The Italian Lottery is the national lottery in which you can participate by purchasing one or more 5 euro tickets and you can win prizes of up to 5 million euros. In addition to the huge prizes announced in January, every year there are also daily prizes of 10,000 or 20,000 euros up for grabs, announced between the end of September and the end of December during the “Affari Tui” broadcast. The chances of winning, however, are very low: the probability of winning the maximum prize is approximately 1 in 11 million, while that of winning any prize varies between 1 in 22,000 and 1 in 33,000.
In this article we see what the Italian Lottery is, how it works and what the real chances of winning are.
What is the Italian Lottery
The Italian Lottery is the national lottery, a game of chance in which you participate by purchasing tickets worth 5 euros each. Every year, from September 1st to January 6th of the following year, ticket buyers can participate in both the daily prize draws and the final draw. Always linked to Rai television programs, today it is associated with the television program “Affari Tui”, where, from Sunday 28 September to Friday 26 December, from Sunday to Friday, the daily prizes are announced. On January 6th, however, the final draw for the first category prizes, the richest, will be held. The entire lottery is regulated by the Customs and Monopolies Agency, which establishes the rules for participation, winning and collection of prizes.
How the Italian Lottery works
This year the 2025 edition of the Italian Lottery began on 1 September 2025 and will end on 6 January 2026. Anyone who purchases one or more tickets, at a bookshop or online, and registers them by scanning the QR code, calling or sending an SMS to the dedicated number, or by entering the 10-digit code on the official website, can participate in the draw for daily prizes worth:
- €10,000 from 28 September to 19 December
- €20,000 from December 21st to December 26th
Even without registration, the ticket will still participate in the final draw on 6 January 2026. During the episode of “Affari Tuoi” the winners of the 5 main prizes will be announced: the first prize, fixed every year, is equal to 5 million euros. The other first category prizes, the second, third and possibly fourth, however, are decided by a special commission based on how many tickets have been sold. At the moment, all that is known is that there will be 5 main prizes and that a special prize of 300,000 euros is expected; the definitive amounts will be announced after the closing of the sales and the verification of the overall proceeds.
However, to get an idea of how the prizes could be distributed, we can look at the 2024 Lottery, in which the best prizes were:
- first prize of €5,000,000;
- 4 other first category prizes from €1,000,000 up to €2,500,000;
- 25 second category prizes of €100,000;
- 50 third category prizes of €50,000;
- 200 fourth category prizes of €20,000.
To check if your ticket is a winner you can check on the official website, on the MyLotteries app or on the online retailers’ showcase. The winning tickets, in addition to being communicated during the broadcast, are published on the Lotteria Italia website, on the portal of the Customs and Monopolies Agency and on the app. In case of winning, the payment request must be submitted within 180 days from the official publication date. Let’s see, however, what the real probability of winning is.
What are the odds of winning
Every year, 10 million paper tickets are printed and 1 million digital tickets are generated. If they were all sold, the odds of winning the top prize would be 1 in 11 million. The probability of winning any of the first category prizes, however, is 5 (as many as the first category prizes) in 11 million, i.e. 1 in 2.2 million.
Naturally, these probabilities vary based on the actual number of tickets sold: if, for example, 5 million were sold, the probability of winning the top prize would become 1 in 5 million, while the probability of winning one of the five main prizes would rise to 1 in 1 million.
Put like this, these numbers tell us little. To better understand how unlikely it is to win the first prize, let’s think about the San Siro stadium in Milan (or Giuseppe Meazza stadium), the largest in Italy. San Siro can accommodate around 76 thousand people. If we took 145 stadiums the size of San Siro and placed an Italian Lottery ticket on each seat, we would have approximately 11 million tickets, one on each seat of our 145 imaginary San Siris. Winning the first prize of the Italian Lottery is like entering any of these 145 stadiums, choosing a seat and casually sitting on the winning ticket. Somewhat unlikely.
If, however, we try to consider the probability of winning any of the almost 300 prizes drawn on January 6th and the daily prizes, our chances of winning increase greatly. Looking at the official historical data, we can see that the possibility of obtaining any Italian Lottery prize varies between 1 in 33 thousand (1/33,865.54 in 2016) and 1 in 22 thousand (1/22,508.26 in 2020). This probability, of course, depends on how many tickets have been sold, but also on how many prizes are offered each year. Even considering all the possible prizes, however, winning remains rather unlikely. To have a mental image again, let’s think about putting a ticket on every seat in the Turin Olympic stadium (28 thousand seats). Winning any prize is like choosing any seat in that stadium and randomly finding the only winning ticket. Much more likely than before, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
