Set for life is a name, not a term of years. The top prize runs for 30 years and then stops, and the total paid out is £3.6 million before any tax on the interest element. That is a large sum by any measure, but it is finite, and it is not a payment that continues for as long as the winner lives.
The game at a glance
5 of 47 + Life Ball
Mon · Thu
United Kingdom
1 in 15,339,390
The same for every possible combination, including this one.
All divisions →
1 of 10
Life Ball: you pick it yourself, drawn from a separate pool.
18+
Must be 18+ to play Set For Life.
Set For Life, in brief
Set For Life is a National Lottery draw game run in the UK by Allwyn. A line costs £1.50 and asks you to pick five numbers from 1 to 47, then one Life Ball from a separate pool of 1 to 10. The Life Ball is yours to choose, not an extra ball pulled from the main pool afterwards, and it decides which side of the prize table your ticket falls on.
Draws are held on Monday and Thursday. Nothing rolls over, because the top prize is not a cash pile: matching all five numbers plus the Life Ball pays £10,000 every month for 30 years, arriving as monthly instalments rather than one transfer. Over the full term that comes to £3.6 million, and the figure is the same whether the prize went last week or last year.
The second tier is a shorter version of the same idea. Matching the five main numbers without the Life Ball pays £10,000 every month for one year, so the game has two annuity prizes rather than one. Below those, the six remaining tiers are ordinary fixed cash amounts, from £250 down to £5, paid in the usual way.
Prize tiers
Match 5 + Life BallJackpot
£10,000 every month for 30 years, paid monthly rather than as a lump sum
Match 5
£10,000 every month for one year, the shorter of the game's two annuities
Match 4 + Life Ball
A fixed £250
Match 4
A fixed £50
Match 3 + Life Ball
A fixed £30
Match 3
A fixed £20
Match 2 + Life Ball
A fixed £10
Match 2
A fixed £5, the smallest prize in the game
Where Set For Life came from
The National Lottery's first annuity draw
The first Set For Life draw took place on 18 March 2019. Every National Lottery draw game before it paid its top prize as a lump sum, and this one deliberately did not. The pitch was a steady income instead of a windfall, aimed at players who liked the idea of a salary-shaped prize, and it gave the operator a top tier it could advertise as a monthly figure.
How the payments work
Each monthly payment is made up of a capital element and an interest element. The capital part is tax free, the interest part is taxable, and the rules state that under tax rates in force the monthly payment will not fall below £10,000 after tax. Payments run for 360 months and then stop, which is where the £3.6 million total for the top tier comes from.
Under Allwyn
Camelot ran the game at launch. The current rules, Edition 4, took effect on 1 February 2024, the date Allwyn's licence to operate the National Lottery began. The 5 from 47 plus a Life Ball from 10 matrix, the £1.50 line price and the Monday and Thursday draw nights all carried over unchanged, so the top-tier odds have stood at 1 in 15,339,390 since 2019.
Picking numbers, honestly
The Life Ball comes from a pool of only 10 numbers, which makes it look like the easy half of the ticket. On its own it is worth nothing. The smallest prize needs two main numbers, so a ticket matching the Life Ball and nothing else wins no money at all, unlike the equivalent tier in Thunderball.
Choosing numbers above 31 to avoid sharing a prize is beside the point here. Every Set For Life prize is a fixed amount, so two winners of the top tier each receive £10,000 a month rather than dividing one annuity between them. The odds of matching are 1 in 15,339,390 for every combination of five numbers and a Life Ball.
Set For Life — frequently asked
No. It runs for 30 years at £10,000 a month, then stops. That is £3.6 million in total.
You pick it yourself from a pool of 1 to 10, and it splits the prize table in two. Matching it lifts a ticket into the higher of the two tiers for the same number of main numbers, and it is the difference between the 30-year annuity and the one-year one.
£10,000 every month for one year, which is £120,000 in total. It is the second prize tier, at odds of about 1 in 1,704,377.
Partly. Each payment splits into a capital element, which is tax free, and an interest element, which is taxable. The rules say the payment will not drop below £10,000 after tax at current rates.
£1.50 a line, drawn on Monday and Thursday evenings. That is two draws a week, fewer than Lotto or Thunderball, and it has been the schedule since the game launched in 2019.