Introduction
Omaze is one of the most prominent and longest running raffle companies that has been operating since 2012. They have monthly winners of high-value properties, and also monthly millionaires since their ‘Monthly Millionaire’ started in August 2025.
Key Information
- URL: omaze.co.uk
- Organiser: OMAZE UK LIMITED
- Type: Competitions & Prize Draws
- Prizes: Houses, Cash
Review Summary
Omaze is one of these ‘prize draws’ that rely almost as heavily (if not more) on the publicity of their charitable donations like the National Lottery does. However, as they are a for-profit business taking advantage of the current Gambling Commission guidelines allowing companies promote draws as long as they have a free postal entry method available… They aren’t as well scrutinised or as charitable as you might think.
Omaze is more than happy to focus on the charity side of things for the sake of promoting the business and their draws, but if some points out that they are not as charitable as they should be, they will say that they are “not a charity”. So, the best of both worlds for them I suppose.
This is because the majority of the revenue will go to the pockets of the people working for Omaze (most importantly their executives and owners), and into their costs or whatever can be put down as an expense or a deduction for tax purposes. Which is of course absolutely fine for a private company to do.
Due to the very colourful track record, issues with terms and conditions, issues with the properties they have awarded unsuspecting ‘winners’, and the lack of transparency in how the draws are performed and what the odds are; Omaze scores 3.8 out of 10 in Real Score which means I recommend that you should avoid them at all costs.
If you have someone justifying the charitable donations as a reason to spending lots on the likes of Omaze – please convince them spend less money on what is effectively gambling, and to just do the donations directly to the charities.
If you wish to learn more about how I’ve calculated the Real Score for Dream Car Giveaways, please see the below sections!
Real Score
The basic information about the prizes and the company (Omaze UK Limited) are somewhat visible, and there are lots of FAQs and Terms and Conditions available on the website answering the most basic questions.
However, as someone who has a bit of a history of reading through Omaze’s terms and conditions… They appear to change more often than some people change their socks. So, while you may think something was the case a week ago – if you visit their website again you may find that something very relevant to the competition has changed. And this is not always for the better.
There are plenty of examples of previous winners, and the results are publicised to a high standard – even if they are done so for the sole purpose of being able to used in marketing and advertising the latest competitions. This is a massive improvement from years ago, when I reviewed Omaze for the first time.
Their terms and conditions currently (at the time of writing) say that the winners will agree to take part into having their names published, and their pictures taken.
While having a big win publicised everywhere including potentially ending up on the news will be detrimental for a person’s close relations and private life… But for the sake of the competition being transparent and trustworthy? I’d say that’s a very good thing and much needed.
Just for comparison; this is quite different with Raffle House (which in effect is ‘an Omaze’ of sorts) – as they will just publish and say something along the lines of: “John D. won the prize, but because we respect John’s privacy we won’t tell you who John D. actually is and what they look like”.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to confirm how Omaze does their draws. No videos or documents are being published of the official results, nor do they even name a party or a specific platform that they use for the draws.
In contrast, there are several competitions that do understand the importance of transparency, and for example: BOTB shows the judging videos in full for their dream car competitions, and competitions like 7days Performance, Rev Comps and Elite Competitions use lottery machines in their live draws.
The only thing visible at the time of writing this, is the mention below in their FAQ section:
Omaze did use Civica Election Services in the past to perform the draws, but now they only appear to be used for handling the free postal entries and nothing else.
Also, there has at least historically been some kind of weird prerequisites for a winner to be eligible to win; that have included background checks and other things… Which don’t sound like things that should be a part of a trustworthy and honest process.
But more on those below in this review…
Omaze is running the competition as a ‘free prize draw’ with a paid entry. This means that they should offer a free entry method as defined by the guidelines of the Gambling Commission.
You are able to find the free entry on ‘the same level’ as the other options, which is nice, but if you click to the “Postal – No purchase necessary” tab and you click on the first highlighted ‘click here’… You are guided away from the free entry page – which is less nice and clearly designed to just sell more real entries.
Additionally, it doesn’t look like they will acknowledge the receipt of the free entry. But what they do say, is that if the entry is invalid you won’t be notified.
So, I’m guessing no matter what you do with your free entry you won’t know if you’re in the draw even or not? (And therefore, do you even have a real chance of winning anything with the free entry?)
For context and a bit of a comparison; as 7days Performance is setting the standards in proper conduct, they say the below in their terms:
- the Promoter will email each Entrant who has submitted a valid entry via the Postal Entry Route to confirm their ticket number;
That’s more like it, isn’t it!? If you enter the competition operated by 7days Performance with the free postal entry, you will get confirmation of this. But if you enter Omaze’s competition through their free postal entry, and won’t get notified for this… How can you even be sure that they genuinely take these free entries into account?
