Set For Life Odds Calculator

Open the Set For Life odds calculator and you are already sitting on the United Kingdom National Lottery's annuity product: five main numbers from a pool of 47 plus a Life Ball drawn from 1 to 10. The default Ticket Price is £1.50, the default Jackpot is 3,600,000, and that jackpot figure is the advertised thirty-year total of £10,000 a month, not a Powerball-style lump sum. Allwyn runs the National Lottery today; Camelot operated Set For Life from its March 2019 launch until the licence handover in 2024. Draws are daily, which is why a ticket count here is a count of lines on one evening, not a month of subscriptions unless you deliberately multiply.

Tickets is the first field. Enter how many independent £1.50 lines you are modelling for a single draw. One ticket is one five-number combination plus one Life Ball. Ten tickets are ten independent combinations. The engine does not assume a wheel, a lucky dip correlation, or a syndicate share structure; it treats every ticket as an independent Bernoulli trial against the published matrix. Doubling Tickets doubles your outlay and almost-but-not-quite doubles a tiny probability. The at-least-once chance the calculator prints is 1 minus (1 minus p) to the power of tickets, which for p around one in 15.34 million stays microscopic even at fifty lines.

Ticket Price defaults to 1.50 because that is the current National Lottery stake per Set For Life board. Override it to model a price rise, a free-ticket promotion, or your slice of a office syndicate (if six people split six lines, your personal price is still 1.50 unless you are costing the whole slip). Price feeds expected value only. It does not change combinatorial odds.

Jackpot defaults to 3600000. That is £10,000 times 12 months times 30 years. If you want a colder EV, replace it with a present-value estimate of the annuity: tax on the monthly payments, inflation, and the fact you cannot invest the unpaid remainder. The calculator treats Jackpot as a single cash figure paid on a win. It does not discount cash flows and it does not encode the second prize of £10,000 a month for one year.

Main Matches is the prize-tier probe on the five-from-47 grid. Set 5 to inspect a full main-number hit. Set 4, 3, or 2 to look at the bands that dominate real Set For Life prize tables. Bonus Matches is the Life Ball: 1 means you matched it, 0 means you missed. The advertised top prize requires Main Matches 5 and Bonus Matches 1. Five mains with Bonus Matches 0 is a different National Lottery tier in the real game. This model reports the hypergeometric odds of the (mains, Life Ball) pair you asked for; it does not pay out the official pound table.

Read Jackpot Odds for the 5-plus-Life-Ball hit, This Prize Odds for the tier you configured, then the two chance percentages for a book of tickets, then Jackpot EV and Expected Jackpot Return. At the advertised £3.6 million, EV per line is deeply negative because 3,600,000 divided by 15,339,390 is about 23 pence against a £1.50 stake.

Set For Life is the United Kingdom National Lottery's answer to the American cash-for-life products: a daily £1.50 game whose headline is not a nine-figure rollover but a salary. Match five numbers from 47 and the Life Ball from 1 to 10 and the operator pays £10,000 every month for 30 years. The marketing line is £3.6 million. The economic object is an annuity. Camelot launched the game on 18 March 2019, filling a gap between the midweek Lotto and the high-volatility EuroMillions ticket. In February 2024 Allwyn UK took over the National Lottery licence; Set For Life continued under the same matrix, the same daily rhythm, and the same annuity top prize.

The format is deliberately smaller than Lotto's 6/59. Five from 47 is 1,533,939 main combinations. The Life Ball, drawn from ten numbers, multiplies the jackpot denominator by ten, producing 15,339,390 equally likely top-prize tickets. That is hard enough to feel like a lottery and easy enough, relative to EuroMillions, that Allwyn can keep a daily draw without the prize fund collapsing. Second prize in the published table is five mains without the Life Ball: £10,000 a month for one year. Lower tiers pay cash. This calculator's bonus field is the Life Ball, not a supplementary ball drawn from the remaining 42, because the jackpot definition is 5 plus Life Ball.

