£50k in Premium Bonds after a year: What could you win?

Two very different results show there’s no guarantee

Even though we’ve had some of the best savings rates in years, Premium Bonds remain popular. Despite no guarantee in what you could win, people hope they might get lucky and net big prizes – especially if they have a lot of cash invested.

To get an idea of how that pans out, I asked two people with the maximum £50,000 saved what they won in a year. Though your own situation will differ, it’s a great way to understand what your chances are.

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What are Premium Bonds?

Unlike a savings account where you get a guaranteed return on your deposits – known as an interest rate – Premium Bonds instead have a Prize Rate.

This looks like an interest rate, but it actually represents how much of the total invested is given out in prizes. These prizes range from £25 to £1 million. Here’s more on how they work.

2025 Premium Bond stats

In 2025 more than 470,000 people opened new accounts, including 77,177 for under 16s! That brought the total to £135 billion of bonds in the draw by the end of the year.

The average balance during the year was £10,674.

£4.9 billion was given away as prizes.

The lowest holding to get the top £1m prize was £100.

One winner with just £14 in bonds from 1972 won £100,000, another with £71 from 1962 won £50,000.

What would you hope to win in a year?

In the last year, the prize rate has actually changed three times, starting at 4.4%, and going down to 4.15%, before dropping to 4% at the start of 2025 It then fell to it’s current rate of 3.8% in April.

• January to March 2025 draw – 4%
• April to July 2025 draw – 3.8%
• August to December 2025 draw – 3.6%

If you add that all together it gives an average prize rate of 3.77%. That means that someone with the full £50,000 will hope to get a return of £1,885 in a year.

It’s worth noting though that the likelihood of getting close to this rate reduces if you have less money held in PBs as you’ll effectively have fewer entries in to each draw, and therefore fewer chances of winning.

Still, the prize rate is a useful shorthand for those with average luck. But would you have average luck?

How much did £50k win over a year?

A few years ago, when savings rates were particularly poor, I had £10,000 in Premium Bonds for a full 12 months. And my experience in that time was pretty good. I actually beat the then rate of 1%.

But since interest rates elsewhere have improved I’ve only had money in PBs (as I like to call them) on and off – effectively those months when the prize rate was decent, but moving the cash when it was beaten.

Since the summer of 2023, I’ve been sharing the winnings from some friends who had kept the full £50,000 cash in Premium Bonds for a year. We’ll call them saver one and saver two (you might remember my last update also included saver 3, but I wasn’t able to get their data this time)!

Here’s the total they won and their effective win rate during the 2024 calendar year when the average prize rate was 4.42%.

So a year on, how have things changed? This is an update looking back at the last 12 months, July 2024 to June 2025 for those same three people, broken down month by month.

You can see just how random it is. Both savers had months with no wins, while saver two won more in seven months of the year, and had the same result in two.

Overall, saver one fared worst, getting way below the average prize rate of 3.77% with a poor 2.2% return. Saver two managed to get 3.85, just above the average rate in 2025, but it was half what they got the previous year.

Why are the results so different?

Forget the rumours how newer bonds are more likely to win, that older bonds are sometimes excluded, that bonds that have already won won’t win again and even that people outside of London are at a disadvantage.

These are all myths. Every single bond, new and old, across the UK, has the exact same chance of winning one of the prizes. The only thing in the favour of these savours is that have more entries thanks to having more bonds.

But ultimately is is just down to luck. Saver two was just a lot luckier than saver one, while saver three was incredibly lucky!

It’s a great example of when someone wins more than expected, someone misses out. At it’s most extreme in PBs, that’s shown when someone wins really big and many, many people win nothing at all.

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Premium Bonds vs savings on £50k

So, we’ve established you could do well or you could do badly with Premium Bonds compared to the prize rate. But what about if you’d instead put the money in an easy access savings account?

If our savers instead had moved their money from best buy to best buy in that period, they’d have got between 4.35% and 4.85%. The average interest rate in the year works out (roughly) as 4.65%, and with £50,000 saved you’d earn an average of £2,325 in guaranteed interest.

That’s better when compared to the average prize rate of 3.77% and winnings of £1,635. Of course, everyone will get a different win rate. In our examples, saver one (a return of 2.65%) was worse off this year with Premium Bonds, while both savers two (5.85%) and three (22.65%) ended up with more from PBs.

However it’s not actually that simple.

Tax on interest

First, you need to account for tax. Premium Bond prizes are tax-free, so there’s no interest on the return. Outside of PBs or ISAs, you are taxed. The average rate in easy access, after tax is paid on interest drops it down to make Premium Bonds more competitive.

It shows that the average PB rate would beat all savings accounts that pay tax. However, you also need to factor in the personal savings allowance to get a real comparison.

Here’s what putting the full £50,000 in to savings at the average rate would really return (remember the Premium Bond total is average luck).

So in this instance, it still appears that the average Premium Bonds return would have given a slightly lower return for basic rate tax payers, but the best return over this period for both higher and additional rate tax payers.

In our real life examples though, Premium Bonds would only have paid more for Saver 1 if he was an additional rate tax payer (he’s not).

And of course there’s also the £20,000 annual ISA allowance. If you choose to use that for cash rather than stocks and shares, that also increases the amount you can earn tax free, again reducing the appeal of Premium Bonds.

And low earners would also get the Starting Rate for Savings, offering up to £5,000 more tax-free interest each year.

Earning interest on the prizes

Another factor to consider is you can’t reinvest prizes into PBs if you already have the full £50k saved. Which means our three savers all (hopefully) moved their winnings into a high paying account to keep earning, perhaps as much as 7% via regular saver, then they’d earn more on top – even if tax was potentially due on that.

The best savings accounts

Check out our list of the highest paying regular, easy-access, fixed and ethical savings accounts

Are Premium Bonds worth it?

Andy’s analysis

As demonstrated, there’s no guarantee you’ll do well with Premium Bonds. In 2025, both savers would have made more from putting the cash in other accounts and paying some tax on the interest they made.

And that’s with the full amount saved, which have the best odds of winning. If you have smaller amounts then your chances of winning greatly decrease.

But, there are still times when they’re worth a shot. If you’re already filling your personal savings allowance (or if you don’t get one) and have maxed out the annual ISA allowance (perhaps in stocks and shares rather than cash), Premium Bonds can be a good option.

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