Society Lottery Licence for Charity Raffles: The Plain Guide

A trustee at a local charity once asked me, slightly worried, whether their parish-fete tombola needed a Gambling Commission licence. It did not. Two weeks later a different trustee asked whether their planned weekly online lottery was covered by their existing small-society registration. It was not, and the difference between those two answers is exactly the kind of detail that lands charities in regulatory trouble.

Lotteries are tightly regulated in the UK because they are a form of gambling. The rules are clear once you know where the thresholds and definitions sit, and most charities can run perfectly legal raffles and lotteries with modest paperwork. The risk comes from running something that has quietly crossed a line nobody on the team has read about.

The five types of lottery a charity might run

1. Incidental non-commercial lottery

No registration required. Run at a one-off non-commercial event. The rules to stay inside:

• Tickets sold only at the event, results announced at the event.
• Prize value cap of 500 pounds.
• No more than 500 pounds deducted from proceeds for expenses.
• No rollover.

A village fete tombola, a quiz-night raffle, a gala dinner draw. All typical incidental lotteries.

2. Private society lottery

Tickets sold only to members of the society (and people on the society's premises). No external advertising. Useful for member-based charities but limited in reach. No registration with the local authority required.

3. Small society lottery

The most common charity raffle structure. Registered with the local authority, ten-pound registration fee, annual renewal. Operates within these limits:

• Maximum 20,000 pounds of ticket sales per single draw.
• Maximum 250,000 pounds of ticket sales per calendar year across all draws.
• No more than 25,000 pounds in a single prize.
• Tickets must show the price, the promoter's name, the date of the draw, the name of the society, and the local authority registration number.
• At least 20 percent of proceeds must go to the society's purpose; expenses and prizes together cannot exceed 80 percent.

4. Large society lottery

Once you exceed either 20,000 pounds per draw or 250,000 pounds annually, you require an operating licence from the Gambling Commission. The licence carries application fees, annual fees, regulatory returns and ongoing compliance obligations. Most charities running weekly lotteries (such as those promoted through the People's Postcode Lottery model or through major hospital and hospice weekly draws) operate at this scale.

5. External lottery manager

A common pattern for medium-size charity weekly lotteries: contract an external lottery manager (ELM) who holds the operating licence and runs the back office. The charity remains the promoter and beneficiary. This is often the most cost-effective route to a substantial weekly lottery programme; the ELM's fees are typically structured per player and modest at scale.

Small society lottery: the practical setup

A small society lottery is straightforward to register. The local authority issues the registration, and the steps are essentially:

1. Confirm your charity is a non-commercial society (charitable, sporting or cultural).
2. Nominate a named promoter (a member or employee of the society).
3. Apply to your local licensing authority with the small fee. Allow four to six weeks for processing.
4. Wait for the registration certificate. Display the registration number on all tickets.
5. After every draw, submit a return to the local authority within three months: ticket sales, prize values, expenses, amount applied to the charitable purpose.

Renewal happens annually with a small fee. Missing a return or late renewal can result in suspension of the registration; a diaried admin task is worth more than its modest time cost.

Trustee duties around lotteries

Three trustee responsibilities the Charity Commission and Gambling Commission both take seriously:

• Ensure the lottery genuinely furthers the charity's purpose and is not a personal benefit to any individual.
• Verify that proceeds are properly applied (the 20 percent minimum to charitable purpose is the legal floor, not the target; most well-run small society lotteries return 40 to 60 percent to purpose).
• Ensure social responsibility measures are in place: clear age verification (over 16), self-exclusion options for players who request them, and links to GambleAware on any digital interface.

The personal liability sits on the named promoter and ultimately on the trustees. Treat the duties as live ones, not as box-ticks delegated to a fundraising staff member.

Operational habits that prevent trouble

1. Maintain a separate ticket-sales bank account or accounting code. Mixing raffle income with general donations creates audit problems.
2. Print or generate tickets with all required information. Digital ticket platforms designed for UK charities (Givergy Raffle, Raffall, KindLink and others) handle this correctly by default.
3. Keep records of every draw for at least three years: ticket sales, expenses, prize awards, beneficiaries.
4. Refresh the trustee briefing on lottery duties annually. Most lottery failures originate in trustees who have forgotten the rules, not malicious actors.

When to move to a large society lottery

If your weekly or monthly draw is reliably approaching either threshold (20,000 pounds per draw or 200,000 pounds annually), start the Gambling Commission application at least four months before you expect to cross the line. Operating without the licence above the thresholds is a criminal offence, and the regulator is unlikely to be flexible on charities that should have planned better.

The compliance overhead of a small society lottery is modest. The compliance overhead of a small society lottery that quietly grew into something the registration no longer covers is enormous, painful and entirely avoidable.

A short checklist for trustees

1. Do we know which of the five lottery types we are running, by name?
2. Have we registered with the right authority, and is the registration current?
3. Is our named promoter aware of the duty, and do they have the support to fulfil it?
4. Are our tickets compliant with the required information?
5. Are returns being submitted on time?
6. Are we approaching any threshold that would require a different licence?

Six questions, ten minutes at a board meeting, once a year. That is the difference between a small charity raffle that quietly raises money for years and the kind of regulatory problem that turns up in the trade press for all the wrong reasons.

Related reading: Charity Raffle Rules: When You Need a Licence, The Fundraising Regulator Explained: What It Does and What It Expects From You and Charity Trustee Responsibilities: A Plain Guide to What the Role Actually Involves.