Ways to win money online, compared honestly

The realistic options

Prize competitions

You answer a genuine skill question and buy a ticket. A fixed number of tickets exists, so the odds are knowable before you enter and do not change as more people join. The prize is awarded whether or not every ticket sells. This is what we run. Tickets here start at 9p, in minimum orders of 25, so the smallest order is £2.25.

Prize draws and raffles

Pure chance, no skill element. Lawful ones are either licensed lotteries or free-entry promotions. The thing to check is whether the number of entries is capped: an uncapped draw means your odds get worse every time somebody else enters, and you will not be told when.

Premium Bonds

You risk nothing but the opportunity cost: your capital is returned on demand, and in exchange it earns no interest. It is the only option here where losing means earning nothing rather than paying something. NS&I publishes the current odds and prize rate, and they change, so read them there rather than anywhere that quotes them second hand. Our guide compares the two formats.

What to avoid

Anything that promises a guaranteed return, asks for a fee to release a prize you have supposedly already won, or will not tell you how many tickets exist. A genuine operator publishes the cap, the closing date and the free entry route without being asked.

What the odds actually look like

On a capped competition the arithmetic is simple and public: your tickets divided by the total that can be sold. If a draw has 20,000 tickets and you hold 25, your chance is 25 in 20,000, or about one in 800. That number is fixed when you buy, which is the property an uncapped draw cannot offer.

A smaller prize is usually the better chance. Ticket for ticket, a £250 draw with 20,000 tickets is far likelier to pay out than a £10,000 draw with 200,000. Our odds calculator works it out for any number of tickets, and the figure it shows is the real one.

Winning without paying

No purchase is ever necessary here. Every competition takes a free postal entry which receives the same number of entries and exactly the same chance of winning as a paid ticket: same draw, same pool, same odds. The only cost is your postage.

That is not a loophole, it is the law working as intended, and it is also the simplest test of an operator. The free entry route explains exactly what to send.

How to check we mean it

Before entries close we publish a cryptographic fingerprint of a secret and name a future round of a public randomness beacon that nobody, including us, can predict. After the draw we publish the secret. Anyone can then recompute the winning ticket from scratch.

Verify a draw does it in your own browser, and it re-fetches the beacon directly from its source so you never have to take our word for any part of it.