How Much Should You Spend on Competitions?

Decide the number before you look at the prizes, and set it low enough that losing all of it would change nothing about your month. Anyone who tells you to spend only what you can afford to lose has given you a rule with no number in it, so it moves every time you see a prize you want.

By Joanne Jones · Last reviewed 12 October 2026

Full disclosure: we're one of the sites selling tickets.

Why "only spend what you can afford to lose" fails

It sounds responsible. What it does is put the work on you, at the exact moment you are least able to do it, using a figure nobody has ever worked out.

Ask someone what they can afford to lose and they will guess. The guess moves with the prize, the day, and whether they won a tenner last week. A number that moves is not a limit, and a figure that bends around how you feel is the thing the whole model runs on.

A limit is a number you set once, in advance, when no prize is in front of you. That's the whole difference.

What a monthly budget actually buys

At £2 a ticket, here is what a monthly budget buys across a year. Treat it as a model of how the arithmetic behaves, not as a measurement of any operator's draws:

Monthly budget	Tickets a year	1 in 1,000 draws	1 in 5,000 draws	1 in 25,000 draws
£10	60	5.8%	1.2%	0.2%
£25	150	13.9%	3.0%	0.6%
£50	300	25.9%	5.8%	1.2%
£100	600	45.1%	11.3%	2.4%

Those percentages assume every draw sells out at the stated ticket count, one prize per draw, a flat £2 a ticket all year, and every entry independent of every other. Real entering is messier. Several tickets in the same draw are not independent of each other, and concentrating them that way nudges your chance slightly above what this model shows. A draw with more than one prize, or one that never sells out, moves it again.

Read the bottom right corner. A hundred pounds a month is £1,200 across the year, and in this model it buys a 2.4% chance of winning at least once when the draws are big. That is not bad luck waiting to turn. It's the arithmetic, it holds for every operator including us, and no amount of persistence changes it.

Read the top left too, because it cuts the other way. In this model ten pounds a month into small draws beats ten times that into large ones. How far that holds for you depends on the draws you actually enter, but the direction is reliable: how big the draw is moves the number more than your budget does.

You can put your own numbers in rather than reading mine.

Set the number before you see the prizes

Order matters more than the amount.

Open your banking app, not a competition site. Pick a figure you would be relaxed about losing entirely, every month, for years, with nothing to show for it. Write it down somewhere you will see it.

Two tests for whether the figure is right. If losing it would change what you eat, cancel something, or need explaining to anyone, it's too high. If you had to think about which account it comes from, it's too high.

Set it monthly rather than weekly. That's our recommendation and not a research finding: a weekly number gives you fifty-two chances to decide this week was unusual, and catching up is the behaviour that does the damage.

When it stops being entertainment

• You've entered to get back to even, not because you wanted the prize
• You've spent past the number you set, and found a reason why this month was different
• You're hiding what you spend, or rounding it down when asked
• You've thought you were "due" a win
• Entering is what you do when you feel bad, not when you feel like it
• You've borrowed, or used money set aside for something else

You are never due. Where draws are independent, and an ordinary prize draw is, losing forty in a row changes the forty first by nothing at all. The tickets don't know. Any feeling that your luck is about to turn is the single most expensive idea in this industry.

Where to get help

Genuine skill-based prize competitions and qualifying free draws do not need a gambling licence under the Gambling Act 2005. That says nothing about whether the spending can hurt you.

The industry's voluntary code is blunt about it. Published in November 2025, it opens by citing 2023 research finding that people already experiencing gambling harm enter prize draws more often than everyone else, and that 88% of prize draw participants also gamble commercially against 60% of adults generally. The code asks operators to watch for financial harm, excessive participation and social or psychological distress. These are the services it names, and the ones we follow.

• Citizens Advice debt helpline, 0800 240 4420, for free advice on debt and money problems. Weekdays 9am to 8pm, Saturdays 9.30am to 1pm, closed on public holidays
• National Debtline, 0808 808 4000, free and independent debt advice. Weekdays 9am to 8pm, Saturdays 9.30am to 1pm
• Mind Infoline, 0300 123 3393, for mental health. Weekdays 9am to 6pm
• Samaritans, 116 123, any hour of any day, free from any phone
• Your bank's gambling block probably won't stop this. It works by matching the merchant code on each payment, and competition sites usually aren't coded as gambling. NatWest says outright that its block won't prevent payments to competition or prize draw websites. Ask whether yours can block competition sites specifically, because that is a separate setting and most banks don't have one

The code names no gambling service, but GamCare covers this and says so. It has written about draws and competitions directly, and tells anyone affected by them, or worried about someone else, to get in touch. The National Gambling Helpline on 0808 8020 133 is free, confidential and open around the clock.

What operators should be doing

The voluntary code sets out what a signatory takes on. It's a voluntary code and not law, so an operator that hasn't signed isn't bound by any of it. Consumer protection and advertising law still apply to them either way. Signing adds to that floor. It never replaces it. We'll be judged on this list too.

• Spending limits. Either the operator caps monthly spend for everyone, or you can set your own, and £0 has to be one of the choices
• Credit cards. No more than £250 a month per player, and none at all on instant wins
• Account controls. A temporary suspension lasting at least six months, and permanent closure, both available when you ask
• Information on your chances. Clearly, and before you enter where that's possible. A maximum ticket count is one way to give it and past draw data is another
• A free entry route, shown prominently before you pay. Ordinary first or second class post qualifies on its own. Any other method has to be neither more expensive nor less convenient than paying

Two things that list does not give you. A maximum ticket count is not the same as your odds. A 10,000-ticket cap that sells only 4,000 leaves you two and a half times better off than the cap implied. Nothing requires every operator to publish the final number sold. And a free route is free of the entry fee, not free of the stamp, which stays a small thing right up until you are entering several competitions a week and buying stamps in books.

How NetCompetitions handles spending

You can check all of this on how the site works and on any live competition page. We haven't signed the voluntary code yet, so for now nobody is holding us to it but us.

• Self-set spending limits from day one, over a day, a week or a month. Setting one or lowering one applies the moment you save it, even if you've already spent past the new figure. Raising one waits 24 hours, and so does removing it
• The total ticket count on every competition, before you enter
• The free postal route on every competition page, with the same chance of winning as a paid entry

We'd rather you spent under the figure you set than up to it.

Do this today

1. Pick the figure, before you open a competition site
2. Check it against the two tests: would losing it change your month, and did you have to think about which account
3. Write it where you'll see it
4. Set the limit on any site you already use, instead of relying on yourself to remember it
5. Put the free postal route on anything you'd enter but wouldn't pay for (how that works)