EuroMillions HotPicks

At a glance

Price: £1.50 per game played
Draws: Tuesday and Friday, 8:45pm — the EuroMillions draws
Sales cutoff: 7:30pm on draw day
Format: Choose 1 to 5 numbers from 1–50
Lucky Stars: Not used
Prizes: Fixed, from £10 to £1,000,000
Rollovers: None
Advance play: Up to 4 weeks ahead

How to play

First you decide how many numbers you want to play: one, two, three, four or five. That choice is the game — Pick 1 through Pick 5 are effectively five separate lotteries sharing one set of balls. Then you choose that many numbers from 1 to 50.

Each game costs £1.50. Playing Pick 1 costs £1.50; playing Pick 5 also costs £1.50. If you play more than one game on the same slip you pay £1.50 for each.

HotPicks doesn't have draws of its own. It uses the EuroMillions draws on Tuesday and Friday, with sales closing at 7:30pm on draw day, the draw at 8:45pm and results from around 9:30pm. You can buy entries up to four weeks in advance.

Only the main numbers count

This is the single most important rule and it's easy to miss. HotPicks uses only the five main EuroMillions numbers. The two Lucky Stars are drawn from a separate pool of twelve and play no part whatsoever in HotPicks. If your HotPicks number comes up as a Lucky Star, that is not a match.

The second rule is just as blunt: you must match every number you picked. There are no partial-match prizes. Play Pick 5 and match four of them and you win nothing at all — not a consolation prize, not a smaller tier, nothing. In ordinary EuroMillions four numbers would pay something; here it pays zero.

That's the trade. You give up all the small consolation prizes, and in exchange the prizes you can win are much larger relative to the odds.

Prize tiers and odds

Every prize is a fixed amount. Nothing here is pari-mutuel, nothing depends on ticket sales, and there's no jackpot pool to share.

EuroMillions HotPicks games. Each is a separate £1.50 wager on the same draw.
Game	To win	Odds	Prize	Average payout
Pick 1	Match 1	1 in 10	£10	66.67%
Pick 2	Match 2	1 in 123	£100	54.42%
Pick 3	Match 3	1 in 1,960	£1,500	51.02%
Pick 4	Match 4	1 in 46,060	£30,000	43.28%
Pick 5	Match 5	1 in 2,118,760	£1,000,000	30.87%

The "average payout" column is the official average payout ratio — the proportion of money staked on that game that comes back to players as prizes over time. It's the clearest honest measure of what each game costs you.

Pick 1 returns roughly two-thirds of the stake. Pick 5 returns under a third. If you're purely interested in keeping as much of your money as possible, the small game is the better one by a wide margin — you're paying a much smaller premium for the entertainment. To be completely clear, though: none of the five has positive expected value. All of them lose money on average, and the best of them still loses a third of every pound over the long run. That's how lotteries work; there's no version of this where the arithmetic is in your favour.

There is no "overall odds of winning" figure

Plenty of sites will quote you a single blended number for HotPicks. Ignore it. It doesn't mean anything.

Each Pick game is a separate wager, bought separately and priced separately. The odds shown in the table are the overall odds for that game. If you play Pick 3, your odds of winning something are 1 in 1,960 — full stop. Blending Pick 1's 1 in 10 with Pick 5's 1 in 2.1 million produces an average of games nobody plays simultaneously, and the resulting figure flatters or damns whichever game you actually chose.

A million pounds for £1.50

Here's the genuinely interesting thing about HotPicks, and the reason it isn't just a worse EuroMillions.

A Pick 5 entry pays £1,000,000 at odds of 1 in 2,118,760, for £1.50. The EuroMillions jackpot sits at odds of 1 in 139,838,160, for £2.50. Pick 5 is roughly 66 times more likely to hit than the EuroMillions jackpot, and costs 40% less per go.

The reason is simply that you've dropped the Lucky Stars. Getting five main numbers out of fifty is 1 in 2,118,760. Adding the requirement of both stars multiplies the difficulty by 66 and gets you to 1 in 139,838,160. HotPicks charges you the full price of the main-number difficulty and none of the stars.

There's a second advantage that's easy to overlook. The £1m HotPicks prize is not shared. Under normal conditions, if ten people match five numbers, all ten get £1,000,000 each — it's a fixed prize, not a slice of a pool. A EuroMillions jackpot, by contrast, is divided between everyone who wins it, and shared jackpots are common precisely because so many people pick the same clustered combinations.

The honest counterweight: the EuroMillions jackpot is frequently far more than £1 million and can reach €250 million, and a EuroMillions ticket also gives you twelve other ways to win plus a UK Millionaire Maker entry. HotPicks gives you exactly one way to win and nothing else. Different products, not better and worse ones.

When prizes can be capped

The fixed prizes are fixed under normal conditions, but there's a backstop. Each game has a Prize Fund equal to a cap multiplier times the total staked on that game in that draw. If the total prizes due exceed that fund — which would take a freak number of winners, usually meaning a very popular combination came up — prizes are recalculated as the fund divided by the number of winners, rounded down to the nearest pound.

Prize cap multipliers, applied to total stakes in that game in that draw.
Game	Cap multiplier
Pick 1	1.2
Pick 2	1.35
Pick 3	3.7
Pick 4	11.2
Pick 5	65.0

It's a rare event rather than a routine one, but it's in the rules and it's the one circumstance in which a "fixed" prize isn't.

What HotPicks doesn't have

No jackpot. No rollovers — an unwon prize simply isn't paid out, because there's no pool to carry forward. And no UK Millionaire Maker entry: that comes with a EuroMillions ticket, not a HotPicks one, so buying HotPicks does not put you into the raffle.

EuroMillions HotPicks is not the same game as Lotto HotPicks, and the June 2026 two-round change affected Lotto HotPicks only. EuroMillions HotPicks is unchanged. The names are confusingly similar; the games share nothing but the word.

What the odds actually mean

1 in 2,118,760 for the top prize is far better than a EuroMillions jackpot, and still not a plan. Playing one Pick 5 line in every draw, twice a week, you'd expect to wait somewhere around twenty thousand years. The improvement over 1 in 140 million is real and it is also, in any human sense, irrelevant.

Pick 1 is the opposite case. 1 in 10 means you'll genuinely see wins — roughly one draw in ten. But £1.50 staked to win £10 at 1 in 10 means you lose 50p per play on average, forever. Frequent small wins are what makes a losing proposition feel like a winning one.

That's the trap worth naming with HotPicks specifically: the near-misses feel close. Matching four of your five numbers looks like you almost won a million pounds. You didn't — you won nothing, and you were never nearer than 1 in 2.1 million to the prize. The game gives you no partial credit, and neither should your memory of it.

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 HotPicks line

The generator has a EuroMillions HotPicks preset under Options → Presets. It gives you five numbers from 1–50 and no Lucky Stars — a Pick 5 line. If you're playing a smaller game, just take the first one, two, three or four numbers it produces; they're drawn from the same pool and any subset is as good as any other.

Need a Pick 5 line?

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Prices, draw times, prizes and rules do change. Always confirm the current details with The National Lottery before you play. Lucky Dip is independent and not affiliated with Allwyn or The National Lottery.