What this calculator works out
A raffle is the simplest bet there is: every ticket in the drum has exactly the same chance, and your chance is your tickets divided by all of them. This calculator does that division and shows the answer three ways — as a percentage, as a one-in figure and as traditional odds against — because the same chance feels very different depending on which of those you read.
It also handles the thing most raffle calculators skip. Most raffles have more than one prize. If there are five prizes in the drum, your chance of winning something is not five times your chance of winning the first one, and the calculator works out the real figure by following the draw prize by prize.
The raffle in question might be the one at the school fete, the club's Christmas draw, a charity's postal raffle or a book of tickets sold round the office. The arithmetic is the same for all of them, and so is the honest conclusion: buying more tickets does improve your chance in exact proportion, and it is still usually a small chance. Whether that matters depends on why you are buying — as a bet, or as a donation with a bit of fun attached.
Your tickets and the draw
How the calculation works
For a single prize, the chance is one line of arithmetic.
Chance of winning = your tickets ÷ tickets sold
One in = tickets sold ÷ your tickets
Odds against = (tickets sold − your tickets) ÷ your ticketsTen tickets out of 500 is 10 ÷ 500 = 0.02, which is 2%. Turned round, that is 1 in 50. Written as odds it is 49 to 1 against, because odds against count the losing outcomes for every winning one: of the fifty equally likely ways the draw could go for you, one is a win and forty-nine are not.
With more than one prize, the draw removes a ticket from the drum each time, so the arithmetic follows the draw round by round. The easiest way to get the chance of winning at least one prize is to work out the chance of winning nothing and subtract it from one.
Chance of nothing on the first draw = (sold − yours) ÷ sold
Chance of nothing on the second draw = (sold − yours − 1) ÷ (sold − 1)
… and so on for each prize
Chance of at least one prize = 1 − (all of those multiplied together)Each step is slightly worse for you than the last, because every losing ticket that comes out leaves your tickets as a bigger share of what remains. This is the correct way to count it; simply multiplying your single-prize chance by the number of prizes overstates the answer, and overstates it badly when the prizes are a large share of the tickets.
The calculator also gives your expected number of prizes — the number of prizes multiplied by your share of the tickets. Ten tickets in 500 with five prizes is an expectation of 0.1 prizes, which is a useful way to see how far from a likely win most raffle holdings are.
A 2% chance, 1 in 50, and 49 to 1 all describe ten tickets in 500. The odds format stretches the low end — it makes the gap between 1% and 2% (99 to 1 against 49 to 1) look enormous — and squashes the high end, where 40% and 50% are 1.5 to 1 and evens. Bookmakers use it because it maps directly onto payouts. For deciding whether a chance is worth having, the percentage is the easiest to think about.
Worked example: ten tickets in a raffle of five hundred
A village hall fundraiser sells 500 tickets at £1 each for a single prize, a hamper donated by the farm shop. You buy a strip of ten.
That is 1 in 50, or 49 to 1 against.
10 of 500 tickets are yours — a 2.00% share.
| Tickets | Chance | One in | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | 2.00% | 1 in 50 | £10.00 |
| 20 | 4.00% | 1 in 25 | £20.00 |
| 50 | 10.0% | 1 in 10 | £50.00 |
| 100 | 20.0% | 1 in 5 | £100.00 |
Your tickets cost £10.00. Whether that is worth a 2.00% chance depends on the prize and on why you are buying — the Prize Draw Value Calculator puts the two together.
Exact for a fair draw from the tickets actually sold. If the total you entered is tickets printed rather than sold, the real chance is better than shown.
The chance is 2.00%, which is 1 in 50, or 49 to 1 against. The £10 spent buys exactly that: for every fifty ways the draw could go, one of them is your hamper.
The instructive part is what changes if the raffle has five prizes instead of one. Your chance of winning something becomes 9.6% — not 10%, because once a losing ticket is drawn for the first prize your remaining chance for the others improves slightly less than it would if the drum were refilled. With prizes few and tickets many, the shortcut of multiplying by five is nearly right. In a 50-ticket raffle with five prizes and ten tickets, the shortcut says 100% and the real figure is 69%: the shortcut fails exactly when the raffle is small and the prizes are plentiful.
