Do Free Postal Entries Win? Yes, and Here's Why

Yes. A free postal entry has exactly the same chance as one paid ticket, because the law says it must. Postal winners are rare for a simpler reason: very few people post, so most winners come from the far bigger pile of paid tickets.

By Joanne Jones · Last reviewed 22 September 2026

Full disclosure: we're one of the sites selling tickets. The maths below works the same on us.

This covers the law in Great Britain: England, Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland has separate gambling legislation.

Why the suspicion is fair

You've probably never seen a postal winner announced. Winners pages show a name, a prize and a photo, and how the winner entered usually isn't part of it. So the conclusion writes itself. The free route exists to keep the lawyers happy, and nobody who uses it ever wins.

That's a reasonable read of what you can see. It also merges two questions that need pulling apart. How often do free entries win? And are they treated fairly when the draw happens? The first has a dull answer. The second is the one to worry about.

What the law requires

A paid competition decided by chance is a lottery unless it offers a genuine free way in. Schedule 2, paragraph 8 of the Gambling Act 2005 sets four conditions for that free route, and the last one settles this whole question: the system for allocating prizes must not differentiate between people who paid and people who sent a letter.

So your postcard is one entry, in the same draw, carrying the same weight as a paid ticket. The Gambling Commission's guidance covers the other three conditions. The postal entry guide covers what to write on the card, and the competition glossary defines anything in a free entry clause you haven't met before.

Same chance per entry, very different numbers of entries

Here's the distinction everything else rests on. Equal weighting means every entry has the same chance. It does not mean every route produces the same number of winners.

Say you post a card to a competition that sells 40,000 paid tickets, and 199 other people do the same. That's 40,200 entries, and yours has a 1 in 40,200 chance, exactly like every paid ticket in the pile. The 200 postcards are half a percent of the total. So the winner turns out to be a postcard about 0.5% of the time.

Run 200 draws like that and you'd expect one postal winner. One. That is what fair looks like.

The volumes below are round numbers chosen to show the pattern, not figures from any real operator.

Paid tickets	Postal entries	Chance the winner is a postal entry	Draws per postal winner, on average
500	20	3.8%	1 in 26
5,000	50	1.0%	1 in 101
40,000	200	0.5%	1 in 201
40,000	1,000	2.4%	1 in 41

Rare isn't rigged. Take the third row and an operator running twelve draws a month. The chance it goes a whole year, 144 draws, without a single postal winner is about 49%. A coin flip, on a perfectly fair site.

How you'd tell if a site was cheating

From outside, on a single draw, you cannot. One postal loss proves nothing, and neither do a hundred. That's frustrating, and it's why an operator's paperwork matters more than its promises.

What you can check is the terms. Any of these is a reason to walk away:

• Postal entries go into a separate draw, or a later one
• A postcard counts for less than a paid ticket
• The free route demands recorded or special delivery, when the Act's benchmark is a letter sent by ordinary post
• The postal address or deadline only appears after you've paid

Clean terms get you halfway. The rest is whether the draw itself can be checked, and our ten-minute check on any competition site covers what a credible draw method looks like. If a site fails before you even reach the terms, how to spot a fake competition is the better starting point.

What a fair operator can publish

Assurances cost nothing. Numbers are harder to fake. A site that treats postal entries fairly can prove it to you by publishing, for every draw:

• The total number of entries, postal ones included
• How many of those came by post
• The draw method, ideally a third-party tool or a recorded draw
• Which route the winning entry came through, with the winner's consent

With the postal count and the winning route across a year of draws, you could check whether postal winners turn up at roughly the rate the table predicts. Without them, nobody outside the company can. Ask a site for its postal count. How it answers tells you plenty.

Is the stamp worth it?

On any fair site, including ours, most winners will be paying entrants. Nearly all of them. There are far more paid tickets than postcards, and no amount of fairness changes that.

Whether a postcard is worth sending is a price comparison. A second class stamp costs 91p, plus a postcard and ten minutes of your time. On a cheap ticket, the stamp can cost more than paying. On a £10 ticket, it is the same chance for a fraction of the price.

What the stamp cannot do is change the draw you're entering. A free entry into a draw of 40,000 tickets carries the same chance as a paid one in the same draw, which is the whole point of the route.

How NetCompetitions handles free entry

• The free postal route linked from every competition page
• Postal entries in the same draw as paid ones, with the same weighting
• No recorded or special delivery required, ever
• The total ticket count published on every competition, before you enter

You can read how it works.

The bottom line

Free postal entries win at exactly the rate their numbers say they should, and that rate is low because almost nobody posts. A year without a postal winner can be perfectly fair. Send a card when the stamp costs you less than the ticket, and judge the site on what it lets you check. A promise of fairness you can't test is only a promise.