Thunderball

Thunderball is the quiet one. It has no jackpot, no rollover, no eight-figure headline, and it turns up four nights a week without much fuss. What it does have is a fixed prize table, which makes it one of the easier UK games to understand — and the only one where the biggest winner and the tenth biggest winner take home exactly the same amount.

How to play

Each line costs £1. You choose five main numbers from 1 to 39, then one Thunderball from a separate set of 1 to 14. That's it — no bonus options, no multipliers, no extra add-on to decline at the checkout.

Draws happen four times a week: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. The draw times are not identical, and this trips people up. Tuesday and Friday draws take place at 8:00pm. Wednesday and Saturday draws take place at 8:15pm, because Lotto has the 8:00pm slot on those two nights. If you're used to tuning in at eight, you'll be a quarter of an hour early twice a week.

Playing online or in the app, sales close at 7:30pm on the day of the draw.

One more thing worth clearing up: in June 2026 The National Lottery moved Lotto and Lotto HotPicks to a two-round format. Thunderball was not part of that change. It remains a single-round game, drawn exactly as it always has been.

Prize tiers and odds

Every prize is fixed. There are no pari-mutuel tiers, so the amount printed against each outcome is the amount you get, regardless of how many other people match the same thing.

Read down that list and you'll notice something: matching the Thunderball on its own wins £3. You need none of the main numbers at all. That single tier is doing most of the work behind the 1-in-13 overall figure, and it's also why Thunderball feels like it pays out more often than it does. It pays out small more often.

Why the top prize is never shared

This is the game's defining feature and the main reason people play it. In Lotto or EuroMillions, the jackpot is a pot that gets divided between everyone who matches. If six people share it, each gets a sixth. Thunderball doesn't work that way. Every prize is a fixed cash amount, so if forty people match five numbers plus the Thunderball on the same night, all forty receive the full £500,000.

That removes the one thing you cannot control in a jackpot game — how many other people happened to pick your line. A birthday-heavy set of low numbers is no worse a bet here than an obscure spread across the whole range, because there is no dilution to avoid.

There's a limit, but it is a distant one. Prizes are only capped if the total value of prizes won in a single draw exceeds four times the total value of entries in that draw. In practice this is rare, and it isn't the kind of thing worth planning around.

The Thunderball is drawn separately

The five main numbers come out of one machine holding 39 balls. The Thunderball comes out of a second machine holding 14. They're independent draws, which has a consequence people find odd the first time they see it: the Thunderball can be the same number as one of your main numbers. If 7 comes out of the main machine and 7 also comes out of the Thunderball machine, that's perfectly normal, and your 7 counts in both places if you picked it in both.

It also explains the 1-in-29 bottom tier. With 14 Thunderballs, your chance of matching that one ball is 1 in 14 — but the £3 tier requires you to match the Thunderball and none of the main numbers, which is why the published figure is a little longer than 1 in 14.

No jackpot, no rollover

If nobody matches five plus the Thunderball, nothing happens. There's no rollover, no growing pot, no must-be-won draw at the end of a dry spell. Wednesday's game is identical to the one before it. Across the game as a whole, the average payout is around 52% of sales — the rest goes to good causes, duty, retailers and running the thing.

What the odds actually mean

1 in 8,060,598 is a number most of us can't feel. Here's one way to hold it: play a single line in all four draws every week, which is 208 lines and £208 a year, and you'd expect to hit the top prize roughly once every 38,000 years. Not once in a lifetime with luck — once in a stretch of time longer than recorded history.

Another angle. Buying every possible combination would guarantee the £500,000, and would cost £8,060,598 to do it. The top prize is worth about one-sixteenth of the cost of certainty. That's not a criticism of the game; it's simply what a £1 ticket buys.

The overall 1 in 13 is honest but easy to misread. Most of those thirteen-line wins are the £3 Thunderball-only tier, which returns three times your stake and no more. Thunderball is a game that gives you frequent small change and, very occasionally, someone's life savings.

None of this can be improved by how you choose. Every one of the 8,060,598 combinations is equally likely on every draw, so no system, pattern or generator shifts the odds by a fraction. What a generator saves you is the bother of choosing — nothing more. There's more on the arithmetic in how lottery odds are calculated.

Prices, draw times and prize tiers change from time to time. Always confirm the current details with The National Lottery's official Thunderball page before you play. Lucky Dip is not affiliated with Allwyn or The National Lottery.

Elsewhere on the site

• Set For Life →
• How lottery odds are calculated →
• Do lucky numbers work? →
• Responsible gambling →

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