6 free lottery draws to win money
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 nothing to enter and your chances of winning are often 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.
Make sure you check the T&Cs before entering. For example, you usually need to be over 18 to enter.
What's in this guide?
Best free online lotteries in the 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.
Every day, 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. Plus, the draw is 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 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. 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.
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. -
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 the Free Birthdate Lottery are totally out of your hands.
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. The same rules apply here (including the prize fund), and it seems as though even fewer people claim the jackpot in this draw.
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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).
What's more, you'll need to manually enter the draw every day, and can either pick your own three emojis or go for a lucky dip.
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.
Premium bonds are a mix of a savings account, investment product and lottery – with a chance to win £1 million. Read our guide for more information. -
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 – only a couple of people have ever won (and haven't claimed their prize), and the jackpot has maxed out at £2,000.
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Free Lottery
- How much can you win? – £500 for the main draw
- How often are winners drawn? – Daily
- Do you need to claim your prize to win? – Yes.
As the name suggests, the Free Lottery costs nothing to enter. There are two draws available – the daily draw, worth £500, and the weekly draw, worth £10,000.
After you create your account, you can start entering the lottery. For every draw, you have to pick six numbers between 1 – 75 (or you can randomly generate them). If all six numbers match, you win!
The Daily Draws take place at 7.30pm and the Weekly Draw happens every Monday at 2pm.
Keep in mind that you can enter the Weekly Draw straight after signing up, but after this, you have to take part in at least three Daily Draws to do so again.
To collect your prize, you have to contact Free Lottery within two working days. Your winnings will be sent to you as a cheque via the post. If the prize hasn't been claimed, it doesn't roll over to the next day. And if there's more than one winner, the prize money will be split evenly.
How do free lotteries work?
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 to 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...
