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January 2025 premium bond winners – plus the luckiest regions revealed
Savers in the South East of England won the jackpot eight times in 2024, but five regions had no jackpot winners at all
Two lucky premium bond holders have started 2025 by becoming millionaires in January's National Savings & Investments (NS&I) prize draw.
The jackpot winners are from Liverpool and Gloucestershire, and both will receive the top prize of £1m. While 82 other winners were picked for the next-best prize of £100,000.
Here, Which? reveals the winning bond numbers, and analyses which areas and age groups were luckiest in 2024.
January 2025 premium bond winners
The first winning bond (492XB861312) was bought by a lucky saver based in Liverpool, who holds a total of £37,025. The winning bond was bought in March 2022.
The second winner, from Gloucestershire, only bought their bond (601RW421962) in November 2024 and hold the maximum of £50,000.
- Find out more: should I get premium bonds?
How many winners were drawn in January?
There were 5,851,240 premium bond prizes paid out in the January 2025 draw. Of these, 5,779,559 were worth £100 or less.
In total, this month's prizes were worth £429,090,875.
| Value of prize | Number of prizes |
|---|---|
| £1,000,000 | 2 |
| £100,000 | 82 |
| £50,000 | 163 |
| £25,000 | 328 |
| £10,000 | 818 |
| £5,000 | 1,636 |
| £1,000 | 17,163 |
Source: NS&I, 2 January 2025.
- Find out more: are premium bonds worth it?
The luckiest regions in 2024
The map below shows where 2024's premium bond jackpot winners live in the UK.
The South East of England saw the highest number of jackpot prize winners in 2024, with a total of eight. Greater London and the South West had the second-highest number of winners, with four each.
There wasn't a single jackpot winner in Wales, Northern Ireland, the East of England, the North East, and Yorkshire and the Humber.
NS&I data shows the South East also had the most winners of any prize in 2024, with 1.1m premium bond holders striking it lucky.
Northern Ireland, which had no jackpot winners in 2024, also had the fewest winners overall – just 60,000 bonds were picked out for prizes of any value.
Luckiest year for buying premium bonds
As you can see in the chart below, the majority of bonds that won the £1m jackpot last year were bought in 2023.
2020, 2021 and 2022 had the second-most jackpot prize-winning purchases – a total of three lucky numbers were bought in each year.
Incredibly, two £1m winners from two separate draws in 2024 had bought their lucky bonds just a few months earlier.
Up until a couple of years ago, savings rates were very low. As a result, more people were likely to choose premium bonds, with their promise of big cash prizes, over traditional savings accounts or Isas that offered poor returns. This could explain the success of bonds bought between 2020 and 2022.
The large number of winning numbers bought in 2023 may also be down to NS&I boosting the prize fund rate (which determines the overall value of prizes available in each draw) five times that year. This may have enticed people to buy more premium bonds.
- Find out more: different types of savings accounts explained.
Luckiest age groups in 2024
Premium bond holders over the age of 65 bagged the most prizes last year, according to NS&I data. They won a total of 38.1m prize, worth almost £3bn.
The age group least likely to win were those aged under 16. In 2024, these bond holders won 1.2m prizes worth a total of £96.8m.
Most jackpot winners were older, with 14 premium bond holders aged over 60 becoming millionaires last year – this includes three lucky pensioners aged over 80.
There were also seven jackpot winners aged 50 to 59, one in the 40 to 49 bracket, and two aged between 16 and 24.
Of course, the higher number of jackpot winners in older age groups isn't simply down to luck. Savers in this demographic tend to have more money to invest in premium bonds – and the bigger the holding, the greater your chances of winning a prize are.