What buying more tickets actually does
In a single-prize raffle the chance scales exactly with the number of tickets, which is unusual among things you can gamble on. Here is what that looks like in a 500-ticket raffle with one prize.
| Your tickets | Chance | One in | Odds against | Spent at £1 a ticket |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0.2% | 1 in 500 | 499 to 1 | £1 |
| 5 | 1% | 1 in 100 | 99 to 1 | £5 |
| 10 | 2% | 1 in 50 | 49 to 1 | £10 |
| 20 | 4% | 1 in 25 | 24 to 1 | £20 |
| 50 | 10% | 1 in 10 | 9 to 1 | £50 |
| 100 | 20% | 1 in 5 | 4 to 1 | £100 |
Two things to notice. Doubling the tickets exactly doubles the chance every time, which is why the arithmetic is honest: ten tickets are precisely ten times better than one. And the money column doubles just as exactly, so the question is never "do more tickets help?" but "is a 4% chance of the prize worth £20 to me?" For a £50 hamper, on a pure-bet view, it is not. For the village hall roof, it may well be.
The exception to clean scaling is a multi-prize raffle. There, the more tickets you hold, the more the extra tickets start competing with each other for the same handful of prizes, and the chance of winning at least one climbs more slowly than your ticket count. The calculator shows this, and the expected number of prizes keeps scaling exactly even when the chance of at least one does not.
Understanding the result
Below 1%. A long shot. Most holdings in a well-sold public raffle land here — a strip of five tickets in a draw of two thousand is a quarter of one per cent. If you are buying, buy for the cause or the fun, and treat a win as a bonus.
1% to 10%. A real but unlikely chance. A book of tickets in a small club draw typically sits in this band. You should expect not to win and be pleased rather than surprised if you do.
Above 10%. This only happens in small raffles, or when you hold a large share of the tickets, and it is worth reading the multi-prize figures carefully: with several prizes in a raffle of a hundred tickets, holding ten of them gives a better-than-even chance of coming away with something.
The expected-prizes figure tells you the long-run average. An expectation of 0.1 means that if you entered this exact raffle ten times, you would win roughly one prize across all ten — not that you will win a tenth of a hamper this time.
The number that matters is how many tickets are actually in the draw. A raffle with 1,000 tickets printed that sells 600 gives you 1 in 60 for ten tickets, not 1 in 100. Organisers rarely announce the sold total, but at a fete you can often see it, and for a postal raffle the previous year's accounts sometimes say. When in doubt, the printed number gives you a conservative — pessimistic — answer.
The rules that shape a raffle in Great Britain
The lottery rules described on this page are those of the Gambling Act 2005, which applies in England, Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland has its own legislation and its own limits.
Most raffles are, in law, lotteries — you pay to enter, there is at least one prize, and the winner is chosen purely by chance. The Gambling Commission publishes plain guidance on which kinds can be run without a licence, and the limits affect the odds more than people expect, because they cap how big a raffle can be.
| Kind of raffle | Who can buy | Permission needed | Limits worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Incidental lottery — the raffle at a fete, fair, quiz night or fundraising dinner | Anyone at the event, during the event only | None | At most £500 of the proceeds can go on prizes and £100 on expenses; donated prizes are unlimited. Tickets cannot be sold in advance or online, and the draw can be during or after the event. |
| Small society lottery — a club or charity selling tickets to the public in advance | The public, aged 16 and over | Registration with the local council (£40, then £20 a year) | Ticket sales under £20,000 per draw and £250,000 a year. Every ticket must show the society, the price, the promoter and the draw date. At least 20% of proceeds must go to the good cause. |
| Private society, work or residents' lottery | Members, colleagues at one workplace, or people living at one address | None | No profit can be made; proceeds go to prizes, expenses and, for a society, its purposes. |
| Large society lottery | The public | Gambling Commission licence | Anything above the small society limits. |
Two consequences for the person buying a ticket. An incidental raffle is small by law, so its odds are usually the best you will find — a few hundred tickets at most. And a raffle promoted online or on social media by someone without a licence or registration is not a legal lottery, however good the cause looks, and there is no regulator to go to if the prize never arrives.
When not to use this calculator
Not for the National Lottery or EuroMillions. Those are games of matching numbers, not draws from a pool of tickets, and their odds come from how many combinations exist. The Lottery Syndicate Odds Calculator covers them.
