Lotto

The big change: Lotto now draws twice a night

On 7 June 2026 Lotto moved to a two-round format, with the first two-round draw taking place on 10 June 2026. If you last played before then, the game you remember has genuinely changed shape — not just in the prizes, but in how a draw is run.

Each Lotto draw night now has two Rounds. Each Round draws its own six main numbers plus its own Bonus Ball, from a separate machine. Your single £2 line goes into both Rounds automatically, at no extra cost. You can win in Round 1, in Round 2, or in both.

That's why the overall odds of winning something improved from 1 in 9.3 to 1 in 4.9. You're not playing a cleverer game — you're simply getting two shots at the balls instead of one.

How to play

Pick six numbers from 1 to 59, or let a machine (or this site) do it for you. A line costs £2. Draws happen on Wednesday and Saturday at 8:00pm, and results usually appear from about 9:30pm.

If you're playing online or in the app, sales close at 7:30pm on draw day. Leave it until 7:31pm and your entry rolls into the next draw instead, which is a mildly annoying way to learn the rule.

You don't choose a Bonus Ball. It's drawn by the operator in each Round, and it only matters if you've already matched five main numbers.

The two-round format, explained properly

This is the bit that trips people up, so it's worth being blunt about it.

You cannot combine numbers across Rounds. Each Round is scored on its own. If one of your numbers comes up in Round 1 and a different one comes up in Round 2, that is not a Match 2 — it's two separate near-misses, and it pays nothing.

To win a prize you need the matches to land within a single Round. Two numbers in Round 1 is a Match 2. Two in Round 2 is a Match 2. One in each is nothing at all.

The flip side is that prizes are paid per Round. If your line manages Match 3 in Round 1 and Match 3 in Round 2, you collect the Match 3 prize twice. The same line can win in both halves of the same draw.

The odds in the table below are quoted per draw and already account for both Rounds. The prize figures are what one Round pays.

Prize tiers and odds

Match 2 now pays £1 in cash, not a free Lucky Dip ticket. That's a real change and worth noticing: the old game handed you another go, the new one hands you a coin. On a £2 line, a Match 2 still leaves you a pound down.

The jackpot, rollovers and rolldowns

The jackpot is funded from 8.88% of draw sales. All Match 6 winners across both Rounds share a single jackpot pool — the two Rounds don't have separate jackpots.

Allwyn tops the pool up so that every jackpot winner receives at least £1 million. That top-up is capped at £10 million in total, so in the unlikely event of a very large number of Match 6 winners in one draw, individual winners can receive less than £1 million.

Be careful with the widely repeated line that "the jackpot starts at £2 million". The Game Procedures set no minimum starting jackpot. Allwyn has said jackpots continue to start at around £2 million, but that's the operator's stated intention rather than a rule of the game. The guarantee written into the rules is the £1 million minimum per winning entry.

If nobody matches six, the jackpot rolls over. Lotto allows a maximum of five rollovers, which makes the fifth rollover — the sixth consecutive draw — a Must Be Won draw. Allwyn can also designate any draw as Must Be Won for promotional reasons.

What happens on a Must Be Won draw

If a Must Be Won draw produces no Match 6 winner, the jackpot rolls down the prize tiers in a strict order:

1. Every Match 2 winner gets £5 instead of £1. Allwyn may add up to £8 million from the Reserve Fund to help fund this. If the jackpot plus that £8 million still isn't enough, the total is split equally among Match 2 winners, capped at £5 each.
2. Only if no Reserve Fund money was needed and money still remains, the remainder is shared equally among Match 3 winners.
3. If there are no Match 2 winners at all, the whole jackpot goes to Match 3 winners.
4. If neither of those tiers has winners, it's shared across the remaining tiers that do.

Rolldown amounts are rounded down to the nearest pound.

Is there still a Millionaire Raffle?

Not as a standing feature, no. The old Lotto Millionaire Raffle that ran on every draw is gone. In its place is the Guaranteed Millionaire Raffle Draw, an occasional promotional raffle that Allwyn runs from time to time — not every week, and with no guaranteed frequency.

When one does run, every Lotto line bought for that draw day gets a raffle code of four letters followed by eight numbers. There are one or more £1,000,000 prizes, the number is advertised in advance, they're funded from the Reserve Fund, and the raffle is drawn once after both Rounds have taken place.

What the odds actually mean

1 in 22,528,738 is a number most of us can't feel, so here's the arithmetic laid out.

There are 22,528,738 chances against you on the jackpot. At two draws a week, that's 104 draws a year — so a single line played in every draw would, on average, take somewhere around 216,000 years to come up. Buying every possible combination at £2 a line would cost about £45 million, which is rather more than the jackpot usually holds.

The 1 in 4.9 "any prize" figure sounds much friendlier, and it's true — but read it honestly. The tier doing nearly all the work is Match 2 at 1 in 5.4, which pays £1 on a £2 line. Winning something and coming out ahead are different events.

None of this is a criticism of playing. Two pounds for a couple of days of daydreaming is a fair trade if that's what you're buying. It stops being a fair trade the moment you start treating it as a plan.

Nothing on this site changes any of the above. 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 that in how lottery odds are calculated.

Generating a Lotto line

The generator on this site has a Lotto preset under Options → Presets. It gives you 6 numbers from 1–59 and no bonus numbers — that's deliberate, because the Bonus Ball is drawn by the operator, not chosen by you. There is nothing to pick.

Prices, draw times, prize tiers and rules do change — Lotto's own overhaul in June 2026 is the obvious example. 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.

Related reading

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

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