7 July 2026
Powerball comes to the UK: what it means for players
LottoBase Team · 4 min read
Powerball, the American lottery game known for its very large jackpots, is coming to the United Kingdom. Tickets go on sale on 21 July 2026, and the first draw follows on Wednesday 22 July. This post sets out what the game is, how it works for players here, what the prizes and odds look like, and how LottoBase fits in. The official details are on the National Lottery Powerball page.
What is launching, and what is new for UK players
Powerball has, until now, been a United States game. This is the first time it has been offered anywhere outside the US. The significant part for players here is that the UK is not getting a separate, self-contained version: UK players will play alongside US players for the same shared jackpots. When a jackpot is won, it is paid out over 30 years rather than as a single lump sum — a structure carried over from the American game.
Alongside that shared game, the UK version adds some prize tiers that do not exist in the US format, which we come to below.
How to play
A single Powerball line costs £4. You can buy tickets online — through the National Lottery website or app — and in store at the usual retailers. As with the National Lottery’s existing games, you can play up to four weeks in advance, which covers several draws in a single purchase.
When the draws happen
Because the draw itself is held in the United States, the timing works a little differently from our home-grown games. Powerball is drawn on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday evenings, US time. With the time difference, that lands in the UK in the early hours of the following morning — so results arrive here around 4am on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. The first draw, on Wednesday 22 July, will therefore have its result with UK players in the small hours of Thursday morning. In practice you simply check after you wake up, rather than staying up for a mid-evening draw as you might with Lotto.
The prizes
Two of the UK prize tiers are worth calling out, because they are UK-only additions rather than part of the American game:
- Match 2 main numbers — a fixed prize of £8.
- Match 5 main numbers — a fixed prize of £1 million.
“Fixed” here means the amount does not move: match those numbers and you receive exactly that sum. The remaining UK prize tiers work differently. They pay estimated, variable amounts that depend on how the balls fall, how many people win in each tier, and — because the top prizes are shared with a game run in US dollars — the currency exchange rate at the time. In other words, the headline figures for those tiers are estimates until a draw is settled, in much the same way EuroMillions prizes float with the euro.
The odds, in plain English
A quick word on what “odds” means first, since it is easy to talk past. Odds are simply a way of writing how many possible outcomes there are for each winning one. “1 in 14” means that, over a long run of many lines, you would expect roughly one line in every fourteen to win something — and most of those wins are the smaller tiers, not the jackpot.
For Powerball in the UK, the overall odds of winning any prize are about 1 in 14. The odds of winning the jackpot itself are far longer: around 1 in 292 million. To put that second figure in perspective, it is several times longer than the odds of the UK Lotto jackpot, which sit at 1 in 45,057,474. A larger advertised jackpot and a longer set of odds tend to go hand in hand; that is the trade every big-jackpot game makes.
How LottoBase fits in
LottoBase will fully support Powerball from launch day, the same way it already supports Lotto, EuroMillions, Set For Life and Thunderball. That means the parts of the app you would expect: keeping your Powerball tickets organised alongside your other games, checking each result as soon as the draw is settled, and flagging any win so a prize is not overlooked.
Because the game is brand new, the finer points of how each screen presents Powerball will settle in as it beds down. What matters at launch is that the game is covered from day one, so a line you buy for the first draw is tracked just like any other.
In practice
Powerball gives UK players another option, with a jackpot shared with US players, a £4 line, and its own UK-only prize tiers. It is a game of chance like any other, with long odds on the top prize, so the sensible approach is the usual one: only spend what you can comfortably afford. If you do buy a line, LottoBase will keep track of it from the first draw on 22 July 2026 — result waiting for you when you wake on Thursday morning.