UK Lotto
UK Lotto is the country’s longest-running lottery game and continues to be enjoyed by millions of players every week. Draws take place on Wednesday and Saturday evenings, with big jackpots on offer and five other ways to win, including a second prize of £1 million. Learn all about the game right here.
How to Play and Win UK Lotto
On your UK Lotto ticket you need to pick six numbers from a choice of 59. You can choose your own numbers or select a Lucky Dip if you wish to have them randomly generated for you. It costs £2 per play and you can take part online or by visiting an authorised retailer.
Decide how many lines you want to play, up to a maximum of seven on a single play slip, and enter those numbers for up to four consecutive weeks. You just need to remember to purchase your tickets before 7.30pm on draw days.
When the draw takes place, there are now two rounds. Six balls are randomly selected as the main numbers, followed by a Bonus Ball from the remaining 53 numbers. This process is then repeated for Round 2, with a second set of numbers drawn from another machine. The numbers you select are automatically entered into both rounds.
To win the jackpot, you must match all six main numbers, but there are also prizes for matching two, three, four or five numbers, as well as for matching five numbers and the Bonus Ball. You cannot combine matches across both rounds. For example, matching one number on both rounds does not count as matching two numbers.
You have a 1 in 4.9 chance of winning any prize on UK Lotto and odds of 1 in 22,528,738 of winning big and scooping the jackpot. If the top prize isn’t won in either round, it can roll over five times in a row before it has to be given away in a ‘Must Be Won’ draw, with the jackpot money going down to Match 2 winners (and potentially Match 3 winners if there are funds left over).
Go to the Lotto Prizes page to find out more about how this works, along with details of all the awards that are available.
You can also find out about prize breakdowns and winning numbers on the UK Lotto Results page.
UK Lotto Draw
The UK Lotto is drawn twice a week and uses a variety of different lottery machines and sets of balls to truly randomise the draw. Two machines are required for each draw night under the ‘Double-Round’ format. Each round sees six numbers selected at random from 59, followed by a Bonus Ball. It is therefore possible for some of the same numbers to be drawn in both rounds. Both the machine and set of balls are chosen at random before each draw.
History of UK Lotto
The game was known as the National Lottery when it began in November 1994, with draws originally being held once a week on a Saturday night and the choice of numbers ranging from 1 to 49. The Wednesday draw was introduced in 1997, and the game was later rebranded as Lotto in 2002.
A Lotto Raffle was launched in 2013, and was later tweaked in 2015 to become the Lotto Millionaire Raffle, offering one prize of £1 million and 20 awards of £20,000 in each draw. A number of other big changes were made at the same time in 2015, with the ball pool increasing from 49 to 59, a jackpot cap coming in and a new prize tier being added for matching two main numbers.
The Lotto Millionaire Raffle was discontinued in November 2018 as part of widespread changes to Lotto’s prize structure. The jackpot cap was replaced with a new rollover limit to ensure it would be won more regularly, and bigger fixed prizes were introduced.
In June 2026, Lotto was revamped so that there were two rounds per draw, doubling everyone’s chances of winning. The Lotto Raffle returned, but only alongside some draws.