Not for tombolas. A tombola is a raffle where the prize numbers are decided in advance and you draw from the drum yourself. Your chance is the number of winning tickets still in the drum divided by the tickets left, which changes with every draw and depends on what has already gone. If half the tickets are winners, the arithmetic here does not apply.
Not for judged competitions — a photograph, a caption, a bake. Those are decided by a person, and no probability describes them.
Not for deciding how much to spend. The calculator tells you the chance; it cannot tell you whether the chance is worth the money. The Prize Draw Value Calculator puts the prize and the ticket price together, which is the question that actually matters.
Common mistakes
- Using tickets printed rather than tickets sold. Unsold tickets are not in the drum. This is the most common reason a calculated chance is too low.
- Multiplying by the number of prizes. Five prizes do not give five times the chance of winning something, because you cannot win the same prize twice and each draw shrinks the pool. The gap is small when prizes are few and large when they are many.
- Reading "49 to 1" as "1 in 49". Odds against of 49 to 1 is 1 in 50. The losing outcomes and the winning one add up to the whole.
- Assuming a bigger raffle has a proportionally bigger prize. Often the reverse: a 5,000-ticket postal raffle may offer a £200 prize, while the fete raffle with 150 tickets has a £50 hamper. The small one is usually the better bet.
- Buying more tickets to "win back" earlier ones. Last year's tickets have no effect on this year's drum. Each raffle starts from nothing.
- Treating a long-shot chance as a plan. One in 500 is one in 500. Enjoy the draw; do not budget on it.
Frequently asked questions
Does buying more raffle tickets really improve my chances?
Yes, and in a single-prize raffle exactly in proportion: ten tickets are ten times as likely to win as one. That is unusually honest as gambling goes — most products do not scale so cleanly. What it does not change is that ten times a small chance is still a small chance, and that the cost rises in exactly the same proportion. With several prizes, extra tickets help a little less than proportionally for the chance of winning at least one prize, because your own tickets start competing with each other.
What does "49 to 1" mean?
It is the number of ways to lose for every one way to win. Ten tickets in 500 leaves 490 tickets that are not yours, which is 49 losing tickets for each winning one, so 49 to 1 against. The same chance is 1 in 50 and 2%. Odds against are always one less than the one-in figure.
Does it matter whether I buy consecutive tickets or a spread?
Not at all. Every ticket in the drum is equally likely, whichever number is printed on it, and the tickets are drawn without any regard to their order. Consecutive numbers feel worse because they look like one entry, but they are not. The only thing that changes your chance is how many tickets you hold.
Does a raffle need a licence?
In England, Scotland and Wales, a raffle at an event where tickets are sold and drawn on the day is an incidental lottery and needs no licence or registration, within the Gambling Commission's limits. A raffle selling tickets to the public in advance is normally a small society lottery and must be registered with the local council; larger ones need a Gambling Commission licence. Selling raffle tickets online, including on social media, always needs a registration or licence. The references below link to the Commission's own guidance for each kind.
Is a charity raffle good value?
As a bet, almost never — the prizes are worth much less than the tickets sold, and the gap is the point, because it funds the cause. As a donation with a small chance attached, it is a perfectly reasonable thing to buy. The distinction matters mainly for how many tickets you buy: buy what you would happily have given anyway.
Does the order the prizes are drawn in matter?
For the chance of winning something, no. For which prize you get, it can: many raffles draw the top prize first, so the first ticket out takes it, and if your ticket comes out later you get a smaller prize. Where the draw is run the other way round, with the star prize last, the reverse applies. It changes what you might win, not whether.
How accurate is this?
For a fair draw the arithmetic is exact — this is one of the few probability calculations with no assumptions to argue about. The uncertainty is entirely in the inputs: whether the ticket total you entered is the number actually sold, and whether every ticket really is in the drum.
Is what I enter stored?
No. Everything is calculated in your browser and nothing is transmitted or retained.
Related tools
References
These organisations publish the guidance behind this page.
- Gambling Commission — Types of lotteries and their regulations — what legally makes a raffle a lottery, and the eight kinds of lottery the Gambling Act 2005 permits
- Gambling Commission — How to run a fundraiser with lotteries or raffles at events — the rules for an incidental lottery, including the £500 prize and £100 expenses limits
- Gambling Commission — How to run a small society lottery — registering with the council, the £20,000 and £250,000 proceeds limits, and what a ticket must show
External guidance changes. Check the current position at the source before relying on it for a decision that matters.