Premium bond winners April 2020: where's the luckiest place in the UK?

Two lucky premium bond winners proved they're no April fools, after winning the April 2020 £1m jackpot in NS&I's latest prize draw.

The two top £1m prizes went to savers in Essex and Hertfordshire, while six other winners bagged £100,000 each.

Here, Which? reveals the winning bond numbers for the April draw and look at where in the UK seems to be the luckiest for jackpot winners.

April 2020 premium bond winners

This month, the two £1m jackpot prizes were won by premium bond holders in Essex and Hertfordshire.

The Essex winner is a woman who currently has the maximum holding of £50,000 saved. Her winning bond number (293GZ540034) was purchased in January 2017, and this win makes her the 17th jackpot winner in Essex.

A man in Hertfordshire held the second winning bond (239CV516628). His total holding was worth £40,000, and he bought the lucky bond back in January 2015. He's the 13th premium bonds millionaire to come from Hertfordshire.

How many winners were drawn in April?

There were 3,527,794 prizes given out in the March draw, worth £100,836,075. However, 3,519,499 of these prizes were worth £100 or less.

This is the final prize draw before the NS&I is due to cut the number of prizes up for grabs, reducing the odds of winning from 24,500 to 1, to 26,000 to 1.

The table below shows the full breakdown of prizes:

Which areas win the premium bonds jackpot most often?

Looking at where winners have lived over the past five years, it does seem as though some areas are luckier than others.

Including April's results, there have been nine jackpot winners in Kent and nine in Essex, making these the 'luckiest' places in the country for winning £1m. Surrey and Dorset have both had six winners each.

However, little can really be gleaned from looking at where past winners live. To protect winners' identities, NS&I will only reveal specific locations if at least 100,000 other premium bond holders also live there.

So, while winners in the south east - where lots of premium bond holders live - might be described by their town, any welsh winners may only be described as being in Wales.

Which regions are luckiest?

Over the past five years or so, one in five jackpot winners have either lived in the south east or the south west of England - by far the UK's luckiest regions.

By contrast, less than 3% of winners have been from Yorkshire and the Humber, and Scotland - in fact, both of these regions have only been home to four winners since mid 2014.

There haven't been any jackpot winners in Northern Ireland during the time we've been recording results.

You can see the percentage of winners in each UK region since June 2014 in the map below.

What are premium bonds?

Premium bonds are provided by National Savings & Investments (NS&I).

You can invest anything from £25 to £50,000, and each £1 bond is given its own unique number.

All of these numbers are then put into a draw each month and drawn at random to win cash prizes.

While prizes range from £25 to £1m, you're not guaranteed to win - and, if you don't, your money will lose interest in real terms as it won't be earning any interest to keep up with inflation.

Money saved with NS&I is backed by the Treasury, so 100% of your cash is safe - even if your collective NS&I savings exceed the £85,000 maximum covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS).

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The Which? Money podcast: are premium bonds worth it?

Last July, the Which? Money podcast debated whether premium bonds were really worth investing in.

You can listen below, or check out the episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.