Omaze does have quite a long track record, starting from 2012 in the US. And it is a very colourful one.
For one, they’ve had an ASA ruling stating they’ve reached the CAP code in misleading adverts. They’ve also been mentioned as one of the most common companies to receive complaints by the Gambling Commission.
Additionally, even if Omaze claims that they are not a charity, why did they agree to pay fees and penalties in California for not being a properly registered fundraiser?
So yeah, there definitely is a track record.
As a sidenote on this: I’m assuming the reason that they got into legal trouble in the US, but managed to be ‘compliant’ in the UK due to the more relaxed rules around competitions… Probably explains also why Omaze decided to focus only on the UK market since 2020 (the same year when the lawsuit was settled). But that’s yet another story for another time that requires more investigation.
Omaze’s prizes are great in comparison to other competitions – generally. Even if there have been some issues with the houses in the past, they still are high-value prizes and the monthly millionaire makers (as in, £1 million in cash) are definitely top-tier prizes as far as the prizes are concerned.
But… Even though they are great in comparison to a lot of other draws and competitions, the issues that the prizes may come with are worth pointing out.
Below is a snapshot from a quick Google search regarding such issues (as provided by the new ‘AI results snapshot’).
One could forgive something like this once or twice but… If it happens often? Maybe it shows that they don’t either do their due diligence when sourcing the prizes, or that they are purposefully sourcing the prizes as cheaply as possible (which could explain such issues).
As if you can source a house worth ‘£4 million’ and advertise it as such, but only pay £1-2 million for it… That’s obviously good for the bottom line of the business.
Who knows. It’s just worth pointing out that even though the prizes seem good on the surface, they may not always be what they originally seemed like. And as there are no cash alternatives provided, the winner will be stuck with selling the house which might be a headache in its own.
Now, even though the prizes are great – what are the actual odds of winning them?
As Omaze puts it: How long is a piece of string?
So… Let’s try to figure out! But before we do so, I’ll have to point out that this method is obviously a bit flawed as there are quite a moving factors and unknowns – but this should still give a rough and realistic ballpark idea of the odds.
Even if Omaze doesn’t tell you what the odds of winning are, you can guesstimate this by looking at how many tickets they sold in total over the year, and how many prizes they gave out.
In 2024 (as that’s the latest full year accounts available on Companies House), the revenue for Omaze UK Limited was a whopping £196,695,000. Or, almost £200 million.
We can make some assumptions about their average customer, and that the majority of the players should opt in for their subscription packages (not just because they are extremely heavily promoted on the website, but also because they give you a lot better value and more entries than the one-offs).
Therefore, for this guesstimate I would use the lowest subscription tier, and the highest subscription tier to figure out what the lowest and the highest per-entry-cost would be, and then we can use the revenue they made to figure out a range for how many entries they may have actually sold. (This obviously also excludes all the free postal entries.)
The lowest tier of £15 a month will give you 150 entries, which means one entry costs £0.15. The highest tier that costs £50 a month will grant you 640 entries, which means that the entries in the best-value tier are £0.078125 a pop.
This means, that using the 2024 revenue and 2025’s prices the annual amount of entries sold should be somewhere between 1,311,300,000 and 2,517,696,000*. However, they will not obviously be selling the same amount of tickets in 2025 as they sold in 2024. If we look at the revenue increase from 2023 to 2024, this was +54% – which is quite a lot for a company to grow in revenue in just one year. If we expect them to increase the revenue with something a bit more modest like 30% – we’ll get an estimation of entries for 2025 between 170,469,000 and 3,273,004,800 in total.
* Note: These subscriber entry amounts are from 2025, and in 2024 the same amount of money got you a lot less entries. Omaze has since increased how many entries you get presumably to look like better value.
And how many prizes have they given out? It looks like in November 2025, the number of prizes from 2025 is 9, and it looks like in 2024 there were 13 prizes… So it sounds like roughly one main prize or house a month is raffled out.
Therefore, the odds for of winning one of Omaze’s main house draws for one entry in 2025 should be somewhere in between 12/170,469,000 and 12/3,273,004,800, or between one in 14.2 million to one in 272.8 Million (which to be fair is quite the broad range – but it shows that the actual odds aren’t that great). And as their subscriptions grant a similar amount to the monthly millionaire maker (and as there are 12 months in a year), the odds for that should be roughly the same.
So what are the odds? Hard to say exactly, but they are not great. And of course they wouldn’t be as the prizes are so big. For context, odds of getting six matched on the Lotto in the UK is one in 45 million. So, it’s safe to say the odds are more likely than not worse than winning the national lottery for a single entry.
