NS&I’s Premium Bonds offer a brilliant fantasy to savers – that one day you may wake up and find yourself a millionaire.
Most know that this is incredibly unlikely, with over 24 million bondholders trying to grab the two £1 million prizes given out each month, but a great deal of smaller prizes are distributed each month.
Article continues below
Sign up to Money Morning
Don’t miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter
Don’t miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter
How much do you need to save in NS&I Premium Bonds to be likely to win?
Put simply, the more money you have in Premium Bonds, the more likely you are to win in the monthly prize draw. This is because of how Premium Bonds work.
For every £1 you have saved in Premium Bonds, you get one entry in the prize draw.
For example, someone who has a £1,000 holding will get 1,000 entries in the prize draw, while someone who has the minimum £25 holding will get just 25 chances to win.
So, the more money you have saved, the more chances you have to win some of the prizes.
However, new data suggests you need a much larger holding than you may expect to win anything.
Fewer than 1% of all Premium Bonds prizes handed out between February 2025 and January 2026 went to accounts with a holding worth less than £1,000, according to a Freedom of Information request (FOI) submitted to NS&I by AJ Bell.
What is more, just 6% of the prizes distributed during that period went to account holders with £10,000 or less saved in Premium Bonds.
Conversely, 53% of all prizes went to those with the maximum account value of £50,000.
That means more than 90% of all prizes are being dished out to Brits with over £10,000 saved in Premium Bonds, making the hope of winning anything from Premium Bonds far-fetched if you do not put a serious amount of cash in them.
The data obtained from NS&I also showed that the average Premium Bond account value among the almost 14.3 million holders who have never won a single penny in prizes is £128.91, up by 21% since April 2025.
How can I increase my chances of winning in the Premium Bonds prize draw?
There is only one way to increase your chances of winning in the Premium Bonds prize draw, and that is to increase the amount of money you hold.
The way to maximise your chances of winning is to invest the maximum £50,000, with the data showing over half the total prizes go to savers with accounts this size.
However, if you are unable to reach that £50,000 number just yet, the figures show that the more money you put in, the higher the likelihood of winning will become.
You can do this by putting some savings into Premium Bonds each month to gradually increase the size of your pot. Alternatively, you are also given the option to automatically reinvest Premium Bonds winnings – that may be a good way to grow your pot too.
Where else could you put your money for guaranteed growth?
With more than half of all Premium Bonds winners having £50,000 in the savings vehicle, it raises the question of whether this is a wise choice.
On the one hand, having the maximum holding will make you much more likely to see some sort of return on your money every month, and you even have a chance to win £1 million.
But none of this is guaranteed. Even if you have the maximum Premium Bonds holding, there is still a chane you will not win a prize – those with especially bad luck may even see their cash be static for prolonged periods as they fail to win prizes.
If you put £50,000 into the top savings account on the market at the moment, the Chase Saver with boosted rate, you would see your money would be guaranteed to grow by 4.5% in one year to £52,250.
While it is true that, according to the statistics, it is very unlikely that your £50,000 will stay static over the course of a year, and indeed you might win prizes worth more than £2,250, none of this is guaranteed.
Could investing make more sense than Premium Bonds?
Investing the money you hold in Premium Bonds could be a better financial decision in the long-term than keeping them in the savings vehicle.
When winning no prizes, money help in Premium Bonds is entirely static. It does not grow and starts to erode away in real terms thanks to inflation.
Conversely, money invested in a well-diversified portfolio over the long term tends to grow – though, of course, the value of your investments can go down as well as up.
Suter at AJ Bell said: “Over the longer term, investing has proven to beat cash returns, and short of winning one of the maximum prizes will undoubtedly stand a better chance than Premium Bonds at helping someone to amass wealth.”
If you had invested into a global tracker fund like the Fidelity Index World ten years ago, you would have seen a return of 252.3%, according to AJ Bell calculations.
If someone with the average Premium Bonds holding for those who do not win (£128.91) had put this money into a global tracker fund instead of leaving it dormant in Premium Bonds, they will have seen their money grow to £454.19.
Meanwhile, if someone with £1,000 in Premium Bonds had instead put that into the same fund, their money would have grown to £3,523.32.
Suter added: “Suffice to say the vast majority of Premium Bond holders will not have been anywhere near those levels, and would likely have stood to benefit significantly had they put their money in investments rather than letting it gather dust in a Premium Bonds account during that time.
“These figures once again prove that although you need to be in it to win it when it comes to Premium Bonds, unless you’re willing to stuff the accounts with tens of thousands of pounds, you’d be better off swapping ERNIE for FTSE.”
Read our article on saving vs investing for more on how the two strategies compare.
