Lottery odds, side by side

How to read a lottery odds figure

“1 in N” is a count of tickets, not a forecast. Work out how many different tickets a game allows, and N is that number.

A game asking for six numbers from 49 has 13,983,816 possible tickets, because that is how many ways six things can be chosen from 49 when order does not matter. Add a second pool the player also picks from and the two counts multiply, which is how Powerball reaches 292,201,338 while only asking for five numbers and one extra. What each game asks for is its matrix, and it is the only input the count has.

Nothing about that number is disputable and nothing about it moves. It does not depend on how many tickets were sold, how long the jackpot has rolled, or which numbers came up last week. Two figures on this page tell you almost everything: the jackpot odds, and the odds of winning any prize at all. The gap between them is usually enormous, and where both figures come from is worked through step by step in the guides.

Short odds and big jackpots are the same dial

Lottery operators widen the number pool when they want bigger headlines. A wider pool means more possible tickets, more draws with no winner, and a prize that keeps climbing. That is the entire mechanism. UK Lotto moved from 49 numbers to 59 in 2015 and its jackpot odds went from 1 in 13,983,816 to 1 in 45,057,474 in the same stroke.

The dial turns the other way too. In June 2026 Allwyn left UK Lotto’s 59 balls exactly where they were and instead put every £2 line into two rounds a night, which takes the published per-line jackpot figure to 1 in 22,528,738 and the chance of any prize to 1 in 4.9. The table above still counts one round, because that is the unit that makes every game on this page comparable.

So the ranking above is not a ranking of better and worse games. It is a ranking of what each game is for. Daily games near the top pay modest prizes often. The multi-country games at the bottom exist to produce the numbers that end up on the news.

What none of this can do

No number choice, system, wheel or frequency chart changes a single figure in that table. Buying more lines does not change it either; it only buys more of the same tickets. Picking numbers above 31 does not improve your odds. It only reduces the chance of sharing a jackpot, because so many players pick birthdays. That is the one honest adjustment available, and it changes the size of a win rather than its likelihood.

What a ticket is worth on average, once every division is weighed against the price, is its expected value. On every game in the table it is negative, which is the arithmetic behind playing for entertainment only.