Omaze: why your £15 is better spent elsewhere

This post was updated in August 2026 to reflect that Omaze has dropped their minimum spend from £15 back to £10!

Donating to charity in order to enter a prize draw to win a £4,000,000 mansion sounds like the ultimate no-brainer, and that’s what I thought a few years back when I was a regular Omaze customer! 

But over the past couple of years, Omaze has changed a lot and been steadily increasing prices. With millions competing for the same prize and a business model that prioritises subscriptions over one-off purchases, the odds of an Omaze win have never been worse, and their charity donations from each draw have dropped significantly. They’ve ditched the smaller gift card prizes, so your chance of winning a prize is less than one in a million, and the ‘free’ entry route is now more expensive than buying tickets!

Omaze is now a huge profitable business, rather than a charity raffle. So is there any point in entering their draws? In this post I look at the odds, the reality of the ‘free’ entry option, and suggest alternative ways you can donate to charity. Then I’ll leave you to decide if you’re just helping Omaze grow their empire – and whether your money is better spent elsewhere!

What are the Omaze prizes?

Omaze launch a new house draw every month. In each draw there are two main prizes:

• A multi-million pound house plus £250,000 cash
• An early bird prize – usually a car/campervan plus a big cash prize (eg. £100,000) for those who enter the draw early.

Subscribers are also entered into bonus draws:

• £100,000 draw (if you spend £25+ a month on tickets)
• £1,000,000 Monthly Millionaire Draw
• £120,000 flash subscriber draws (if you buy tickets during a certain period of a few days)

Non-subscribers can also buy entries into the Monthly Millionaire Draw

Omaze no longer awards thousands of smaller prizes, which means your chance of a win is now very, very small. 

What’s the minimum I can spend?

You can’t just buy a single entry. The minimum you can spend is £10, which gets you 15 entries into a single prize draw. However, Omaze heavily incentivises subscribers: a £10 subscription gets you five times that amount – 65 entries in the draw.

How many people enter Omaze draws?

From the results of a 2024 Government survey, we can estimate that 4 million people in the UK enter at least one Omaze draw each year (compared to 44 million who play the lottery). It’s estimated about 30 million tickets are sold for each house draw. 

How much is given to charity?

Omaze used to guarantee 17% of ticket sales went to the nominated charity, but they have removed this from their rules and now they only guarantee a £1,000,000 donation from each draw. Based on estimated ticket sales of at least £20 million per draw, this figure could be as little as 5% of your money going to charity. The majority of the money from Omaze ticket sales is spent on marketing and advertising.

Is Omaze gambling?

No. Because they offer a free entry route, Omaze run a prize draw rather than a lottery – and so they don’t need a license from the Gambling Commission. This applies to all ‘raffle’ sites in the UK – including BOTB, Rev Comps, Elite and all the smaller local businesses you might see advertising on Facebook or Instagram. It’s a huge industry, and all these businesses use the legal loophole of having either a free postal entry route or a ‘skill’ question to avoid being regulated by Gambling law. 

How can I use the free entry route?

Despite being called a ‘free’ entry route, it actually costs you the price of a stamp, currently 91p for second class. When the laws about this were set out in the 2005 Gambling Act, a stamp was only 21p so sending a postcard was always a cheaper entry option than buying a ticket. Like all other UK ‘raffle’ sites, Omaze don’t want to make it easy for people by giving them a genuinely free entry option via a web form or email (although in the early days when Omaze started in the US, they did actually have online free entries!)

If you spend the minimum amount of £10 on Omaze draw tickets, you get 15 entries at a cost of around 67p each. So the cost of an 91p stamp for the ‘free’ postal route is more expensive than buying tickets! If you consider the cheapest cost per ticket – a £50 monthly subscription – works out at less than 8 pence an entry, your ‘free’ postal entry is 13 times more expensive! 

What alternatives are there to Omaze?

The best alternative option depends on why you’re entering the draws.

