NS&I’s Premium Bonds, Britain’s best-loved savings product, celebrate their 65th birthday on Monday.
The first ever Premium Bond was purchased on 1 November 1956 and since then the idea of a lottery where you can get your stake back has soared in popularity.
There are now 21.1million Premium Bond holders – not far off a third of the UK population – holding between them over 113billion eligible £1 bonds.
Harold Macmillan (left) launched Premium Bonds in 1956 – but Harold Wilson (right) labelled it a squalid raffle.
NS&I pay out around three million tax free prizes ranging from £25 to £1million every month to Bond holders, whose numbers are chosen by an electronic random number generator known – the latest version is ERNIE 5.
There are two £1million prizes on offer each month and five £100,000 prizes, 11 £50,000 prizes and 20 prizes worth £25,000.
To celebrate the 65th anniversary of Premium Bonds, we have put together 65 facts about the much adored product.
We also spoke to two savings experts on the subject, as well as hearing from Agent Million, the person who tells two lucky Premium Bonds holders each month that they have won the £1million jackpot.
The first Premium Bond draw was made in Lytham St. Anne’s, near Blackpool, Lancashire on 1 June 1957. The jackpot prize was £1,000.
The early days…
1. The first Premium Bond was purchased by the then Lord Mayor of London, Alderman Sir Cuthbert Ackroyd on 1 November 1956.
2. By the end of the first day on sale, more than £5million of Bonds had been purchased.
3. The public had to wait seven months for the first draw on 1 June 1957.
4. There were 49million Bonds eligible for the first draw belonging to around six million Premium Bond holders.
5. The first draw was made in Lytham St. Anne’s, near Blackpool, Lancashire.
6. Harold Wilson, the Shadow Chancellor at the time of the launch of Premium Bonds, referred to them as a ‘squalid raffle.’
7. Church leaders also expressed concern that Britain would become a nation of gamblers and warned people not to get involved.
8. The jackpot prize for the first draw was £1,000 – the jackpot has since increased 99,900 per cent, currently standing at £1,000,000.
9. The smallest prize for the first draw was £25 as is still the case today.
10. The maximum investment in 1956 was £500 – today it is £50,000.
11. It was thought the first draw should take 30 hours to complete, but it went on for over two days because the engineers and staff needed to rest.
12. There were 23,142 prizes paid out in the first draw – There are 141 times’ more prizes now.
13. IFK341150 was the first ever Premium Bonds number drawn and was held by a Premium Bond holder in Cumbria.
Premium Bonds have captured the imaginations of multiple generations becoming a British institution loved not just in the UK, but across the world.
Mind-blowing facts
14. 394,007 Bonds bought prior to the first ever draw are still eligible to this day.
15. These 394,007 Bonds have won 103 prizes so far in 2021.
By the end of the first day on sale in 1956, more than £5m bonds had been purchased
16. Monday’s draw will be the 774th Premium Bonds prize draw and the draw will be the 469th and 470th millionaires that ERNIE makes.
17. The longest amount of time a winner has waited to win the £1million jackpot is 16,587 days (or 45 years and 5 months). This was a winner based in Newham in London, who held £17 in Premium Bonds. The winning Bond was purchased in February 1959 and won the jackpot prize in July 2004.
18. The winner from Newham also coincidentally had the smallest holding ever to win the £1million Premium Bonds jackpot.
19. On the flipside, 12 winners have waited just two months to win the £1million jackpot, winning in the first draws in which their Bonds were eligible.
20. 12 people holding £1,000 and under have scooped the £1million jackpot prize.
21. More than £22.1billion in prize money has been paid out by ERNIE since the first draw in 1957.
22. The oldest ever £1million winner was aged over 90 at the time of their win.
23. There has been a millionaire from every English county apart from Rutland.
24. In October’s Premium Bond draw both the £1million prize winning bond numbers were purchased in January and February of this year. In fact in the past 12 months, nearly half of the 24 £1million prizes were won by bond numbers purchased either in 2020 or 2021.
Odds of winning
25. The odds of winning for each £1 bond in the first ever draw were 9,600 to one.
26. The odds of a £1 holding winning the £1,000 jackpot in 1956 was estimated to be around 1 in 505,079.
27. If you held the maximum £500 in Premium Bonds at the time, your odds of winning the jackpot increased to around 1 in 1,010.
28. The chance of winning a prize today is more remote – at 34,500 to 1 for every £1 bond.
29. According to data scientist, Andrew Zelin, those who invest £1,000 into Premium Bonds will have to wait 3.2million years for a 50:50 chance of pocketing the top £1million prize.
