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- Maths reviewed by Josh Miller
- Tested by Diana Westfield
Ticket 1 costs 1p, ticket 2 costs 2p, all the way up to ticket 200 at £2. Sell the lot and the penny raffle raises £201. Nobody pays more than £2, the average ticket is about a pound, and people dive back into the tub for “one more go” because the next one might be cheap. The CasinoCalcs penny raffle calculator above works out the total for any number of tickets and starting price, and checks you’ll cover the prizes.
Penny raffle calculator: how much it makes
Adding 1 + 2 + 3 + … + n by hand gets old fast. The shortcut is n × (n + 1) ÷ 2:
| Tickets | Dearest ticket | Raised (penny) | Raised (10p start) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 | £1 | £50.50 | £505 |
| 200 | £2 | £201 | £2,010 |
| 300 | £3 | £451.50 | £4,515 |
| 500 | £5 | £1,252.50 | £12,525 |
Double the tickets and you roughly quadruple the money, because the extra tickets are the expensive ones. That’s the useful lever: going from 200 to 300 tickets more than doubles a penny raffle.
If not every ticket sells
Buyers draw blind, so the cheap and dear tickets go out in a random mix. Sell 70% of a 200-ticket penny raffle and you’ll take about £140, give or take. Set prizes against that figure, not the full £201, and anything above it is a bonus for the cause.
The pound raffle (or envelope raffle) is the bigger cousin. 100 envelopes at £1 to £100 raise £5,050, which is why schools and clubs use it for a holiday or a TV. Pick “1 (pound raffle)” for the starting price.
For a standard raffle with one fixed price, the raffle ticket price calculator sets the price, and the raffle odds calculator shows each buyer’s chances. The raffle ticket tracker keeps track of who bought what.