Being able to win a £4 million house for as low as £10 does sound great, and great value for a competition.
And even though I’d mostly leave it at that… In this case however, I won’t. First of all it’s incredibly unlikely that you would win, but this combined with the fact that these houses always seem to be very overinflated in their value – AND the fact that if you win a house that someone has been trying to sell for years and then you’re stuck with selling it… You will probably end up selling the property at a fraction of the advertised value.
As an example, (even though I don’t really like using these ‘AI results’), the below is quite telling:
So, when you rephrase this… “For £10 you have an extremely poor chance of winning a somewhat falsely advertised property with an overinflated value”…. Does that sound like good value? I’d say less so.
Not sure about you, but I’d genuinely rather have a somewhat realistic chance of winning £100,000 in cash – and then being able to use that wisely in the way I want.
Omaze is one of the biggest companies in the UK making the biggest donations to some of the most popular charities.
Lately, they always seem to pledge a minimum of £1 million to charity on their raffles – which does sound pretty good. And I’m sure it is most welcome to these charities.
If we look at the latest accounts of Omaze, they donated more than 20% of their revenue to charities. From year before, it was 16% or so. And when I reviewed Omaze in the past YEARS ago – it seemed only around 5% or so was donated to charity from a single competition.
So, they’ve definitely gotten better over time in how much they donate, and I’m sure this is also a big lifeline for some of these charities.
That being said, with the company only doing 12-ish prizes per year, and in comparison to the amount of money they are able to raise and make… It doesn’t sound as good as it potentially should.
For the Bonus section I’d like to focus on Omaze being one of the voluntary signatories in the latest Voluntary Code of Good Practices for Prize Draw Operators. As a part of becoming a signatory on this code, they have pledged to be transparent about their operations, charitable work, and also the odds of their draws.
But as you should know by know, there really isn’t much transparency at all for any of that. Therefore, it’ll be interesting to see if Omaze actually changes anything before the deadline in May 2026. But until then? Not great.
A closer look at: The ever-changing terms and conditions
As in the “Available Information” part I mentioned that Omaze changes their terms more than some people change their socks, it’s only fair to elaborate on this part a bit. While we can only guess why certain things have been done in a certain way, I think the fact that this is the way the company was ran and is ran in my opinion is telling in its own right.
One good thing (I guess depends on your perspective) about the Internet is, that what usually goes up there – is there forever one way or another. And, one easily verifiable way of checking what Omaze’s said or done in the past, is to check the rules pages via the WayBack Machine!
Example 1 – From 2020
(Accessible here via Wayback Machine)
In 2020, Omaze had a mention of Civica being used for the selection process. Which sounds good as it’s a third party company that should mean that the draws are done properly and randomly.
However, by 2025? I can’t find any mention of how the draws are actually performed, and by whom.
The only mention I could find, was in the FAQ sections as below – which doesn’t explain it that well. Who is using this random number generator to pull the winner, what is this random number generator? And most importantly, if you had a transparent method of drawing the winners in 2020 specifically, why not in 2025?
Example 2 – from 2021
(Accessible here via Wayback Machine)
Below is a snippet of the Official Rules from May 2021.
“Confirmation and verification of Potential Winners
No person will be confirmed as a winner of any Experience (Winner) unless they have satisfied all requirements of these Official Rules, been verified by Omaze or its representative and been notified of such completed verification.
Winner Documentation. In order to verify their identity and eligibility, Omaze may require Potential Winners to sign paperwork confirming their eligibility and their ability to participate on given dates relevant to the Experience (if applicable), as well as other legal releases as may be reasonably required by Omaze or the provider of the prize (for instance health and safety forms).
Background Checks
Omaze may perform background screenings or security checks, at its discretion, and the Potential Winner agrees to sign any necessary documentation required for such checks. This will always be done in accordance with Omaze’s Privacy Notice.”
So… There are obviously a few issues there or things that sound a bit strange. First of all, winners need to satisfy ALL RULES, and the rules include things like background checks for the winners. In effect, the company seemingly does reserve a lot to ensure that they can ‘raffle’ or choose the right kind of a winner.
Example 3 – From 2022
(Accessible here via Wayback Machine)
By 2022 the rules and terms had changed again on multiple fronts. But for simplicity’s sake, let’s focus on a couple of examples below which is to do with how Omaze reserves the rights to disqualify winners, and the wording change in the background screening – which is linked heavily to disqualifying winners.
First, the wording in the disqualification part has increased 5-fold, to include things like mentioning the background screening. But it now includes things “including and not limited to” things such as weather as being a valid reason to disqualify a winner.
Ok, but what about the background screening? Once again, the amount of wording had increased by quite a bit. At least they start the paragraph this time with “except where legally prohibited” – so, that’s a nice change; to promise that you won’t do unlawful screening and checks.
