Every month, a machine called ERNIE picks winning numbers at random from billions of Premium Bonds. Two of those numbers win £1 million each. The September 2026 draw handed out 6,529,868 prizes worth £497,086,175 in total, ranging from £25 up to those two jackpots. All prizes are free of UK Income Tax and Capital Gains Tax. You do not declare them on a Self Assessment return, and they do not count towards your Personal Savings Allowance.
ERNIE has been running draws since June 1957 and has now picked 586 £1 million winners. Over 22 million people hold bonds.
How the draw works
Each £1 you put in buys one bond with its own number. Every bond gets an equal chance in every monthly draw: currently 21,000 to 1 against winning something. Those odds are per bond, per draw, and they do change from time to time, so check nsandi.com for the current figure.
Holding more bonds means more entries in the draw. If you hold 1,000 bonds you have 1,000 chances each month, but each of those chances is still 21,000 to 1. You are not improving the odds on any single bond, just adding more tickets to the hat. A full £50,000 holding gives you 50,000 entries a month, which makes small wins fairly regular but still leaves the jackpot a long way off. Be careful comparing the two headline numbers. Winning something at 21,000 to 1 is common enough, but the jackpot is a different matter: with roughly 137 billion bonds in the draw and only two £1 million prizes, a single bond has something like a one in 68 billion chance of landing one. The National Lottery Lotto jackpot is about 1 in 45 million per line, so on a per entry basis the Premium Bonds million is the far longer shot.
What you are really staking
Your capital stays safe in cash terms. You can cash in at face value whenever you like, and NS&I is backed by HM Treasury. That means the full amount is government guaranteed rather than sitting under the £85,000 FSCS limit that applies to banks.
The catch is straightforward: if your bonds do not win, you will not earn interest like a savings account could provide. The money you could have earned elsewhere is what you are giving up for a shot at prizes.
The prize fund rate for September 2026 is 4.35% a year. That is not an interest rate you receive. It is an average worked out across all bondholders, and most people win less than it suggests because a few large prizes pull the average up. Someone holding a small number of bonds might win nothing for years. Someone holding £50,000 will probably win fairly often, but there is no promise they will match what a savings account would have paid.
There is also inflation to think about. A £1 bond stays worth £1 in cash, but if it sits there for a decade without winning, it buys less than it used to. The capital is secure, but not growing.
Theories that do not work
You will sometimes hear that buying bonds in one block improves your chances, or that certain number ranges win more often. Neither is true. ERNIE picks numbers at random. Every eligible bond has the same chance, regardless of when it was bought or what digits are in its number. There is no pattern to exploit and no system that beats pure chance.
The only thing that genuinely shifts your probability is holding more bonds. That is arithmetic, not strategy.
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Who can buy and how much
Anyone aged 16 or over can buy Premium Bonds. A parent, legal guardian or grandparent can buy for a child under 16, with a nominated adult managing the holding until the child turns 16. The minimum purchase is £25. The maximum any one person can hold is £50,000, so a couple can hold £100,000 between them.
Check for unclaimed prizes
Prizes never expire. If you have old bonds, or you have moved house and missed letters, use the NS&I prize checker to see whether anything is sitting there waiting. It takes a couple of minutes and costs nothing.
Premium Bonds suit people who like the monthly flutter, do not need an income from their savings, and want government backing. They are not a high return investment, and treating them as one will disappoint you. Enjoy the draw, keep your capital safe, and accept that it may not grow.
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