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They say the best things in life are free, and that’s certainly the case with free lottery draws. Here are the best lotteries to play and how much money you could win.
Credit: M.Stasy (background), WAYHOME studio (foreground) – Shutterstock
We all like to imagine what we’d do if we won the National Lottery, but the fact of the matter is that you’re five times more likely to be struck by lightning than bag the jackpot. And, with a single ticket costing two whole pounds, the chances are you’ll actually lose money by playing the lottery, rather than make any.
But that’s not the case with free lotteries. These draws cost absolutely nothing to enter and your chances of winning are often much, much better than they are in paid lotteries.
We’ve done the hard work for you and put together a list of the best free lotteries, with winning criteria ranging from postcodes to your date of birth, and even your favourite emojis.
What’s in this guide?
Best free online lotteries UK
These are the best free lotteries to play:
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Pick My Postcode
How much can you win? £200+ for the main draw
How often are winners drawn? Daily
Do you need to claim your prize to win? Yes.Pick My Postcode (formerly the Free Postcode Lottery, and not related to the People’s Postcode Lottery) is one of the biggest and best sites in the free online lottery game.
Despite the name change, Pick My Postcode is still a free postcode lottery and each day there’s a minimum of £200 up for grabs (the daily prize is usually £500 but it’s been reduced during the coronavirus pandemic).
Every day at midday, a random UK postcode is chosen from the database of Pick My Postcode users. However, eligible winners must log in to the site and claim their prize to receive it – otherwise, it rolls over to the next day. On the other hand, if multiple users have the same winning postcode and all make a claim, the money is split evenly between them.
You can boost your potential prize pot with a 1p bonus for every day you visit the site to check the winning postcode, and there are four additional draws on the site with prizes ranging from £5 to £150.
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Freemoji Lottery
How much can you win? $20+ for the main draw
How often are winners drawn? Daily
Do you need to claim your prize to win? Yes.Don’t be fooled by the fact that the prize is in dollars – Freemoji Lottery’s head office is based in the UK and the draw is absolutely open to anyone living in this country.
When you sign up to Freemoji Lottery, you get to choose five emojis which you’ll enter into each day’s 7pm draw. You can choose any five you’d like, although if it were down to us we’d go for sunglasses face, ok hand gesture, eyes, thinking face and praying hands (and yes, you do have to donate your money to us should that combination win you the jackpot).
Freemoji Lottery will send you an email every day reminding you to check the site, and it’s definitely worth doing so – even if your combo comes up, you’ll need to actively claim the prize to win. If not, the money rolls over to the next day, with the eventual sum often reaching hundreds, if not over a thousand, dollars.
In addition to the main draw, Freemoji also runs the Fivers Draw. This secondary competition draws five emoji combinations every day but, in return for you being five times more likely to win, there’s just $5 up for grabs if your line comes up.
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Free Birthdate Lottery
How much can you win? £10 for the main draw
How often are winners drawn? Daily
Do you need to claim your prize to win? Yes.You can choose your favourite emojis and, to a certain extent, you can choose where you live. But your date of birth is down to fate, so, in some ways, it’s reassuring that your chances of winning are totally out of your hands on the Free Birthdate Lottery.
As the name suggests, each day the team at Free Birthdate Lottery draws a random date from the past, and if it happens to be the day you were born, you win the £10 jackpot.
Just like Pick My Postcode, the Free Birthdate Lottery will only ever pick dates of birth from the database of registered users, meaning somebody should win every day. However, also like Pick My Postcode (and most other free lottery draws), eligible winners must claim their prize to win.
The £10 doesn’t roll over if it goes unclaimed, and if multiple users successfully claim the prize, it will be split between them. But a quick look at the past results shows that most people never bother to claim, so if your birthday comes up, you’ll probably bag the full amount.
Free Birthdate Lottery also runs a daily survey draw, whereby you have to complete a quick questionnaire before revealing another date of birth. All the same rules apply here (including the prize fund), and it seems as though even fewer people claim the jackpot in this draw.
If you don’t mind answering a question or two to bag a reward, you should check out our guide to the best paid survey sites. -
Lucky Emoji
How much can you win? £10+
How often are winners drawn? Daily
Do you need to claim your prize to win? Yes.Not got your fill of emoji-based lotteries? We know the feeling. And, fortunately, there’s another one just waiting for you to sign up and get playing: Lucky Emoji.
Unlike Freemoji Lottery, where you need to pick five emojis, you just need to go for three on Lucky Emoji. The selection of emojis to choose from is also smaller but, conveniently, three of the five we picked for Freemoji are still available (sunglasses face, thinking face and ok hand gesture – an emoji for every occasion).
Again, you’ll need to claim the prize if your trio of emojis comes up, and the £10 jackpot doesn’t roll over if nobody steps forward. But if you want a little extra free money, you can boost your bonus (which you’ll receive if your combo wins) by getting your friends to sign up via your referral link.
