Prize Money
The Euromillions lottery offers twelve different levels of prize, and all of these are funded by the money that people spend to buy their Euromillions lottery tickets. But how does your entry fee get divided between the various prize tiers? This is a question that occurs to many players, so to settle the matter we will now explain the breakdown for anyone losing sleep over it.
A Euromillions lottery ticket costs €2 (roughly equivalent to £1.50 in the UK) and the first slice of this entry fee goes to the lottery company operating the game in each country. It obviously costs money to run the Euromillions game, and the companies which operate lottery naturally exist to make a profit, so 50% of the money paid for a ticket goes directly to the operator selling it. For example, if you are playing in France, €1 of every €2 ticket you buy will go to the Francaise des Jeux.
The remaining 50% of ticket fees from each participating country goes into something called the Common Prize Fund. This, as the name suggests, is basically a huge pot of money out of which all Euromillions prizes are paid. The twelve tiers of prize, the odds of winning and the percentage of the Common Prize Fund allocated to each, are as follows:
| Prize Level | Matches | % Prize Fund |
|---|---|---|
| Jackpot | match 5 + 2 | 22 |
| Tier 2 | match 5 + 1 | 7.4 |
| Tier 3 | match 5 + 0 | 2.1 |
| Tier 4 | match 4 + 2 | 1.5 |
| Tier 5 | match 4 + 1 | 1 |
| Tier 6 | match 4 + 0 | 0.7 |
| Tier 7 | match 3 + 2 | 1 |
| Tier 8 | match 3 + 1 | 5.1 |
| Tier 9 | match 2 + 2 | 4.4 |
| Tier 10 | match 3 + 0 | 4.7 |
| Tier 11 | match 1 + 2 | 10.1 |
| Tier 12 | match 2 + 1 | 24 |
| Booster Fund | 16 |
If you add up all of these percentages, you get a grand total of 84%. So what happens to the remaining 16% of the Common Prize Fund, you may ask? Well, it goes into a separate fund known as the Booster Fund. This Booster Fund is used to boost the jackpot level – often in weeks where the jackpot needs topping up to provide the guaranteed minimum of €15,000,000.
So there you have it – a definite explanation of how your Euromillions entry fee is divided between the lottery operator, the twelve tiers of the game itself, and that all-important Booster Fund.