If you want to support a charity, Omaze is not a good way to donate because the charity don’t get a guaranteed percentage of ticket sales. Instead you could:

• Enter the Charity’s own lottery – or just give a donation directly
• Pay to enter one of the fundraising prize draws on the Crowdfunder website at www.crowdfunder.co.uk/prize-draws – then at least 95% of your donation goes directly to the charity

If you want to win a house, unfortunately entering this kind of raffle is about the only way you can win one these days. At least Omaze guarantee the house will be given away, unlike other similar sites (Raffle House for example – most of their house draws don’t sell enough tickets, so the winner gets a cash prize). But consider if the actual house would be suitable for you, or would it be a hassle to sell it if you won? Make sure you REALLY want to win it!

If you enjoy the thrill of prize draws, enter free ones instead! There are thousands advertised on brand websites, apps, in supermarkets, on Instagram and more. If you join my SuperLucky email list at www.superlucky.me/news you can download my guide with more than a hundred places to find comps – and none of them are pay-to-enter raffle sites! Many compers don’t spend a penny on their hobby, yet they still win over £10,000 of prizes every year. And if you decide to cancel your Omaze sub, you could spend the money you save on joining my membership Lucky Legends – the £6 monthly subscription gives you access to a member forum with over 1,000 competitions listed, plus a monthly masterclass and loads of advice from successful compers!

How can I enter Omaze draws by post?

If you do want to send a postal entry off, you’ll need a postcard and a stamp (second class is fine). You can send as many postcards as you like as long as each one is stamped and sent separately – you can’t put them in one envelope! 

Postal entries will go into the house draw, and any early bird draws (if it’s received in time).

To enter by post, write your name, address, date of birth, telephone number, and email address on a piece of paper or postcard and send with a 1st or 2nd class stamp to: Omaze Scrutineers – (insert relevant draw name here), Civica Election Services, 33 Clarendon Road, London, N8 0NW. 

Full details on the postal entry method are here. You can use a plain or picture postcard – see my tips on how to send a postcard entry.

Do people really win Omaze prize draws?

Omaze do a good job of publicising their winners, and the draws are genuine. A few years ago, when there were thousands of smaller prizes, it was easy to win a £10 gift card (and I won a few) – but now the smaller prizes have been removed, it’s back to a one in a million chance of a prize!

Do the Omaze winners actually live in the houses?

Recent reports suggest that winning an Omaze house can be a legal burden rather than a dream prize, as some were built without proper planning permission, or on land susceptible to flooding. The winner of a £6m Norfolk property was locked out of her prize for over seven months while Omaze tried to get retrospective planning permission. And even with the £250,000 cash bonus, winners find the huge running costs unsustainable – one young winner put her £3m Wirral mansion on the market at a £500,000 loss months after she won.

Have Omaze signed the Voluntary Code for Prize Draw Operators?

The Government’s new Voluntary Code for Prize Draw Operators aims to clean up the ‘raffle site’ industry by demanding better transparency and fairer free entry routes. Omaze is a founding signatory, meaning that they have agreed to improve transparency about the odds of winning and how much of your money goes to charity. They must ensure the free entry route is no less convenient than the paid route, and show that they are doing enough to prevent player harm. If raffle sites don’t stick to the code, the Government will introduce stricter regulations. 

Ultimately, Omaze’s shift to a subscription-focused business model means poor odds and a smaller percentage going to charity than before. If your goal is to support a good cause, there are better ways to donate. If you’re chasing the thrill of a win, you can do this for free by taking up comping. For most people, Omaze is no longer a no-brainer, but an expensive gamble!

More SuperLucky resources

If you’d like the chance to win amazing prizes without spending money, there are thousands of free entry online prize draws and competitions open to UK entrants! Check out my blog posts below:

• Beginners guide to comping
• How to win cash prizes in FREE online competitions
• Instant wins & daily draws
• Ten easy ways to find competitions

You might also like to read my post Raffle sites: Comping or Gambling, an in depth investigation into the industry.