Your chances of winning any prize are currently 26,000 to 1.
In other words, if you had
one bond that was entered into every monthly draw
you might expect to get one prize every 2,166 years.
The maximum amount that can be held rose to £40,000 on June 1.
If you held this amount, you should get about 17 prizes a year — but you might not get any or you could get more. Not surprisingly, most prizes are won by those who hold the most bonds — in fact, those holding the then-maximum £30,000 in December 2013 took almost two of every five prizes.
Currently, the odds of any one bond getting the £1 million prize are
47 billion to one.
Put another way,
if Premium Bonds had been launched when the earth was a mere 600,000 years old, you could have sat and watched the first simple-celled life develop, dozed through the development of multi-celled organisms, watched the first animals struggle on to land, marvelled at the dinosaurs, had a quick chat with Neanderthal man — and
still be hoping for that big win.