Set For Life’s First 25 Draws: What’s Happened So Far?
Updated: Thursday 13th June 2019
The National Lottery is marking its 25th anniversary this year, but its newest game is just 25 draws old. Set For Life launched in March as the UK’s first annuity lottery, but what has happened so far, how many winners have there been and what else do you need to know about the game?
How Many Winners?
There have well over 3 million prizes given away in total since the first Set For Life draw on Monday 18th March. To play the game, you must pick five main numbers from 1 to 47 plus one Life Ball from a separate set between 1 and 10. There are eight ways to win in every draw, so you receive an award for matching anything from two numbers upwards. In the first 25 draws, the total number of prizes has been:
3,621,588 winners across all prize categories
144,863 winners on average in each draw
£38,267,825 has been won in prize money
Big Prizes
The top prize is worth £10,000 every month for 30 years, making it the only UK lottery to offer a guaranteed income rather than a one-off jackpot. The second prize works in a similar way, rewarding anyone who matches five main numbers with £10,000 a month for one year. Set For Life has already created many big winners.
Match 5 + 1 - One winner
Match 5 + 0 - 29 Winners
Anyone who wins a prize must come forward within 180 days, the same as any other National Lottery game, and has the option to go public or stay anonymous. One player, who won the second prize of £10,000 a month for one year, opted for partial publicity after winning online. Known only as Mr T from Liverpool, he said he was looking forward to going on an exotic holiday and a ‘year he’ll never forget’.
Super Chance Draws
The odds of matching the full winning line are 1 in 15,339,390, while the odds of winning the Match 5 prize are significantly better at 1 in 1,704,377. The National Lottery decided to introduce Super Chance draws to make it much easier to win the top prize, after a couple of months had gone by without any Match 5 + 1 winners.
In Super Chance draws, any player who matches five main numbers receives £10,000 a month for 30 years, regardless of whether or not they match the Life Ball. In the first Super Chance draw on Thursday 23rd May, two ticket holders snapped up the top prize without matching the Life Ball. If nobody had matched five numbers in that draw, another Super Chance draw would have been held in the next draw and they would have continued until there was at least one winner.
The first time that a player matched all five main numbers plus the Life Ball was a couple of weeks after the Super Chance draw, on Thursday 6th June, meaning that three participants have so far been set up for life with big payouts guaranteed for the next 30 years.
Set For Life Statistics
All the numbers have an identical chance of appearing in every draw, but the statistics from the first 25 draws show that some have come out far more than others. Among the main set from 1 to 47, the number 6 has been the most frequently drawn, with eight appearances so far, followed by 15 (drawn seven times). By contrast, the numbers 10, 14, 18, 34 and 38 have still not been selected at all.
Among the Life Balls, the number 3 has been drawn six times already out of 25 draws, while the number 1 has not yet been seen. Go to the Statistics page to see more information about numbers frequencies, common pairs and triplets, which you may want to use to help you select your next line.
Growth of the Game
National Lottery bosses announced when Set For Life launched that they were ‘really pleased to be enhancing their range of games’. As a new type of lottery for the UK market, it was designed to target new players and particularly youngsters who would be attracted to the idea of prizes being paid out over a long period.
Speaking about the latest sales figures for 2018/2019, Camelot chief executive Nigel Railton recently said that the National Lottery now had a ‘more balanced portfolio’, which he anticipated would result in an upturn in revenue over the next 12 months. This will also help the National Lottery to raise more money for good causes.
As Set For Life continues, there are sure to be more and more winners of the biggest prizes, setting up an increasing number of players for a lifetime of financial security.
Published: Tuesday 11th June 2019Lottery News News Archive