The Birthday Draw Odds: Your Real Chances of Winning ITV and Global's £1 Million

The Birthday Draw is the weekly £1 million prize draw run jointly by ITV and Global, the company behind Heart, Capital, Smooth and Classic FM. You pick a date, a letter and a colour, and if all of them match the winning combination you win or share the jackpot. Neither company publishes the odds. They can be worked out from the terms and conditions, so we did.

The short answer: about 1 in 11.4 million per entry for the jackpot, and about 1 in 365 to win anything at all, nearly always £5. Below is how we got there, what the smaller prizes are worth, how it compares with the National Lottery and with capped prize competitions, and the cheapest way to enter.

How The Birthday Draw Works

Each entry is a combination of three choices, set out in section 4.7 of the terms (the version in force from 7 September 2026):

• A date in DD MM YY format. It can be any valid calendar date in the last 100 years. It does not have to be your birthday.
• A letter. Any of the 26.
• A colour. One of 12: red, orange, peach, gold, yellow, mint, green, blue, teal, purple, lavender or pink.

Entries close at 23:59 on Sunday and the result is published on Thursday. One winning combination is announced each week. Draw #42, published on 12 November 2026, was 07 01 02, F, Orange. The week before it was 31 01 32, T, Purple.

A single entry costs £2. Subscribers pay £1 per entry, and there is a free postal route. You can make up to 60 entries a week.

The Odds of Winning the £1 Million Jackpot

To win the jackpot you have to match all five parts: day, month, year, letter and colour. So the odds are one in the number of possible combinations:

• Dates in the last 100 years: 36,525 (100 years, including 25 leap days)
• Letters: 26
• Colours: 12

36,525 × 26 × 12 = 11,395,800 combinations. One entry is one of them, so your chance of holding the winning combination is about 1 in 11.4 million.

One caveat. The terms describe the prizes for matching "the drawn Entry Selections" but do not describe how the winning combination is generated. Our figure assumes every valid combination is equally likely to be drawn, which is how a draw of this kind would normally work. One detail in the terms supports it: 11p from each paid entry goes into the jackpot fund. A £1 million prize at 1 in 11.4 million costs about 8.8p per entry to fund, so 11p is what you would expect to see if the odds are what we calculate.

Two more things to know about the jackpot:

• It is shared. The terms say the jackpot fund "will be shared equally between the entries that match all the drawn Entry Selections". If two people pick the same combination and it comes up, they get £500,000 each.
• There is not a jackpot winner every week. If nobody holds the winning combination, nobody wins the £1 million. The "guaranteed winner" wording on the site refers to the separate subscriber draws, covered below.

The Odds of Winning a Smaller Prize

There are four lower tiers, and all of them require the day and month to match. Using the same assumption, the odds per entry are:

• Day and month only: about 1 in 400. This pays a fixed £5.
• Day, month and colour: about 1 in 4,600.
• Day, month, letter and colour: about 1 in 115,000.
• Day, month, year and colour: about 1 in 456,000.
• All five: about 1 in 11.4 million. The jackpot.

Add them up and the chance of winning something is about 1 in 365, which makes sense: you win something whenever your day and month come up, and there are 365 days in a year. More than nine times out of ten, that something is £5.

The three middle tiers do not pay fixed amounts. They share what is left of the weekly prize fund after the jackpot allocation, the £5 prizes and the subscriber draws: roughly 63% to the top tier and 18.5% each to the other two. The amounts therefore move from week to week. The winners The Birthday Draw has chosen to feature on its site won between £1,778 and £30,000 from the weekly draw. When we checked on 14 November 2026 that page showed 26 winners and no jackpot winner.

How Many People Enter?

ITV and Global do not say. But the results page gives a clue: it reports the number of "unique winners" each week, and that was 295 for draw #42 and 305 for draw #41.

Since about 1 entry in 365 wins something, roughly 300 winners implies something like 110,000 entries a week. Treat that as a rough floor, not a measurement. One person can hold several winning entries and is counted once, and people do not pick dates evenly, so the real figure is probably higher.

If it is in that region, it tells you something useful. With around 110,000 entries spread over 11.4 million combinations, the chance that anybody matches all five in a given week is in the region of 1 in 100. At that scale the jackpot would be won about once every two years.

How Much of the Money Comes Back as Prizes?

This is stated outright. Section 7.2 of the terms says the weekly prize fund is 40% of net entry sales, where net means after VAT and processing costs.

On Competition Showroom we measure every prize competition with a Value Ratio: total ticket revenue divided by the prize value. A prize fund of 40% of sales is a Value Ratio of 2.5 at best, and a little worse once the VAT is counted. The median across the roughly 2,000 capped UK competitions we track was 2.5 when we measured it this month. So on value, The Birthday Draw is almost exactly an average prize competition. It is neither a rip-off nor a bargain.

