I bought £25,000 of Premium Bonds but won nothing for a year – am I just unlucky?

I bought £25,000 worth of NS&I Premium Bonds but haven’t won anything for a YEAR – was there a mistake or am I just really unlucky?

  • Our reader should have won 12 times in a year, but instead won nothing
  • NS&I insists that it did not make a mistake and that there is bad luck

In November 2020 I bought £25,000 worth of National Savings & Investments Premium Bonds in one transaction, all with consecutive numbers.

They were eligible to enter the draw in January 2021, but I didn’t win anything at all in 2021. However, in 2022 and 2023 I won quite a few prizes.

I am concerned that I have not received any prices at all on such a large number of bonds in all of 2021.

I appreciate that the draw is random, but my lack of success seems statistically unlikely, and I’m concerned that due to an IT error, my bonds are not included in the database from which prizes are selected for all of 2021, because they were at least incorrectly identified as first eligible for prizes in January 2022 instead of January 2021. Via email

Wanted Savings: Two-thirds of Britons own NS&I Premium Bonds, and millions more own other NS&I Savings Bonds

Sam Barker, from This is Money, replies: Premium Bonds are the UK’s most loved savings product, with over 22 million people owning them.

Most of the £1 million jackpot wins come from large stake NS&I customers – Brits can save up to £50,000 each in Premium Bonds.

Many savers love the eexcitement of a chance to win £25 or more in each month’s Premium Bonds draw.

With a stake of £25,000 it seems extremely unlikely that you won’t win anything for a whole year.

So has a mistake been made, or are you just an unlucky Premium Bond holder – and how much bad luck?

NS&I denied there was a mistake with your bonds and suggested it was all just bad luck.

With average luck, you should have won a prize 12 times in 2021, data shows.

I spoke to an expert statistician to find out the exact odds of our reader winning nothing at all in 2021.

Statistician Michael Dunne-Willows said the odds of going all year without winning anything with £25,000 worth of Premium Bonds equals 0.00000373.

That assumes all 25,000 £1 Premium Bonds were eligible for 12 monthly prize draws in 2021.

Dunne-Willows added: ‘That is an extremely small chance and equates to a chance of more than 260,000 to 1. This is extremely unlikely.

In fact, with 25,000 Premium Bonds and given the above assumptions, the client should generally expect to win on average about 12 times a year.

“Most of these gains are generally the lowest prize value of £25, but still that equates to an expected total gain of over £300 a year.”

An NS&I spokesperson said: ‘Ms S has made a formal complaint to NS&I, which was originally responded to on 5 July. Further letters were sent to Ms S on 15 July, 29 July, 26 September and 22 October 2022.

“It was explained in these letters that the generation of Premium Bond Numbers is completely random and that Ms. S’ Bonds were eligible for the prize draws they should have been in.”