EuroJackpot

First, the important bit: you can't buy this in Britain

EuroJackpot is not sold in the United Kingdom. There is no UK operator, the National Lottery doesn't offer it, and there is no British retailer where you can hand over £2 and get a EuroJackpot ticket. The UK is not one of the participating countries and never has been.

So this page is a reference rather than a how-to. It's here because EuroJackpot is the game people most often confuse with EuroMillions, and because it's genuinely interesting how differently two games with identical odds can behave. If you're in the UK and want something you can actually play, EuroMillions is the equivalent.

You'll find websites offering to buy EuroJackpot tickets on your behalf. This site doesn't recommend or link to any of them. If you're outside the UK and in a participating country, buy from your own national operator.

How to play

You pick five numbers from 1 to 50 and two Euro numbers from 1 to 12. A line costs €2.00, and most operators add a processing fee to the slip on top — the amount varies from country to country, so the real cost of a single line isn't quite €2 anywhere.

Draws take place on Tuesday and Friday evenings in Helsinki, under police and notarial supervision.

Draw times are worth treating with suspicion. Official operators contradict each other: LOTTO.de says the draw happens between 8pm and 9pm German time, while the Dutch operator states 19:00 Dutch time. Rather than pick a winner, this page says only "Tuesday and Friday evening". Exact draw times and sales cutoffs vary by country, so check your own operator. In Germany, WestLotto gives a sales cutoff of 18:59 CET — that's Germany-specific and shouldn't be assumed to apply elsewhere.

The same shape as EuroMillions

Five from fifty plus two from twelve is exactly the EuroMillions format. Not similar — identical. So the jackpot odds are identical too: 1 in 139,838,160 in both games.

That makes the comparison unusually clean, because the maths cancels out. Every difference between the two is a difference in how the money is arranged, not in how hard the numbers are to hit. EuroJackpot's line is cheaper (€2 against £2.50, though the processing fee narrows that) and its ceiling is much lower (€120 million against €250 million).

Prize classes and odds

There are twelve prize classes and all of them are pari-mutuel — there are no fixed amounts anywhere in the game. Half of all stakes go to prizes, and each class takes a set percentage of that pool, split between however many winners there are. A quiet draw with three winners in a class pays far more per winner than a busy one with three hundred.

A further 9.00% goes to a Booster fund, used to underwrite the guaranteed minimum jackpot and top up prize levels.

A small curiosity for anyone cross-checking against EuroMillions: the German operators round these odds down where the UK EuroMillions procedures round the identical arithmetic up — 1 in 31,075 here against 1 in 31,076 there. Both are official; it's a rounding convention, not a difference in the games.

No overall odds figure

You won't find an "odds of winning any prize" number on this page because no official operator publishes one. Plenty of unofficial sites quote a figure. None of them can point to an operator that stands behind it, so this page leaves it out rather than inventing one.

One real draw, for scale

Because every prize floats, published tables of "typical" amounts are largely fiction. Here instead is one actual result. In the draw of 24 July 2026, on total stakes of about €53.0 million, class 1 paid €71,262,143.10 and class 12 paid €8.70.

That is a single draw, not a typical one — a different night with different sales would produce entirely different numbers in every class. It's here only to show the range the pari-mutuel structure can span within one draw.

The €120 million cap that never has to pay out

This is the real difference between EuroJackpot and EuroMillions, and it's a structural one.

Every draw starts with a guaranteed minimum jackpot of €10 million. If nobody wins it, it rolls over — Friday to Tuesday, Tuesday to Friday — and keeps building.

The jackpot is capped at €120 million. Once class 1 would exceed that figure, the excess flows to class 2 instead. Class 2 is also capped at €120 million, and anything beyond that flows to the next lower class with a winner. The upshot is that the EuroJackpot jackpot can never exceed €120 million, no matter how long the run goes on.

And here's the part that surprises people who know EuroMillions: there is no "must be won after N draws" rule. None. EuroMillions forces the money out after four rolls at its cap; Lotto has a Must Be Won draw after five rollovers. EuroJackpot has no equivalent mechanism at all. The jackpot sits at €120 million and simply waits, draw after draw, until somebody matches all seven numbers.

In practice it does get won. Across 2025 the jackpot was won 16 times, twice at the maximum. But that's the game landing where the probabilities said it would, not a rule making it happen.

What else is different

There is no supplementary game inside EuroJackpot — no equivalent of the UK Millionaire Maker bundled into the ticket price. German players can add the national side-lotteries Spiel 77 and SUPER 6 to the same slip, but those are separate German games that happen to share a piece of paper; they are not part of EuroJackpot and aren't available to players in other countries.

The last format change was on 25 March 2022, when the Tuesday draw was added, the Euro numbers went from 2-from-10 to 2-from-12, the maximum jackpot rose from €90 million to €120 million and the payout shares increased. The line price stayed at €2. Nothing has changed since.

Where you can play it

Nineteen countries currently participate: Germany, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden.

What the odds actually mean

1 in 139,838,160 is the same wall EuroMillions players run into, and it's worth spelling out. At two draws a week, a single line played every time would take on average roughly 1.3 million years to hit the jackpot. Buying every combination at €2 a line would cost about €280 million — more than twice the capped jackpot, so even the brute-force approach loses money by construction.

The cheaper classes come up often enough to notice. Class 12 — two main numbers and one Euro number — lands about once in every 49 lines, and on the 24 July 2026 draw it paid €8.70. That's a real return on a €2 line, and it is also the tier that does most of the work in making the game feel winnable.

The €120 million cap changes the psychology more than the maths. A jackpot that can't grow past a fixed point removes the runaway-headline effect that pulls people into EuroMillions rollovers — but the chance of winning it is identical either way, and a capped jackpot with no forced payout can stall at the ceiling for a long time.

Nothing on this site changes any of that. A generator picks numbers; it cannot make them more likely to be drawn. In a fair draw every combination has exactly the same chance. There's more on the maths in how lottery odds are calculated.

Generating a EuroJackpot line

EuroJackpot's format is the same as EuroMillions', so the EuroMillions preset on this site produces a valid EuroJackpot line: five numbers from 1–50 and two from 1–12. It's the generator's default, so you can simply press the button.

Prices, draw times, prize shares and rules do change, and details such as processing fees and sales cutoffs differ by country. Always confirm with the official operator in your own country before you play. Lucky Dip is independent and not affiliated with EuroJackpot, LOTTO.de, WestLotto or any other operator.

Related reading

• EuroMillions →
• EuroMillions HotPicks →
• How lottery odds are calculated →
• Do lucky numbers work? →
• Responsible gambling →

Lotteries are entertainment, and they're for over-18s only. If it's stopped being fun, or you're spending more than you meant to, the responsible gambling page lists free, confidential UK support. 18+.