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Free Lucky Lottery
How much can you win? £10 – £52
How often are winners drawn? Daily
Do you need to claim your prize to win? Yes.Free Lucky Lottery is fairly close to the regular National Lottery in terms of how to play. All you need to do is a pick a four-digit number when you sign up and that’ll be your ticket to every daily draw.
But unlike your chances of winning the National Lottery, the odds of success here a lot, lot more favourable. As you may have already realised, there are ‘only’ 10,000 possible four-digit combinations running from 0000 to 9,999 – not a guaranteed win, but one in 10,000 is a lot better than the one in 45 million shot you’d have on the standard Lottery.
Free Lucky Lottery has a minimum prize fund of £10, although this increases by 50p for every day that the jackpot goes unclaimed (yep, you’ll need to claim your prize if your numbers come up, so check every day!), up to a maximum of £52.
And, drawing yet another similarity with the National Lottery, Free Lucky Lottery donates a portion of its revenue to charities in the UK, with previous beneficiaries including Cancer Research, the British Red Cross the NSPCC.
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Selfie Lottery
How much can you win? £10+
How often are winners drawn? Daily
Do you need to claim your prize to win? Yes.Don’t let anybody ever tell you that taking selfies is a waste of time. Aside from being one of the many ways you can boost your following and make money from social media, your carefully staged mugshots could end up bagging you the jackpot in the Selfie Lottery.
At its core, the Selfie Lottery isn’t too dissimilar to the other free lotteries on this list. When you register, you submit a single selfie which is entered into every draw. A new winner is chosen every day at 1pm, and the lucky user has 24 hours to claim their prize. So far, so standard.
But it’s the scale of the bonuses that really sets the Selfie Lottery apart. By completing tasks like taking surveys, registering for free trials or even just following the company on Facebook, you can boost your bonus by hundreds of pounds.
A word to the wise, though – as with any free lottery, you won’t get your bonus unless you win. As there’s no guarantee of this ever happening, we’d advise against completing any of the bonuses that require you to spend money, even if it’s just a few quid. This is all about making money, not losing it.
It’s also worth noting that, if you win, the Selfie Lottery may ask to post your selfie on their social channels. However, they have confirmed to us that you can ask them not to do this if you’re not comfortable with it.
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Free National Lotto
How much can you win? £5 – £20 for the main draw
How often are winners drawn? Daily
Do you need to claim your prize to win? Yes.The Free National Lotto is almost identical to the standard National Lottery, albeit with a couple of crucial differences.
For starters, when you sign up to the Free National Lotto you need to pick five numbers to play for every draw (unlike the paid Lottery, where you can change as often as you like), and there are no bonus balls.
Secondly, but more importantly, there’s always a winner on the Free National Lotto. As with some of the free lotteries mentioned above, only sets of numbers that have been selected by Free National Lotto users will be drawn – it’s just a matter of whether or not they claim their prize in time (and if they don’t, the money rolls over to the next day, up to a maximum of £20).
There are two extra draws on Free National Lotto: a daily survey draw (where you need to complete a survey to reveal the winning numbers to hopefully bag £5) and what’s known as 5 Ball.
Unlike the main and survey draws, 5 Ball only draws numbers twice a week and the pick is completely random – they’re not just picked from the selections made by users.
That means that your chances of winning are substantially worse than in the main draw (a depressing one in 658,008), which may explain why – as far as we can see on the results page – nobody has ever won 5 Ball at the time of writing, and the jackpot has maxed out at £2,000.
How do free lotteries work?
Credit: WAYHOME studio – Shutterstock
Getting free money sounds too good to be true. How can free lottery websites afford to pay out hundreds, or even thousands of pounds in jackpots, when you’re not paying a penny to enter? The answer is simple: advertising.
Like newspapers and social media networks, the majority of free lottery sites receive their income through advertising. This could come in a number of different forms, from your bog-standard advert on a webpage, to receiving a payment whenever a user signs up for a service through their link (this is known as ‘affiliate marketing’, and is also a great way to make money from your blog).
The fact that free lottery sites are funded by advertising also explains why most of them require you to visit the website and check the draw in order to claim your prize. To ensure companies keep advertising with them, lottery sites need to maintain high enough levels of traffic – hence asking you to visit them every day.
Are free lotteries legit?
Although we’ve been careful to only include free lotteries that we know be safe and legit, a corner of the internet where money is being given away for free is inevitably going to attract the attention of online scammers.
As you should do whenever you’re considering handing over your personal or financial details to a company you’ve never heard of, it’s a good idea to do some background checks first.
We’d recommend Googling the company, looking at reviews on sites like Trustpilot and even searching for the company’s name on Twitter to see what people have to say.
If there’s any doubt whatsoever over the legitimacy of a free lottery, it’s best to steer clear – no potential jackpot is worth the risk of losing every penny to your name!
Feeling lucky? Now try your hand at entering competitions to win money…
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