chance of success, or what constitutes a sensible outlay for a solid chance of a small return.

This is what the most readily available UK/British lotteries cost to play (per line):

Hopefully, the information in this article will help you to play lotteries with more understanding of what you might win, and what you can expect when you play. Remember to enjoy it and to always play within your limits.

Although there is no certain way to pick or predict winning lottery numbers (and you should mistrust any source that clams to guarantee this ‘knowledge’), feel free to read some of our other articles examining previous Health Lottery, Lotto and EuroMillions numbers, and prediction methods based in science and astrology.

Every major lottery and society raffle you can play in the UK gives a proportion of the ticket price or subscription fee to good causes, and it is good to keep in mind that even when a player doesn’t win, somebody benefits.

You can read about some of the vital health projects that you support by playing our games here.