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14-Times Lottery Winner Finally Reveals His Secret
What’s the prize limit for a rollover?
There are two national lottery games with jackpots that can roll over. However, they both handle their prize limits differently. Lotto The Lotto jackpot can roll over for a maximum of five draws in a row before it has to be won. With a Wednesday jackpot of at least £2 million and a Saturday jackpot of at least £3.8 million, the lowest amount that a maxed out lotto rollover can reach is £13.6 million. Each draw’s jackpot can be increased if enough tickets are sold, which will increase the potential rollover cap.
Euromillions The maximum jackpot from a Euromillions rollover is €190 million. This limit could take anywhere from a few draws to reach, or could take as long as the current rollover record of 18 draws, reached in 2019. Once this €190 million jackpot cap is reached, the prize must be won in 5 draws. Any extra lottery funds accumulated between those 5 lottery draws is used to increase the prizes for the lower winner tiers.
This is also good for the lotteries themselves as the extra attention generated by big jackpots means that even more people are likely to buy tickets. As jackpots are at least partly funded by ticket sales, this creates a snowball effect, where a jackpot increases so more people buy tickets, so the jackpot increases by a bigger margin, so even more people buy tickets, and so on.
The Lotto jackpot starts at £2 million on a Wednesday or £3.8 million on a Saturday. It rolls over if it is not won, but there is a limit for long it can keep climbing and the jackpot does sometimes have to roll down if nobody wins. A rolldown is when the jackpot is split between winners in other prize categories, significantly boosting the payouts for thousands of players.
Its not a strict rule, but more tickets tend to be sold the higher a jackpot climbs. For example, between July and October 2019 the EuroMillions jackpot went on a record run of 22 rollovers before it was finally won and weekly ticket sales more than doubled in that period. The table and graph below show how ticket sales increased over the 11 weeks of that rollover run:
A lottery rollover occurs when no one wins the jackpot in a particular draw. Each lottery game has its own rules about what happens in this scenario, but typically the value of the jackpot for the next draw will increase. Not all National Lottery games have rollovers, while those that do – Lotto and EuroMillions – have different limits on how long the jackpot can keep increasing.
It can only roll over four times at the cap; if there is no jackpot winner in the fifth draw the entire amount will be shared between winners in the next winning prize tier. Once the maximum jackpot has been won or rolled down the cap than increases by €10 million. See the EuroMillions Jackpot Cap page for more information. Useful Pages
What happens if nobody wins a capped rollover jackpot?
Once all the rollover limits have been met for a lottery game, someone has to win that huge prize! This is called a ‘Must Be Won’ draw, and it has slightly different rules to normal National Lottery draws. If nobody matches all the numbers needed to win the jackpot in a Must Be Won draw, then the rollover prize money is shared between the lower tiers of winners.
For Lotto, the jackpot trickles down to increase the prize money for the lower tier winners, with a minimum of 3 matching numbers required for a boost. For Euromillions, this works a bit differently and the jackpot is shared between the next highest winning tier.
FAQ
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