How to Play EuroMillions

How to play EuroMillions, the short version: choose 5 numbers from 1 to 50 and 2 Lucky Stars from 1 to 12, pay £2.50 a line in the UK, and the draw happens on Tuesday and Friday nights. It’s the same game in nine countries feeding one jackpot, which is why the top prize gets so much bigger than anything a single country’s lottery can manage. The facts below were checked on 6 November 2026.

How to play EuroMillions, step by step

Pick your five main numbers and your two Lucky Stars, or take a Lucky Dip. That’s one line. In the UK every line also carries a UK Millionaire Maker code, a separate raffle-style draw with at least one guaranteed £1 million winner each time, so you’re in that without doing anything extra. Irish tickets have their own add-on, and other countries do it differently again.

Lines can be bought for one draw or several in advance. Players have to be 18 or over.

What time is the EuroMillions draw?

The balls are drawn in Paris on Tuesday and Friday evenings, at about 8.45pm UK time. In the UK, ticket sales for that night’s draw close at 7.30pm. Results go up on the official sites within minutes, and the full prize breakdown, which takes a while because nine countries have to report their winners, follows later that night.

How many numbers in EuroMillions?

Five from 50 plus two from 12. That second pool is what makes the jackpot so hard: picking the right five main numbers is 1 in 2,118,760 on its own, and then you need both stars, a further 1 in 66. Put together it’s 1 in 139,838,160. The CasinoCalcs EuroMillions odds calculator shows all 13 prize tiers, and the smallest one, two main numbers, comes up about once every 22 lines.

The jackpot starts at a guaranteed minimum and rolls over until somebody wins it, up to a cap of €250 million. After the cap is reached, any extra rolls down to the next tier. UK winners are paid in pounds at the exchange rate for that draw, so a “€200 million” jackpot isn’t a round number here.

How much is a EuroMillions ticket?

£2.50 a line in the UK, unchanged since 2016. Elsewhere it’s set in euros or local currency and the price includes different add-ons, so a ticket in Spain, France or Ireland costs a different amount. Only the UK and Irish games use English on the ticket, which might matter if you’re on holiday.

What a winning line pays depends on how many others won the same tier that night. Our EuroMillions prize calculator gives typical amounts for each match.

Claiming a prize

It works like Lotto in the UK: shop counters pay small prizes, larger ones go through the official claim process, and big wins start with a phone call to the operator. You have 180 days from the draw. Buy in the country you live in, because claiming a foreign ticket from home is a hassle at best.

If you want to see what playing every Tuesday and Friday for twenty years looks like, the EuroMillions simulator runs it without costing a penny. It’s a sobering ten seconds. For the UK draws, see how to play Lotto.

The jackpot is huge because the odds are huge. BeGambleAware.org has support if you need it.