Coast Competitions Guide · Explainer
The Birthday Draw Explained: How It Works and Whether It Is Gambling
The Birthday Draw arrived in January 2026 with two of the biggest names in British broadcasting behind it and a £1 million headline. People have been asking the same handful of questions about it ever since. Is it gambling, how are the winners picked, and how does it compare with the lottery? We have read the published terms and set out what they say, and what they leave unsaid.
Last updated 3 October 2026 · Written by Coast Competitions
Key Takeaways
- What it is
- A weekly prize draw run jointly by ITV and Global since January 2026. You pick a date, a letter and a colour and win by matching what is drawn.
- What it costs
- £2 for a single entry or £1 an entry on subscription, up to 60 entries a week. There is a free postal route with the same chance of winning.
- Legal status
- A commercial prize draw with a free entry route, not a licensed lottery. Open to UK residents aged 18 or over.
- The key difference
- It is a matching game. A capped prize competition always draws one winning ticket. Here the jackpot is shared by whichever entries match.
What The Birthday Draw is
The Birthday Draw is a weekly prize draw promoted jointly by ITV Consumer Limited and Global Media Group Services Limited, the companies behind ITV and radio stations including Heart, Capital and Smooth. Each draw opens for entries at midnight on Monday and closes at one second to midnight on Sunday. The idea is easy to explain on air, which is rather the point: your birthday is your ticket.
How you enter and what it costs
You create an account, giving your name, date of birth, a verified email address and a verified phone number. An entry is then made up of three choices. The first is a date in day, month and year form, which can be any real date in the last hundred years and does not have to be your own birthday. The second is a letter, and the third is one of twelve colours.
A single entry costs £2. On a monthly subscription the price is £1 an entry, with discounts at set numbers of entries, and subscribers are also placed in a daily draw for £100 held on their birthday and a separate weekly subscriber draw. Payment is by card, PayPal, Apple Pay or Google Pay. Each account is limited to 60 entries a week, and you cannot enter the same combination twice.
How winners are decided
This is where it differs from the kind of draw most competition sites run. Nobody pulls a single ticket out of a pool. A combination is drawn, and you win according to how much of it your entry matches. There are five tiers.
| What your entry matches | What it wins |
|---|---|
| Date, year, letter and colour | A share of the jackpot fund, which is at least £1,000,000 |
| Date, year and colour | A share of about 63% of what remains of the weekly prize fund |
| Date, letter and colour | A share of about 18.5% of what remains |
| Date and colour | A share of about 18.5% of what remains |
| Date only (day and month) | £5 |
The terms state that all prizes are awarded by chance and that the draw takes place once the window for postal entries to arrive has closed. They do not describe how the winning combination is produced, whether by a random number generator, an independent adjudicator or some other method. Nor do they say whether it is drawn from every possible combination or from the entries actually received, and that distinction matters, because only the second would guarantee a jackpot winner every week.
Is the £1 million guaranteed?
The wording is that the jackpot prize fund for each weekly draw will be at least £1,000,000, shared equally between the entries that match the whole combination. Two entries matching would split it. The wider prize fund is set at 40% of net entry sales, meaning sales after VAT and processing costs, and 11p from each paid entry is allocated to the jackpot fund.
What the terms do not cover is a week in which nobody matches everything. They say that any sum left over after prizes have been distributed may be allocated to future prize tiers at the promoters' discretion, and they stop there. If a guaranteed winner matters to you, that is a question to put to the promoters directly.
What are the odds?
The terms do not publish odds. You can get a feel for the scale with some arithmetic, as long as you treat it as ours and not theirs. A hundred years contains roughly 36,500 dates. Multiply by 26 letters and 12 colours and you reach about 11.4 million possible combinations. If every combination were equally likely to be drawn, one entry would have about a 1 in 11.4 million chance of matching all of it, and about a 1 in 365 chance of matching the day and month for the £5 prize.
For comparison, one Lotto line has a 1 in 45,057,474 chance of the jackpot. One ticket in a prize competition capped at 5,000 tickets has a 1 in 5,000 chance of winning that draw's prize. Our odds calculator puts those numbers next to each other for any draw you like.
Is The Birthday Draw gambling?
It depends which sense of the word you mean. In ordinary speech, paying £2 for a chance at a prize decided by luck is a flutter, and the terms are plain that prizes are awarded by chance. In law the answer turns on something else. The Gambling Act 2005 regulates lotteries, betting and gaming, and a lottery is a draw that people must pay to enter. Offer a free way in on equal terms and the draw falls outside that definition.
The Birthday Draw has a free postal route, described below, and its terms state that a postal entry has the same chance of winning as an online one. That places it on the prize draw side of the line, the same footing used by house draws such as Omaze and by competition operators like us. It is not a licensed lottery and does not need a Gambling Commission licence to operate. Consumer protection law and the advertising rules apply to it as they do to any promotion. We explain where the legal line sits in prize draw vs lottery.
