Omaze has become a familiar name in the UK thanks to its glossy adverts promising the chance – sometimes with free entry – to win multimillion-pound houses, cars, and cash lump sums, all while raising money for charity. What many entrants don’t realise, though, is that there’s a completely free way to take part. Here’s how it works, what the odds actually look like, and what you could walk away with.
What Is Omaze?
Omaze is a for-profit entertainment company that partners with charities in fundraising events, with customers purchasing an entry or subscribing and a percentage of sales going to the partner charity. The company was founded by Matthew Pohlson and Ryan Cummins in the US in 2012, initially running celebrity-experience draws before shifting focus to UK house draws from 2020 onward. It has raised more than $250 million for charities to date.
How Omaze Free Postal Entry Works
Because Omaze runs prize draws rather than a lottery, UK law requires it to offer a genuinely free way to enter alongside the paid options. The Gambling Act 2005 allows charging an entry fee for a random prize draw as long as a free entry route exists alongside it, and Omaze’s postal entry qualifies as that free route.
In practice, this means sending your name, address, and other requested details on a postcard to the address published in the relevant draw’s terms and conditions. You only pay for a stamp, and you get the same chance of winning as anyone who paid for an entry. The catch is volume: each postcard only counts as a single entry, unlike online purchases where a subscription or bundle can hand you dozens or hundreds of entries at once.
Omaze has previously landed in hot water over how visible this option is. The Advertising Standards Authority ruled against an earlier Omaze ad because the paid entry route was given more visual prominence, with ticket graphics and a coloured box, than the free postal route, even though both used the same size text. Since then, the free entry link has generally been made more prominent on the entry page, though it’s still easy to miss if you’re not looking for it.
There’s also a longstanding gripe among entrants that each postal entry has to be sent separately in its own envelope, meaning you cannot post multiple entries together in one delivery, which some argue undermines the “free” route by making it more labour intensive than the paid alternative.
The Odds
Omaze does not publish exact odds for its draws, and there’s no legal requirement for it to do so since entries aren’t capped at a fixed number sold in advance. Estimates commonly circulated online put the chance of winning an Omaze house at around one in a million, though the real figure depends entirely on how many people enter a given draw, information Omaze keeps private. Draws with bigger prizes or heavier marketing pushes will naturally attract more entrants and dilute the odds further.
Boosting Entries Without Spending More
Because subscriptions can be cancelled straight after signing up, many entrants use them purely to load up on entries cheaply. A £10 single purchase typically buys around 15 entries, while a £10 monthly subscription can hand you 60 entries for the same initial outlay, since subscribers keep their entries even if they cancel immediately afterwards. Higher subscription tiers bring the price per entry down further, with a £50 monthly plan offering roughly 640 entries, working out to around 8p each.
The Prizes on Offer
Omaze draws typically centre on a headline house, often worth several million pounds, sold mortgage-free with stamp duty and legal fees covered. Recent UK winners have included a £3 million house overlooking Cornwall’s Camel Estuary, which came with an additional £50,000 cash prize, and a £3 million four-storey house in Fulham, London, paired with a £10,000 cash top-up. Another draw saw a £3.25 million countryside property near Bath won by an entrant who had paid just £10 to enter, with the draw raising £3.5 million for the RSPCA. Winners are free to keep, rent out, or sell the property, and cash alternatives are usually offered as well.
Whether the free route or a paid subscription, the underlying odds remain a mystery Omaze keeps to itself, so anyone entering should treat it as a long-shot charitable flutter rather than a financial plan.