But here’s where it gets a bit strange. They say that Omaze will do any screening or security check at their own discretion, and that they reserve the right to disqualify the winner of the back of these background screenings if they deem that the winner might “reflect negatively” the competition, and that these factors can include anything “without limitation”.
So, the way I read this is as follows: If you’re a single mum who works for the NHS and have a great sob-story to tell, your chances will probably be a lot better than if you are a convicted criminal who isn’t as advertisable, or if you are somewhat well-off already.
As clearly, awarding the houses to winners who are not in line with advertising the competition effectively will “reflect negatively” on the company, and therefore would be a valid reason for disqualification.
Is that a bit of a stretch? Maybe. Is it still a bit weird to have things like these included in the terms? Definitely.
Finally, I’d say the following is the ‘kicker’: They reserve the right to not tell you the result of the screening, or if you were a potential winner and got disqualified because of the screening.
In effect, there could be a number of winners that would have won, but Omaze decided that they are not worthy winners and decide to redraw winners until one deemed ‘eligible’ is chosen. Does that sound like a random selection process for a winner?
A closer look at: Where does all the money go?
While there is no disputing that Omaze has donated lots to charities, it’s still safe to say that they are making an absolute killing as well. And for a private for-profit company to do this, this is of course absolutely fine (or heck, probably the main purpose of most businesses).
If you take the 2024 annual filings as an example, once you deduct the “profit” (which will be fully tax free due to the charity donations) and the amount donated; 75% of the revenue is still unaccounted for.
Of course there are the prizes and the cost of these will add up. However, even if you take the “worth more than” values given by Omaze which are very likely a lot more inflated than what the prizes did actually cost (£40-ish million), and give them a more realistic valuation of… Say £30 million (which will probably still be very much over-inflated)… You’re still left almost 60% of the revenue unaccounted for.
And where is that money going?
Here’s a hint, as responded by someone who works for Omaze:
They are not a charity. Or as in other words as right now described on Wikipedia, they are a “for-profit entertainment company”. They are still of course happy to market and make the biggest song and dance about the charities, but when someone points out that they’re not being charitable? Well of course they are not, for they are not a charity!
I did try to have a look at how much the salaries are and were, but unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much information available, other than some from the old US operations, and a few lower-level role salaries in the UK. And most importantly, the CEO of the company has kept his remuneration extremely private.
As an example, there are a few mentions online of a ‘top executive’ earning half a million a year. And this is before Omaze was even “profitable”, as this year was the first they actually turned a 6 million GBP profit.
Obviously, the most tax-effective company won’t make a massive profit, but rather distribute funds in a more clever way and take all expenses into account and use a combination of tax-efficient vessels and schemes.. Which begs the question I do wonder why OMAZE UK HOLDCO LIMITED was set up in 2025 that has similar directors and is owned by its parent company OMAZE UK LIMITED?
One thing is for sure, the money is definitely going somewhere. Which is, absolutely fine of course as this is a private for-profit company – and there is nothing nefarious or illegal about making ‘some’ money.
Notes
Omaze has been historically and still is quite a difficult company to review, so diving into what can be found and is accessible, and trying to figure out what they’ve changed this time in their terms… Was very frustrating to say the least.
I’m certain that I’ve missed more of the slightly strange terms and conditions they’ve had over the years, or something else worth pointing out. However, I’m still certain that I’ve gone through enough in this review to be able to form an opinion of the business.
Recommended Reviews
Frequently Asked Questions
Omaze is a legitimate for-profit business that has perfected the craft of being able to stay compliant enough not to fall within the gambling laws and regulations in the UK, while being able to raise enough money for the charities to seem like a ‘do-gooder’ – whilst making millions in profit themselves.
However, some of the terms and conditions and the conduct in the past does hint at some concerns about the legitimacy of the draws and whether the prizes are actually good. I’d recommend reading the review in full to form your own opinion.
The odds of winning the National Lottery are abyssal, one in 45 million. And even then, you might have to share the jackpot with another winner.
What about Omaze?
In this review, I estimated roughly that the chances of winning Omaze for one entry could be as bad as one in 272.8 Million. As Omaze doesn’t offer any transparency to their odds, we can only do such ‘guesstimations‘.
So, it’s almost like asking what are the odds of you being able to buy your first home in 2025 in the UK on your own hard-earned money without any additional help, or what are the chances of Chelsea winning the UEFA Champions League? Both are pretty incomparable – but still pretty nonexistent and asking such questions is pretty pointless.
All joking aside, I recommend reading this review in full to get a better idea of some other issues with Omaze – so you can get a better feel for your true odds of winning.
7days Performance
Rev Comps