The Birthday Draw, the National Lottery and a prize competition
These three are often mentioned in the same breath, and they work quite differently. The table sets the Birthday Draw beside Lotto and beside a capped prize competition of the kind we run.
| The Birthday Draw | National Lottery Lotto | Capped prize competition | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who runs it | ITV Consumer Limited and Global Media Group Services Limited | Allwyn, under the National Lottery licence | A limited company, in our case Coast Competitions Ltd |
| Legal basis | Prize draw with a free postal entry route | Licensed lottery regulated by the Gambling Commission | Prize competition with a skill question and a free postal entry route |
| Price | £2, or £1 on subscription | £2 a line | Set per draw, from pence to a few pounds |
| How you win | Match the date, letter and colour drawn | Match six numbers from 59 | Hold the one ticket number drawn |
| Is there always a winner? | Not stated in the terms | No. The jackpot rolls over, up to a limit | Yes. One ticket is drawn from those sold |
| Odds | Not published in the terms | 1 in 45,057,474 for the jackpot | Your tickets divided by the ticket cap |
| Good causes | None mentioned in the terms | A share of every ticket | None, unless a draw is run for a charity |
None of that makes one better than another. They suit different people. Lotto and the Birthday Draw offer a very small chance at a very large sum. A capped competition offers a much shorter chance at a smaller prize, with odds you can work out before you pay. If you are weighing up where a few pounds a week should go, we cover the wider field in alternatives to buying lottery tickets.
How winners are verified and announced
Winnings under £500 are credited to the winner's account, where they can be used towards future single entries or withdrawn to PayPal. They expire if left untouched for twelve months, though the terms promise reminders first. For prizes of £500 or more, the winner starts a claim from their account and receives a call from customer services to complete verification, which can include government-issued photo ID. Payment is then made by BACS in the winner's own name within 28 days of first contact.
On publicity, the terms allow the promoters to announce a winner's first name, the initial of their surname and their town, and say that some larger prizes may be presented at a filmed ceremony. A winner who would rather not be named can ask for less to be published. That is in line with what the UK advertising rules expect of any promoter, and it is the kind of evidence worth looking for with any draw. Our guide on how prize draw winners are chosen and verified explains what good practice looks like.
The free postal entry route
You make your selections on the website as usual and choose the postal option, which gives you a 16-digit code. You write or print the code on a postcard, or on the outside of a sealed envelope, with one code per item, put a stamp on it and post it to The Birthday Draw, PO Box 8784, Derby, DE1 9AP. It has to arrive within the validation period shown on the website. Postal entries count towards the 60 entry weekly limit and cannot be used for subscriptions.
Who can enter
Entrants must be resident in the UK and aged 18 or over, and need a UK mobile number, address and bank account to be able to win. Employees of the promoters and people connected with the draw are excluded. Those are typical conditions for a UK prize draw, and we go through them generally in who can enter UK prize draws.
Summary
The Birthday Draw is a lawful commercial prize draw from two very large media companies, with a free postal route, clear payment terms and a jackpot fund of at least £1 million shared among whichever entries match. It is not a licensed lottery, it does not publish its odds in its terms, and those terms do not say how the winning combination is produced or whether the jackpot is won every week. Whether that suits you is your call. If you prefer a draw where one ticket is always drawn and the odds are printed on the page, that is what we do at Coast Competitions.
Frequently Asked Questions
- The Birthday Draw is a weekly national prize draw run jointly by ITV Consumer Limited and Global Media Group Services Limited, launched in January 2026. You choose a date, a letter and one of twelve colours, and prizes are paid to entries that match the combination drawn that week, with a jackpot fund of at least £1 million for matching all of it.
- In the everyday sense you are paying for a chance to win, and its terms say all prizes are awarded by chance. In the legal sense it is run as a prize draw with a free postal entry route, not as a licensed lottery. The Gambling Act 2005 treats a draw that people can enter without paying as a free draw, which is why commercial promoters are able to run them.
- The Gambling Commission licenses lotteries, betting and gaming. Free draws and prize competitions do not need a Commission licence, and The Birthday Draw's terms do not refer to one. It remains subject to consumer law and to the advertising rules enforced by the Advertising Standards Authority.
- By matching. Each week a date, a letter and a colour are drawn, and entries win according to how much of that combination they match. The terms state that all prizes are awarded by chance and that the draw takes place after the postal entry validation period. They do not describe the mechanism used to produce the winning combination.
- The terms say the jackpot prize fund for each weekly draw will be at least £1,000,000 and will be shared equally between the entries that match the full combination. They do not say that a jackpot will be won every week, or what happens to it in a week when no entry matches.
- Prizes of £500 or more are paid by BACS within 28 days of first contact, after the winner starts a claim from their account and completes a verification call, and they may be asked for government-issued photo ID. Smaller prizes are credited to the account and can be withdrawn through PayPal. The promoters may publish a winner's first name, the initial of their surname and their town.
- Both are weekly matching games where you pay a small amount for a remote chance at a very large prize. The National Lottery is a licensed lottery regulated by the Gambling Commission, with published odds and a share of sales going to good causes. The Birthday Draw is a commercial prize draw with a free postal route, a prize fund set at 40% of net entry sales, and no good causes contribution mentioned in its terms.
Disclaimer
Coast Competitions has no connection with The Birthday Draw, ITV or Global. This is an independent summary of the promoters' published terms and conditions in the version effective 7 September 2026, as we read them on 3 October 2026. Prices, prizes and rules can change, and the official terms are the authority on all of it. Nothing here is legal advice.