New £4m scratchcard: odds and prizes for When It’s Gold Outside

The biggest scratchcard prize the UK has had

When It’s Gold Outside is the first National Lottery scratchcard with a £4 million top prize. That’s double the old record of £2 million. It costs £10 a card and went on sale in selected shops in early September 2026.

There are four £4m prizes in the game. On 2 October 2026 the official scratchcard list still showed all four waiting to be won.

Allwyn, which runs the National Lottery, calls this first run a pilot. It plans to push the card as a Christmas gift, so expect to see a lot more of it in shops over the next few months.

What are the odds?

These figures come from the official game rules for When It’s Gold Outside (game 1526). They’re the odds at the start of the game, per £10 card.

• Any prize: 1 in 3.14
• £4,000,000 top prize: 1 in 1,994,963
• £10,000: 1 in 1,994,963 (there are four of these too)
• £1,000 or more: about 1 in 137,600
• £10, which just gets your money back: about 1 in 6

What you get back on average

There are 7,979,850 cards in the first print run. Buying every one would cost £79,798,500 and pay out £57,613,050 in prizes. That’s 72.2% of the money going in, so on average a £10 card returns about £7.22.

About half of all winning cards pay £10. That counts as a win, but you’re only getting your stake back. So while 1 in 3.14 sounds generous, most cards that win don’t leave you any better off.

How to play

Each card has three winning numbers and 37 of your numbers, each with a prize underneath. Match any of your numbers to a winning number and you win the prize below it. You can win up to 37 times on one card.

Some symbols change things. A WIN symbol pays the prize below it straight away. Multiplier symbols pay 2, 5 or 10 times the prize below them. Find WIN ALL and you get every prize on the card added together.

How it compares

The other £10 card on sale, £2 Million Solid Gold, has half the top prize but a better chance of winning something, at 1 in 2.74. So the new card trades a slightly lower hit rate for a much bigger headline prize.

Next to the draw games, a £4m win here is far less of a long shot than a Lotto jackpot, which is 1 in 45,057,474 per round. It costs £10 a go, though, not £2. Our lottery odds guide compares every UK game side by side.

Before you buy

Check how many top prizes are left. Once the last £4m prize is claimed, shops can keep selling cards already on display, but no new packs go out. The National Lottery’s scratchcard list shows the number left for every game.

Prizes up to £500 can be paid in the shop. For anything bigger, our guide to claiming a prize explains each route. You must be 18 or over to buy a scratchcard, and at £10 a card it’s worth setting a budget before you start.

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