Premium Bonds go into a monthly prize draw (Image: Getty)
The first Premium Bonds draw of the year has made two millionaires with to Bond holders from Liverpool and Gloucestershire.
As the prize fund rate for the monthly draw fell again for the January draw, down to four percent, many savers will be wondering what their chances are of winning the £1million jackpot.
The odds of winning a prize for each £1 Bond are now at 22,000 to one, having dropped from 21,000 to one from the December draw. As winning Bonds are chosen at random, the chances of any individual winning a prize are the same.
There will continue to be two £1million jackpot prizes in each draw, as has been the case since August 2014. Calculations from Martin Lewis’ found that for each £25 worth of Bonds in the monthly draw, your odds of winning the top prize are one in 2,554,661,349.
The distribution of the other cash prizes varies each month. There are typically 84 prizes for the next amount of £100,000, and your odds of taking home one of these prizes for each £25 in Bonds is 1 in 60,825,267.
Whether you purchased your Bonds recently or many years ago, as long as they are eligible to go into the draw, they have an equal chance of winning a prize.
For example, the jackpot winner in this month’s draw from Gloucestershire purchased their winning Bond just two months ago, in November 2024, when they bought £17,480 worth.
As you have to hold your Bonds for a month before they are eligible to go into the draw, this was likely the first draw these Bonds went into.
In contrast, one person from Devon won £10,000 for a Bond they purchased over 60 years ago, in February 1963.
A total of 128,727,262,710 Bond numbers were eligible to go into the January draw with 5,851,240 prizes paid out.
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This was the breakdown for the cash prizes in the January draw, compared to December:
- £1million – two prizes (unchanged)
- £100,000 – 82 (down from 84)
- £50,000 – 163 (down from 169)
- £25,000 – 328 (down from 338)
- £10,000 – 818 (down from 844)
- £5,000 – 1,636 (down from 1,687)
- £1,000 – 17,163 (down from 17,669)
- £500 – 51,489 (down from 53,007)
- £100 – 1,987,844 (down from 2,100,898)
- £50 – 1,987,844 (down from 2,100,898)
- £25 1,803,871 (up from 1,530,453).