Is a Raffle Gambling? Yes, Even the One at Your School Fair

Yes. In UK law a raffle is a lottery, and lotteries are gambling under the Gambling Act 2005. Most raffles run by a school, a club or a charity are still legal without a licence because they fit one of six exemptions. A raffle run to make someone a profit fits none of them.

By Mitch Barnes · Last reviewed 28 September 2026

Why the answer surprises people

A raffle at a school fair doesn't feel like gambling. It feels like a pound for a book of pink tickets and a bottle of wine you'll save for the next Secret Santa.

The regulator does not see it that way. The Gambling Commission says raffles and lotteries "are all forms of gambling", and that running the wrong type means you may be breaking the law. Most people running a tombola have never read that sentence. Most of them are fine anyway, because they happen to fit an exemption without knowing it.

Then there's the reverse surprise. The paid competitions you see advertised online, a car for £1.99 a ticket, look far more like gambling than the school fair does. Legally, they usually aren't.

Three conditions make a lottery

Section 14 of the Gambling Act 2005 sets three conditions. If all three are met, it is a lottery:

1. You have to pay to take part
2. There's a prize
3. The winner is picked by chance alone

That's the whole test. The Act says it applies "irrespective of how it is described", so the name on the poster is irrelevant. Raffle, tombola, 100 club, sweep. If people pay and chance decides, it's a lottery.

Chance alone also covers a fake skill question. Section 14(5) treats a question as pure chance unless it's hard enough to stop a significant proportion of people entering or winning. "What colour is a red bus?" doesn't clear that.

The six exemptions that cover most raffles

Lotteries need a licence unless they fit an exemption. The Gambling Commission lists six, and none of them allows anyone to make a profit.

Type	Who runs it	Where tickets are sold	The catch
Incidental lottery	Anyone holding an event	At the event	The raffle cannot be the main reason for the event, and the money goes to a good cause
Private society lottery	A club or society	To members, or on the society's premises	Not for profit, and not just for fun
Work lottery	Colleagues	At one shared workplace	No profit
Residents' lottery	People living in the same building	At those premises	No profit. Money covers reasonable expenses and prizes
Customer lottery	A business	At its own premises, never online	Prizes under £50, and it cannot be used for fundraising
Small society lottery	A charity, sports club or community group	Door to door, online, by phone or face to face. Never in the street	Register with your local council. No more than £20,000 of tickets a draw, or £250,000 a year

Two rules sit across all of them. Selling tickets online, including on social media, needs a council registration or a Commission licence, and the small society lottery is the only one of the six you register. And a raffle whose profit goes to a person or a business has nowhere to go. The Commission's own page on raffling a house or car puts it plainly: if the money left after expenses and prizes is not going to a good cause, you cannot run a lottery.

Which one are you running?

Work down the list and stop at the first yes.

1. Nobody pays to enter. It's a free draw. Not a lottery, no licence.
2. People can pay, but there's a genuine free way in with the same chance of winning, promoted as clearly as the paid route. Also a free draw, under Schedule 2, paragraph 8 of the Act. No licence.
3. Winning takes real skill, knowledge or judgement, hard enough that a good share of people get it wrong or don't bother. A prize competition. No licence.
4. Someone keeps the profit. It's a lottery with no exemption available. Don't run it.
5. It's drawn at an event you're holding anyway, tickets sold on the day. Incidental lottery.
6. Only your club, your workplace or your building can buy. Private society, work or residents' lottery.
7. A shop draw with small prizes, tickets at the till. Customer lottery, prizes under £50.
8. You're selling to the public over weeks for a good cause, including online or through Facebook. Small society lottery. Register with your council first.

If you pay a company to run the lottery for you, that company needs its own Commission licence.

If none of those fits, you need advice before you sell a ticket. The Commission's guidance for fundraisers is the place to start.

Where the £1.99 car competition sits

Steps two and three are the ones our readers are usually in. A paid prize competition stays outside lottery law because it breaks the third condition, through skill, or the first, through a free entry route. Most online competition sites lean on the free route, which is why every one of them has to offer a postal entry that goes into the same draw.

The Commission is clear about the result. It says you do not need a licence for a free draw or prize competition run to the requirements of the Act. On house and car draws run that way, it goes further: "These are not forms of gambling and we do not regulate them."

So the school fair raffle is gambling that's allowed. The £1.99 car competition isn't gambling at all. Same tickets. Different legal box. Our guide to what a prize draw is sets out the two routes in more detail, and the glossary has every term side by side.

What "not gambling" doesn't mean

We run one of these sites, so this bit costs us. The legal line is real. It's also narrow, and all it tells you is which rules the operator has to follow, which is nothing at all about what you're doing when you pay £1.99 for a ticket in a draw you'll almost certainly lose.

That's the same behaviour as a scratchcard, and the arithmetic in why you never win competitions doesn't change because a paragraph of the Act does. Some operators use "not gambling" as a reassurance, as if it made the spend safer. It doesn't. It means the Gambling Commission isn't watching. Nobody licenses them. No regulator checks their draws.

That's also why the checks in are competition sites legit matter more here than they would for a licensed operator. You're the one doing the checking.

How NetCompetitions handles this

We open later this year, so there's nothing to check yet. These are commitments.

• The free postal route linked from every competition page, with the same chance of winning as a paid entry
• The total ticket count shown before you enter, so you can see your odds as a number
• We won't describe our competitions as "not gambling" to make you feel better about spending

Set a limit before you look at the prizes, and if it stops feeling like fun, GambleAware is free and confidential. You can read how it works in the meantime.

The bottom line

A raffle is gambling in UK law, and the small ones are almost always legal anyway, provided nobody profits and anything sold online is registered with the council first. A paid prize competition with a real free entry route isn't gambling in law. That's a label about regulation, not a verdict on your spending, and it's the one thing we'd ask you not to read into it.