Do you need a licence to run a raffle?
Usually not, but it depends on one thing more than any other: when you sell the tickets and when you draw the winners. Get that right and most community raffles need no permission at all. Get it wrong and a school fundraiser can quietly become an unlicensed lottery.
This is the plain English version. It covers England, Wales and Scotland, where the Gambling Act 2005 applies.
Start here: does anyone pay to enter?
If nobody pays anything, you are running a free prize draw. Free draws sit outside the Gambling Act entirely, and you need no licence and no registration. This is why brands add a "no purchase necessary" route to their competitions.
If people do pay, you are running a lottery, and which of the two exemptions below applies comes down to timing.
If tickets are sold and drawn at the event
Incidental non-commercial lottery
The classic school fete or village show raffle. No registration, no licence, no paperwork, provided all of the following hold:
- Tickets are sold only at the event, while it is happening.
- The draw takes place during the event. You cannot sell tickets on the day and draw it next week.
- No more than £500 is spent on prizes. Donated prizes do not count towards this.
- No more than £100 of the proceeds goes on expenses, such as printing ticket books.
- The event itself is not run for private profit.
The timing condition is the one people fall foul of. Selling tickets for a fortnight beforehand takes you out of this exemption and into the next one. If this is a school fair raffle, there is a step by step walk-through for PTAs covering prizes, pricing and the draw as well as the law.
If tickets are sold in advance
Small society lottery
Any raffle where money changes hands before the day, including anything sold through a link online. This one does need registering, with the council for the area where your group is based.
- Your group must be a non-commercial society: a charity, a sports or cultural group, or another body not run for private gain. A business cannot run one.
- Registration costs about £40 to set up and roughly £20 a year after that.
- Tickets in a single draw must total no more than £20,000, and no more than £250,000 across a year.
- You send the council a short return after each draw.
If you are a business, not a charity
A business cannot run a small society lottery at all. A brand promotion has to be either a free prize draw, or a competition with a genuine element of skill that a good proportion of entrants would get wrong. A token question with an obvious answer will not do it.
Either way you are also bound by the advertising rules, and they apply to influencers running promotions on their own accounts just as much as to brands. CAP Code rule 8.24 says prizes must be awarded in accordance with the laws of chance, using either a computer process that produces verifiably random results or an independent person. It also expects you to be able to show evidence that the winner really was picked at random.
What that means in practice
Picking a name out of the comments yourself, with nothing written down, is not evidence. If a complaint is made months later you need something showing when the draw happened, how many were in it, how the winner was chosen, and that the entrant list has not been edited since.
There is a step by step guide to picking a giveaway winner fairly covering the random method, the evidence to keep, and what to tell entrants before they enter.
The short version
| Your situation | What you need |
|---|---|
| Nobody pays to enter | Nothing. Outside the Gambling Act. |
| Sold and drawn at your event | Nothing, within the £500 and £100 limits. |
| Tickets sold in advance | Register a small society lottery with your council. |
| You are a business | Free entry route or a real skill element, plus evidence the draw was random. |
Where Prize Desk fits
Prize Desk does not sell tickets and never handles money, so it does not change which set of rules applies to you. What it does is draw the winners with a cryptographic random number generator, and issue a certificate recording the time, the entrant count, the method, the winners and a fingerprint of the entrant list. That is the evidence rule 8.24 expects you to keep.
Sources: the Gambling Act 2005 exemptions as published by local licensing authorities and the Gambling Commission, and the ASA guidance on prize draws. Figures were correct when this page was written and councils do vary, so confirm the fee with yours. Questions about the page itself are welcome via the site.