30. Mr Zelin also calculated that with the maximum £50,000 stake you would still have to wait 60.3 years for an even chance of winning £1,000 or 2,385 years for £10,000 and 64,398 years for the top reward.
Random facts
31. The Premium Bonds draw was often a star spangled affair, with the likes of Bob Hope, Dame Judie Dench and Sir Bruce Forsyth all starting the draw at some point.
32. The £1million Premium Bonds prize was launched in April in 1994.
33. A record 113,081,411,333 bonds were in the October prize draw.
The original ERNIE 1 used the signal noise created by neon tubes to generate numbers and could generate 2,000 numbers per hour
34. Since ERNIE turned 60 in November 2016, the number of bonds has almost doubled, up from 64billion.
35. The figure has almost quadrupled from ERNIE’s 50th Birthday – In November 2006, there were 32.3billion eligible Bonds.
The jackpot prize for the first draw was £1,000 – the jackpot has since increased 99,900%, currently standing at £1m
36. Bond number 200VB673507 is one of the luckiest on record – purchased in January 2013 and belonging to a Premium Bonds holder from the West Midlands, the Bond won four £25 prizes between July 2017 and March 2019.
37. Ten children under the age of 16 have won the £1million jackpot.
38. Almost nine in ten of the more than 3.2million prizes paid each month are automatically reinvested into more Premium Bonds or paid directly into customers’ bank accounts.
39. The average holding size of the £1million jackpot winners is just over £17,000.
40. The average time that jackpot winners hold their winning bonds for prior to winning £1million is 1,870 days or just over five years.
41. A staggering 97.3 per cent of the current eligible bonds have been purchased since 1 January 2000 and according to NS&I’s figures, 36.9 per cent of Premium Bonds now available for the draw were purchased since 1 January 2020.
42).In December 2006, NS&I made five people millionaires to celebrate 50 years since Premium Bonds went on sale.
Ernest Marples starting the first Premium Bond Draw in June 1957
43. In June 2007, NS&I again made five millionaires – this time to celebrate 50 years since the first Premium Bonds prize draw.
44. In the run up to the December 2006 draw, during one day in October, NS&I sold more than £220million of Premium Bonds as people rushed to make sure they were eligible for the chance to win one of the five £1million prizes. This remains a record for the most Premium Bonds sold in one day.
ERNIE facts
ERNIE is the machine that generates numbers for the monthly prize draws.
45. The first incarnation of ERNIE was developed by the team behind the World War Two codebreaking machine Colossus at Bletchley Park.
46. ERNIE is now in his fifth incarnation to keep up with the sheer volume of numbers that needs to be generated each month.
47. ERNIE 1 could generate 2,000 numbers per hour.
48. If ERNIE 1 were still in use today, it’s estimated that it would take around 175 days to generate the numbers needed for the monthly prize draws.
49. ERNIE 1 used the signal noise created by neon tubes to generate numbers.
50. ERNIE 3 was the longest serving ERNIE, in use from 1973 until 1988.
51. ERNIE 5 is the first incarnation of ERNIE to use quantum technology to generate numbers.
52. ERNIE 5 is more than 40 times faster at generating the numbers needed that its predecessor, ERNIE 4.
53. On average, it now takes ERNIE 5 around 13 minutes to generate the random numbers required for the monthly draw.
54. ERNIE has drawn more than 538 million winning Bond numbers since the first draw.
55. Having moved out of Lytham for a while, ERNIE is now back in the seaside town where the first ever draw took place.
56. ERNIE is so loved by people across the UK that he has received a swathe of Valentine’s day, Christmas and Birthday cards over the years.
Unclaimed prizes
57. There are currently more than 2million unclaimed Premium Bonds prizes.
IFK341150 was the first ever Premium Bonds number drawn and was held by a Premium Bond holder in Cumbria
58. The value of unclaimed prizes is more than £73million.
59. The largest unclaimed prize is worth £100,000.
60. London has the most unclaimed Premium Bonds prizes in the UK with more than 379,000.
61. This is closely followed by the South East with more than 314,000 unclaimed prizes.
62. The oldest unclaimed prize is worth £25 and is from November 1957 and is due to a holder in South Yorkshire.
Agent Million
63. Agent Million has always been able to deliver the £1 million jackpot.
64. As there is more than one jackpot prize each month, there are four Agents Million.
65. There have been five £1million winners based overseas, meaning that Agent Million has had to leave the UK to deliver the jackpot prize.