The Birthday Draw vs the National Lottery

These are the published jackpot odds for the main National Lottery games, next to our figure:

• Thunderball (£1, top prize £500,000): 1 in 8.1 million
• The Birthday Draw (£2, or £1 for subscribers, £1 million shared): about 1 in 11.4 million
• Set For Life (£1.50, £10,000 a month for 30 years): 1 in 15.3 million
• Lotto (£2): 1 in 45.1 million
• EuroMillions (£2.50): 1 in 139.8 million

So an entry is about four times more likely to hit the top prize than a Lotto line, for a jackpot of at least £1 million. At the £1 subscriber price, only Thunderball gives shorter odds for the same money, and its top prize is half the size. It is also a different kind of product: The Birthday Draw is a prize draw with a free entry route, not a lottery.

The Birthday Draw vs Capped Prize Competitions

The other way to chase a prize of this size is a capped competition, where the operator limits the number of tickets and publishes the limit. Two that are open as we write:

• BOTB's £1.25m Hampshire house: £1 a ticket, capped at 3,149,999 tickets, with a £900,000 cash alternative. Worst-case odds of 1 in 3.15 million. Closes 30 November 2026.
• Elite Competitions' £2 Million Lake Windermere Dream Bundle: 19p a ticket, capped at 29,999,999, with a £1.4 million cash alternative. Worst case 1 in 30 million, or about 1 in 5.7 million for the same £1. Closes 30 November 2026.

Pound for pound, both give a better chance at a comparable prize than The Birthday Draw's 1 in 11.4 million. There are two further differences. A capped draw has one guaranteed winner, where The Birthday Draw's jackpot is only paid if someone matches. And if a capped draw closes without selling out, your real odds were better than the cap. Every live draw of this kind is ranked on our house competitions and cash competitions tables.

The Birthday Draw's advantage is at the other end. About 1 entry in 365 wins something, and a 1 in 4,600 shot at a four-figure share is a real prize tier that a single-winner draw does not have.

The Cheapest Way to Enter

• By post, free. Create the entry on the website, choose the postal option, and you get a 16-digit code to write on a postcard or the outside of a sealed envelope. One code per postcard. The terms state that "a postal Entry has the same chances of winning as an online Entry". You pay for the stamp and nothing goes to the promoters.
• By subscription, £1. Subscribers pay half the single-entry price for the same chance. The price per entry falls further in bundles: 4 entries for £3.50 a week (88p each), 8 for £6.50 (81p) and 12 for £8.95 (75p). It is a rolling monthly payment, so cancel before the first of the month if you want to stop.
• One-off, £2. The most expensive way to buy exactly the same chance.

Subscribers are also entered into two extra draws that do have a guaranteed winner. The £10,000 weekly draw takes one entry for each entry you have in that week's main draw. The £100 daily draw is narrower than it sounds: you are only in it on your own birthday, with a single entry, against the other subscribers born on the same day. The terms do not say how many subscribers there are, so neither set of odds can be calculated.

Does It Matter Which Date You Pick?

Not for your chance of matching. Every combination is as likely as any other. It can matter for how much you win, because every tier above £5 is shared between the entries that match.

The obvious dates, such as 1 January, 14 February and 25 December, are likely to be chosen far more often than an ordinary Tuesday in March. If one of them comes up, the same prize pool is split between more people. That is our reasoning from the sharing rules, not something the promoters publish, but it is the same logic as avoiding popular numbers on the lottery. If you are choosing a date at random anyway, a dull one costs you nothing.

Adding colours is not a way to improve your odds for free. Each extra colour on the same date and letter is a separate paid entry.

What About ITV's and Global's Other Competitions?

The on-air competitions, such as the cash prizes on This Morning and Good Morning Britain or Heart's Make Me A Millionaire, work differently: there is no fixed set of combinations, so the odds depend entirely on how many people enter, and that number is never published. We explain what can and cannot be worked out in ITV and radio competition odds explained.

The Honest Take

The Birthday Draw is better than Lotto on jackpot odds, about average on value, and unusually clear about where the money goes. It is still a 1 in 11.4 million shot, and in most weeks nobody wins the million. If you like it, enter by post or as a subscriber, because paying £2 buys nothing extra. If what you want is the best chance of actually winning something substantial, capped competitions publish a worst case before you pay, and our best odds league table ranks every live one by value.

Figures are from The Birthday Draw's terms and conditions (version effective 7 September 2026), its help pages and its published results, checked on 14 November 2026. The odds are our own calculation and are not published by ITV or Global.