The Viking Number is drawn from its own pool of five, separate from the 48 main balls. That means it can match a number already among the six main results in the same draw, and it also means the pool is small enough that one in five tickets gets it right. The Viking Number on its own is not a winning tier.
The game at a glance
6 of 48 + Viking Number
Wed
Europe
1 in 61,357,560
The same for every possible combination, including this one.
All divisions →
1 of 5
Viking Number: you pick it yourself, drawn from a separate pool.
18+
Must be 18+ to play Vikinglotto in Norway, and each participating country applies its own national minimum age.
Vikinglotto, in brief
Vikinglotto is a shared draw run jointly by the national lottery operators of ten European countries, with the balls drawn at Norsk Tipping's headquarters in Hamar, Norway. A line asks you to pick six numbers from 1 to 48, then one Viking Number from 1 to 5 that comes from its own separate pool. Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia and Belgium all take part.
The draw is held every Wednesday evening at 20:00 CET. The jackpot starts at €3 million and rolls each week it goes unclaimed, up to a ceiling of €25 million. Once it hits that ceiling, extra money flows down to the second tier instead of pushing the top prize higher. Only the top two tiers are pooled across all ten countries.
Below those two tiers, each country sets its own prize ladder from its own share of sales. Sweden pays down to three main numbers and ignores the Viking Number entirely in the lower groups. Belgium runs eleven ways to win, reaching down to a single main number plus the Viking Number. So the same winning line can be worth different amounts depending on where the ticket was bought.
Prize tiers
6 numbers + Viking NumberJackpot
The jackpot, pooled across all ten countries and capped at €25 million
6 numbers, no Viking Number
The second international tier, also shared across all ten countries and also capped
5 numbers + Viking Number
A national prize, set from each country's own share of ticket sales
5 numbers, no Viking Number
A national prize, the highest tier every participating country pays
4 numbers + Viking Number
A national prize, where the operator offers Viking Number tiers
4 numbers, no Viking Number
A modest national prize
3 numbers + Viking Number
A small national prize, offered by some operators and not others
3 numbers, no Viking Number
The smallest tier paid in every participating country
Where Vikinglotto came from
The first cross-border lottery in Europe
Vikinglotto held its first draw on 17 March 1993, more than a decade before EuroMillions. Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden pooled their players into one prize fund, which no European lottery had done before. The point was scale. Five small markets could together fund a jackpot none of them could offer alone, and the model was later copied on a much larger footprint.
Baltic and Belgian arrivals
The map has grown four times. Estonia joined in 2000, Latvia and Lithuania in 2011, Slovenia in November 2017, and Belgium in November 2020, bringing the total to ten operators. Slovenia and Belgium sit outside the Nordic and Baltic core, which is why calling the game pan-Nordic has stopped being accurate. Each new operator brought its own players into the shared jackpot without changing the numbers on the slip.
Three shapes in thirty years
The slip has changed shape several times. From 1993 the game used six numbers from 48 plus three extra numbers. In 1997 it switched to six from 45 with two extras. The current shape arrived on 24 May 2017, returning to 48 main numbers and replacing the extras with a single Viking Number drawn from 1 to 8. That pool shrank to 1 to 5 in June 2021, which is what puts the jackpot odds at 1 in 61,357,560.
Picking numbers, honestly
Because prizes below the top two tiers are set nationally, two identical tickets in different countries can pay different amounts. That is a fact about how the shared game is funded, not a sign that one country's draw is luckier. The six main numbers and the Viking Number are pulled from one barrel in Hamar for everybody.
A capped jackpot is not a hot streak waiting to break. When Vikinglotto reaches €25 million and still goes unwon, the surplus rolls down into the second tier rather than sitting on the top prize. The odds of matching all six plus the Viking Number stay at 1 in 61,357,560 on every draw, capped or not.
Vikinglotto — frequently asked
Ten: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia and Belgium.
1 in 61,357,560. There are 12,271,512 ways to choose six numbers from 48, and each of those pairs with five possible Viking Numbers.
In Europe, yes. Five Nordic operators pooled their players from 17 March 1993, which predates EuroMillions by more than a decade and Eurojackpot by nearly twenty years.
Only the jackpot and the second tier come out of the shared international pool. Everything below that is funded and set by each national operator, so Sweden, Norway and Belgium each publish a different ladder from the same draw.
No. It was introduced in May 2017 with a pool of 1 to 8, replacing the extra numbers the game had used since 1993. The pool was cut to five balls in June 2021, which shortened the jackpot odds.