Operator history matters for anyone comparing odds across National Lottery products. Camelot's 2019 pitch was explicitly anti-jackpot: a life-changing income you could actually spend, rather than a sum so large it is abstract. Allwyn kept that positioning. The game sits beside Thunderball (5/39 plus Thunderball 1/14, £1, top prize £500,000 cash) and Lotto (6/59, £2). Set For Life is the one whose EV discussion must mention discount rates. Treating £3.6 million as cash overstates the prize; treating it as zero until year 30 understates it. A reasonable present-value haircut still leaves a prize that is enormous against a £1.50 stake and still far too small to make the ticket a fair bet.

Daily draws change behaviour. People buy Set For Life the way they buy a coffee: out of habit, not after computing combinations. That is why a calculator that isolates Tickets, Price, and the Life Ball is useful. You can ask what fifty lucky dips do to jackpot chance (almost nothing) and what they do to expected loss (they multiply it). You can set Main Matches to 3 and Bonus Matches to 1 to see why the prize table even bothers with those rungs. You can compare the 5/47 plus 1/10 matrix with Cash4Life in the United States (5/60 plus 1/4) and see that "for life" branding does not imply a shared probability model.

Set For Life is not a substitute for a pension, despite the name. The annuity stops at 30 years, it is shared if two tickets hit, and the National Lottery can and does change games. Use the calculator to read the matrix Allwyn actually sells: five from 47, Life Ball from ten, £1.50, daily, with a headline that is a payment schedule, not a vault of cash.

Set For Life prices a salary, not a vault: five from forty-seven times a Life Ball from ten. Camelot launched the daily National Lottery product on 18 March 2019; Allwyn kept the same matrix after the 2024 licence handover. Match five mains and the Life Ball and the operator pays ten thousand pounds a month for thirty years. Marketing prints 3,600,000 pounds. Combinatorics of that first category: 1 / [C(47,5)×C(10,1)] = 1/15,339,390. A line costs one pound fifty. The 3.6 million figure is a payment schedule treated as cash in the identity below, which overstates present value.

Main combinations: C(47,5) = 47×46×45×44×43 / 120 = 1,533,939. The Life Ball multiplies by ten: 1,533,939×10 = 15,339,390. Five-from-forty-seven is smaller than Lotto’s six-from-fifty-nine and larger than Thunderball’s five-from-thirty-nine. Ten Life Ball faces are the same size as Lotto America’s Star Ball pool and as a Superzahl, not as two Lucky Stars. United States Cash4Life is 5/60 plus 1/4; the shared “for life” slogan is branding, not a shared polynomial.

Hypergeometric mains: C(5,k)×C(42,5−k)/C(47,5). Life Ball: one tenth or nine tenths. Five mains without the Life Ball: 9/15,339,390, about one in 1,704,377, nine times the jackpot probability, the one-year ten-thousand-a-month rung in the official table. Four mains plus the Life Ball: C(5,4)×C(42,1)/1,533,939 × 1/10 = 210/15,339,390, about one in 73,045. Three mains without the Life Ball: C(5,3)×C(42,2)/1,533,939 × 9/10 = (10×861/1,533,939)×0.9, about one in 198. Those mid cells are why a daily salary game can feel “hot” without ever threatening the 15.3 million top.

Fifty lucky dips: 1−(1−1/15,339,390)^50, still on the order of 0.0003 percent at the top prize. Expected headline pounds treated as cash are 3,600,000/15,339,390 ≈ 0.23 against 1.50, so jackpot-only expectation is about minus 1.27 a line. Discounting the thirty-year stream by half would cut that 23 pence of jackpot expectation roughly in two. Lower cash rungs add omitted return. Sharing splits the salary. Tax on monthly payments is a personal question the combination count ignores.

Do not paste Thunderball’s 8.06 million or Lotto’s 45.1 million into this salary. Keep 5/47 plus 1/10, £1.50, daily, Allwyn, a thirty-year schedule rather than a rolling banner.