Set For Life

Set For Life is the odd one out among the UK games. Every other draw hands you a cheque. This one hands you an income: £10,000 a month, every month, for three hundred and sixty months. That structure is the whole point of the game, and it's also the part most worth understanding before you play, because it changes what winning actually looks like.

How to play

A line costs £1.50. You pick five main numbers from 1 to 47, then one Life Ball from a separate set of 1 to 10. Draws are on Monday and Thursday at 8:00pm, and online and app sales close at 7:30pm on the day.

You can buy in advance for up to four weeks. One quirk: advance play is not available if you're paying by Direct Debit, so if that's how you normally play you'll need to buy those draws another way.

Like Thunderball, every prize in Set For Life is a fixed amount. There are no shared pools, no rollovers, no minimum jackpot to advertise and no must-be-won draws. Monday's game is the same as Thursday's, week after week.

Prize tiers and odds

The bottom tier is worth noting: two main numbers, no Life Ball, wins £5 at odds of 1 in 15. That's where nearly all the 1-in-12.4 comes from, and on a £1.50 line it's a return of a bit over three times your stake. Across the game, the expected average payout is around 50–52% of sales.

How the annuity actually works

This is the section worth reading twice. The top prize is 360 monthly payments of £10,000, which comes to £3,600,000 in total. It is not a lump sum with an instalment plan bolted on — it's an annuity policy that Allwyn buys on the winner's behalf, and the monthly payments come from that policy.

Tax

Each monthly payment is made up of two parts: a capital element, which is tax free, and an interest element, which is subject to applicable tax. The game is designed so that under the tax rules and rates current at the date of the game procedures, the monthly payment will not be less than £10,000 after tax, whatever the winner's tax position. Allwyn deals with the tax at source in most cases, so the £10,000 you see advertised is the £10,000 that lands.

You can't take it as cash

A lump sum is not available, other than in very limited circumstances set out in the Game Specific Rules. If your plan for winning involves clearing a mortgage on day one, this is the wrong game — that's not a flaw, it's the design.

What happens if the winner dies

Two different rules apply, depending on timing.

• If the winner dies after payments have started, the estate receives a lump sum equal to the cost of the annuity policy Allwyn paid for, less the payments already made. If the winner has already received the full cost of the policy, the estate receives nothing further.
• If the winner dies before payments start, the estate receives a lump sum equal to the price Allwyn would have paid for the annuity, plus the initial £10,000 validation payment.

All top-prize winners are offered a meeting with a financial adviser, which given the above is not a courtesy so much as a necessity.

The second prize

Matching five main numbers without the Life Ball pays £10,000 a month for one year — twelve payments, £120,000 in total.

One honest note about the total

£3.6 million paid out over thirty years is worth considerably less in today's money than £3.6 million paid today, because of inflation. The final payment in 2056 will buy less than the first one does. That doesn't make it a bad prize — a guaranteed inflation-exposed £10,000 a month is still an extraordinary thing to win — but the headline total and its real value aren't the same number, and it's better to know that going in.

Prize capping

There are limits if an unusual number of people win at once. The total for Match 5 + Life Ball is capped at £16 million. If that isn't enough to give every winner the full annuity, the £16 million is split equally between them and each winner chooses either a one-off lump sum or an annuity paid over the remaining 29 years and 11 months. Match 5 is capped at £2 million, split equally and paid monthly over one year. The lower tiers are only capped if the Capped Prize Fund — 35.94% of draw sales plus £1 million — isn't enough to cover them. Match 2 prizes are never capped.

What the odds actually mean

1 in 15,339,390 for the top prize. Put a line on both draws every week and that's 104 lines a year at £156, and you'd expect to match five plus the Life Ball about once every 147,000 years. The universe is not obliged to deliver it in the first fifty.

Or look at it from the other end. Covering every possible combination would guarantee the top prize and would cost £23,009,085 in tickets, for something with a nominal value of £3,600,000. That gap is the game.

The second prize is 1 in 1,704,377 — roughly nine times more reachable than the top one, and still comfortably beyond planning for. Everything below that is small change: £250 at 1 in 73,045, and then a long tail down to the £5 that turns up once in fifteen lines.

What none of these numbers respond to is how you choose them. Each of the 15,339,390 combinations is exactly as likely as every other on every draw, so no method, pattern or generator improves your chances — including this one. A generator just spares you the business of picking, and stops you defaulting to the same six birthdays. There's more on the maths in how lottery odds are calculated.

Prices, draw days and prize structures change. Always confirm the current details with The National Lottery's official Set For Life page before you play, and read the Game Specific Rules if the annuity terms matter to you. Lucky Dip is not affiliated with Allwyn or The National Lottery.

Elsewhere on the site

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

Set For Life is entertainment, and it's for over-18s only. If playing has stopped being fun, the responsible gambling page lists free, confidential UK support.