Premium Bonds holders may want to make an account change (Image: Getty)
NS&I has issued a statement about the Premium Bonds rules as an interesting theme has emerged looking at the top winners for 2026. Premium Bonds holders may think their chances of ever winning the £1million are vanishingly thin. But looking at all the £1million prize winners so far this year, there is a common trait you may want to note.
Each Premium Bond has an equal chance of being paired with one of the prizes on offer, with the odds of winning for each £1 Bond currently at 22,000 to one. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the prizes on offer are for small amounts.
For example, more than six million prizes in the February 2026 draw were for £25 or £50, of a total of just over 6.183 million prizes. There are only two £1million jackpot prizes in each month’s draw, so your odds of taking home the top prize are indeed very small.
The four top prize winners for 2026 have hailed from diverse parts of the UK, with a winner each from Liverpool, Central Bedfordshire, Suffolk and Berkshire.
But all the jackpot prize winners for this year so far have this in common: they all held the maximum of £50,000 in Bonds going into the draw. So did many of the winners of the £100,000 and £50,000 prizes for February.
In fact, looking at the high value prizes for the February 2026 draw – all prizes for £5,000 or more – more than half of them were won by people with £50,000 in total holdings. The reality is the more Bonds you have going into the draw each month, the more opportunities you have for one or more of them to be paired with a prize.
Calculations by Martin Lewis’ Money Saving Expert indicate that if you hold the maximum £50,000, you will win a median average of £1,600 a year, with an effective prize fund rate of 3.2 percent. The prize fund rate for the scheme is 3.6 percent – this is the amount that is paid out over a year relative to the total amount of Bonds that go into the draw.
NS&I cut the prize fund rate three times last year, while the odds of winning for each £1 have stayed the same, at 22,000 to one, since December 2024. This means your chances of any Bond winning a prize remain the same but your chances of a big prize win have dropped.
An NS&I spokesperson said: “Every Premium Bonds number has a separate and equal chance of winning a prize each month. However, the more Bonds you hold, the better your chances of winning and the quicker you may win a prize.
“While our four £1million jackpot winners so far this year each held the maximum £50,000, we’ve also seen winners with much smaller holdings, including a 2025 jackpot winner from Cleveland who won £1 million with a holding of £100.”
One way to increase your holdings is to set up your account so that any winning are automatically used to buy more Bonds, thus increasing your chances of a future win. The spokesperson explained: “Premium Bonds holders can choose to have their prizes automatically reinvested into more Bonds, up to the £50,000 holding limit.
“Prizes that are automatically reinvested are immediately eligible for the next draw, and this payment method now accounts for nine in ten prizes. Bond holders can set this up through their online account or by calling NS&I.”
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