Life changing

How many winners can you get on a bus?

Have you been eyeing up our figures? We thought you might have been. With lots of numbers on our ads at the moment, helping to show just how many winners The National Lottery makes, we felt it would be helpful to explain how we worked them all out. Remember it’s always important to know how many National Lottery winners you can get on a bus.

How do you know 239 builders have become millionaires?

When you win over £50,000 on any National Lottery game you are paid out by one of our lovely Winners Advisors. They’re like fairy godmothers and fathers but with big cheques books instead of wands. During that meeting as well as validating your ticket and checking you are the rightful owner we record a few bits and bobs about you. One of these details is your job or profession.

We looked back over all our records and added together everyone who had been listed under either Building/Construction or General Labour. That gave us 239 individuals who had won £1M or more up until 27th March 2017.

You give out more pound coins in a week than there are people in the UK?

We looked back across the last financial year – April 2016 to March 2017 – and took an average of the amount paid out in prizes. Across Lotto, EuroMillions, Thunderball, Lotto Hotpicks, GameStore Scratchcards and online games we paid out on average over £67M each week. We took the value of match 2 prizes on Lotto out, as while you win a Lotto Lucky Dip worth £2 you can’t actually win any pound coins. According to the Office of National Statistics there are 65.1M people in the UK. We then used our big calculator

A busload of people win every 10 seconds, a train full win every minute – really?

We worked out how many prizes were won and claimed last year across all our games – on average it is a colossal 8M every week. Seem a lot? Well, for an example, lets look at the most recent Saturday Lotto draw (22th April 2017). There were over 1.1M prizes won in that draw, Thunderball on the same day had over 225,000, the EuroMillions draw the day before had over 420,000 and that is before we get to the other draws in that week and GameStore Scratchcards and Online games.

We worked with a bus capacity of 80 and a train capacity of 728. From here you need a calculator and the divide button. Good luck!

By the time you have read this sentence, 52 people will have won with The National Lottery.

So we used the 8M claimed a week as above. We then estimated an average time of 4 seconds to read the sentence. We just tried it again and got 4.06 seconds – bang on. Again it is then a case of dividing the two together and you get the 52 people.

We want to make the number of winners we make fun so hope this has helped explain how we came up with them. We have a new calculator we’re dying to use and plans for plenty of fun figures so keep your eyes peeled for more.

The National Lottery has been changing the lives of winners and supporting good causes across the UK since 1994. In that time, there have been more than 7,000 new millionaires created and by playing The National Lottery you raise over £4 million for Good Causes every dayΔ.

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