Do I Need a Licence to Run a Raffle? Tombola and Fair Game Rules

Why your raffle is legally a lottery

Under the Gambling Act 2005, any arrangement where people pay to enter, at least one prize is awarded, and winners are decided by chance is a lottery. That definition covers more than the word "raffle" suggests. A tombola is a lottery. A "guess the name of the teddy" stall is a lottery, because there is nothing to guess; the name was picked in advance and picking the same one is pure chance. Sweepstakes and lucky number squares are lotteries too.

Lotteries are regulated, and running an unauthorised one is an offence. But the Act contains exemptions designed precisely for fundraising events, and if you meet the conditions, they cover the overwhelming majority of what happens at a craft fair. The rest of this guide is about meeting those conditions.

The raffle drawn on the day: no licence needed

The exemption most fairs rely on is called an incidental lottery: a lottery that is incidental to an event, such as a raffle or tombola at a fair. The conditions are:

• All tickets must be sold at the event, during the event. No advance sales, no online sales, no selling in the car park the week before.
• The draw can happen at the event or after it has finished, but you should have a way for ticket holders to find out who won (a winners list on your Facebook page is fine).
• All proceeds, after reasonable costs, must go to a charity or other good cause; the lottery cannot be run for private gain.
• No more than £100 of the proceeds may be spent on expenses (printing tickets, hiring equipment).
• No more than £500 of the proceeds may be spent on prizes. Donated prizes do not count towards this cap, which is why asking local businesses to donate prizes is the standard model: a raffle with £2,000 of donated prizes is still exempt.
• No rollovers: you cannot carry a prize over to a later lottery.

Meet those conditions and you need no licence, no registration, and no permission from the council or anyone else.

One point that surprises people: since a 2016 change to the law, the event itself no longer has to be non-commercial. A tombola run for charity at a commercially organised market can qualify as an incidental lottery, provided the lottery itself is wholly for the good cause. Note that this is more generous than the rules for games of chance covered later in this guide, which do still depend on the nature of the event.

Selling tickets in advance: the line that changes everything

The single most common way well-meaning organisers break the law is selling raffle tickets before the day. Posting on a Facebook event page that tickets are available now, selling them at the school gate the week before, or taking payments by bank transfer in advance all have the same legal effect: the raffle is no longer incidental to your event, and it becomes a society lottery, which must be registered before any tickets are sold.

Registration is real but manageable:

• The lottery must be promoted by a non-commercial society: a body established for charitable, sporting, or other non-commercial purposes, such as a PTA, a church, or a hospice fundraising group. This is a genuine constraint. An individual running a fair "in aid of" a charity cannot register personally; the registration belongs to the society or charity, and the lottery is run on its behalf.
• You register with the local authority where the society's principal office is. The fee is £40 for initial registration and £20 a year to renew, set nationally.
• Every ticket must cost the same, and each ticket must show the society's name, the ticket price, the name and address of the responsible promoter, and the draw date.
• Tickets cannot be sold to or by anyone under 16.
• A financial return must be sent to the council within three months of the draw.
• The limits are generous at fair scale: up to £20,000 of tickets in a single lottery, up to £250,000 across a calendar year, no single prize over £25,000, and at least 20% of the proceeds must go to the society's purposes. Beyond those limits a Gambling Commission operating licence is needed, which is far past anything a craft fair will encounter.

If that sounds like more admin than you want, the practical answer is simple: keep all ticket sales on the day, at the event, and you stay inside the incidental lottery exemption with no paperwork at all.

One more exempt type worth knowing: a private society lottery, where tickets are sold only to members of a club or society (and guests on its premises), needs no registration either.

Every fair-day game fits one of three boxes

Raffles are only half the story. Fairs also run coconut shies, guess-the-weight competitions, bingo, wheels of fortune, and a dozen other games, and the legal treatment differs sharply depending on which of three categories a game falls into: genuine skill, judgment, or chance. If you can place each game on your field in the right box, you know its rules. The next three sections take them in turn.

Box one: games of genuine skill

Coconut shy, splat the rat, skittles, beat the goalie, hook-a-duck where the hooking takes real skill. Winning depends on what the player does, so these are not gambling at all and sit entirely outside the Gambling Act.

No licence, no registration, no limit on what you charge or what the prizes are worth, and it makes no difference whether the event is commercial or charitable. Your only duties are the ordinary ones: give the prizes you promised and set the game up safely.

Box two: judgment games, and the token skill trap

A prize competition, where success depends to a substantial degree on skill, knowledge, or judgment, needs no licence or permission from anyone, and may lawfully be run for private or commercial gain. Guess the weight of the cake, guess the number of sweets in the jar, and genuine quizzes all sit here, because estimating and answering are exercises of judgment.

The trap is that token skill does not count. The law treats a competition as a lottery (and therefore unlawful without authorisation) if the "skill" element would not prevent a significant proportion of entrants from winning, or deter a significant proportion from entering. Bolting a trivially easy question onto what is really a draw changes nothing. And guess the name of the teddy is not a judgment game at all; there is nothing to judge, so it is pure chance and belongs under the raffle rules earlier in this guide.

Box three: games of chance

Games of pure chance are regulated gaming, but the Gambling Act contains fundraising exemptions that cover nearly everything a fair would run. There are two sub-types, and the difference matters.

Equal chance gaming covers games where the prize pot depends on how many people play: bingo, race nights, poker and casino nights. At a non-commercial fundraising event these need no licence, subject to hard limits: no player may be charged more than £8 per day in total (covering admission, stakes, and everything else); total prizes must not exceed £600 per event (£900 where the event is the final of a series in which all the players have taken part); players must be told which good cause benefits; under-16s cannot take part; and the profits, after reasonable costs, must go entirely to the cause.

Prize gaming covers games of chance where the prizes are put up in advance and do not depend on how many people play: most stall-side chance games, wheels of fortune, lucky dips, pick a straw. Run for a good cause at a non-commercial event, these have no statutory limit on entry charges or prize values at all. This is the genuine surprise in this area of law: a chance-based game stall faces fewer limits than a raffle, provided the prizes are fixed in advance and the money goes to the cause.

The load-bearing caveat: unlike the raffle exemption, both of these depend on the event being non-commercial, meaning no part of the event's own proceeds (entry money and what the organiser keeps) goes to private gain. A charity fair, school fete, or church bazaar qualifies. A market run for the organiser's profit very likely does not, which puts bingo or a wheel of fortune at a commercially run event in genuinely uncertain territory even when the game itself is for charity. If that is your situation, ask your council's licensing team before the day rather than guessing.

Alcohol prizes, Gift Aid, and how worried to be

Three quick answers to the questions that always follow.

Bottles as tombola prizes are fine. Alcohol given as a prize in an incidental lottery is exempt from alcohol licensing under section 175 of the Licensing Act 2003, provided the alcohol is in a sealed container. What you cannot do is sell tickets that are exchangeable for drinks; that is selling alcohol and needs a licence, which our Temporary Event Notices guide covers.

Raffle tickets are never eligible for Gift Aid. The buyer receives a chance to win, so the payment is not a donation, however charitable the cause. Supporters and treasurers regularly assume otherwise; a line on this in your paperwork saves the conversation later.

As for enforcement: the Gambling Commission's attention is on commercial operators and illegal lottery businesses, not village hall raffles, and nobody is coming to a school fete with a clipboard. The rule genuinely worth respecting is the advance sales trigger, because that is the point at which an unregistered lottery is actually being promoted to the public. Keep sales on the day, or register first, and everything else in this guide is detail you now happen to have right.