Can You Raffle Your Own House in the UK?

Is it legal to raffle your own house?

Yes — provided you structure it as a prize competition rather than an unlicensed lottery. The legal test under the Gambling Act 2005 is whether a genuine free-entry route exists:

• With a free-entry route: Your draw is a prize competition. No Gambling Commission licence is required. Legal.
• Without a free-entry route: Your draw is an unlicensed lottery. Criminal offence under section 258 of the Gambling Act 2005.

Every paid-for entry draw for a house must therefore have a genuine postal or online free-entry route open to all potential entrants. This is not optional — it is the legal foundation of the entire model.

Why would someone raffle their house?

The typical reasons:

• The property is hard to sell at its market value. A raffle can attract interest from a much wider pool than the traditional buyer market.
• A quick exit is needed. If time pressure (divorce, financial difficulty, relocation) makes a conventional sale difficult, a draw can close within weeks.
• To benefit a charity. Some homeowners run draws where the proceeds (or a share) go to a named charity. This adds a “giving” element and marketing appeal.
• To achieve above-market value total returns. If 100,000 entries sell at £10 each, total gross proceeds are £1 million — which for a £800,000 property exceeds market value.

The last point requires careful reality-checking. Achieving the volume of ticket sales to cover property value plus costs is not guaranteed and is genuinely difficult without significant marketing investment.

How do you run one in practice?

Using Raffall:
Raffall (raffall.com) is the best-known UK platform for self-organised prize competitions, including house draws. You list the property, set the ticket price and maximum entry count, and Raffall handles online ticket sales and the draw mechanism. The free-entry requirement is implemented as a postal route: entrants write their user ID, Raffall ID and the answer to a skill question on a postcard and post it to Raffall’s registered office, with postal entries carrying the same odds as paid entries (help.raffall.com, July 2026). As the host, you are responsible for making sure this route is genuinely available and clearly signposted on your listing — this is the critical legal requirement, not an optional extra.

Running it directly:
You could in theory run a draw independently — setting up your own website, payment processing and draw mechanism — but this requires significantly more compliance work and leaves more legal risk for the organiser. Most self-organisers use a platform.

Steps regardless of route:

1. Confirm the property is unencumbered, or get your mortgage lender’s written consent first. Giving a property away through a draw is a disposal outside a conventional sale, and most mortgage terms restrict disposing of a charged property without the lender’s agreement — proceeding without it risks breaching your mortgage contract.
2. Set a realistic ticket price and maximum entry count to cover: property value + platform fees + taxes + marketing costs + your desired return.
3. Publish clear T&Cs covering the draw mechanism, the free-entry route, what happens if maximum entries are not reached, and how the transfer will proceed.
4. Ensure the free-entry route is genuinely accessible.
5. Instruct solicitors in advance for the conveyancing transfer on completion.

What are the tax implications?

For the organiser (you):

The proceeds from selling competition entries are likely to be taxable. HMRC decides whether receipts count as trading income, miscellaneous income or a capital gain by looking at the facts of the transaction — including how organised and repeated the activity is (the “badges of trade” test). A one-off draw to dispose of your own home sits in genuinely uncertain territory between these categories, and there is no published HMRC guidance written specifically for prize-draw disposals of a private house. Professional tax advice before you commit to a draw is essential, not optional.

If the property has been your main residence, Principal Private Residence (PPR) relief is designed to reduce or eliminate Capital Gains Tax on a conventional sale — but PPR relief is written around a sale, and HMRC has not published specific guidance on whether or how it applies to a disposal by prize draw. Do not assume PPR relief applies without checking with an accountant or tax adviser first.

For the winner:
As described in our guide to winning a house and what happens next, the winner pays SDLT on market value and may face CGT on future sale. No income tax on the prize itself.

What if you don’t sell enough tickets?

This is the central commercial risk of self-organised house draws. If you set a maximum of 100,000 tickets at £10 each (£1 million gross) to fund a £800,000 property draw, but only 30,000 tickets sell (£300,000 gross), you have a problem: you cannot deliver the prize without losing money.

Your T&Cs must address this scenario. Options:

• Cancel and refund: If entries fall short of a stated minimum, cancel the draw and refund all paid entrants.
• Proceed anyway: Honour the draw regardless of entries, covering the shortfall yourself.
• Set a maximum entry count: Some self-organised draws set a low enough maximum entry count (say, 5,000 at £200 each) that the maths work even without selling out — though higher ticket prices reduce the pool of potential entrants.

Raffall’s host terms make the minimum-entries threshold and cancellation policy a matter for each individual host to set and disclose on their own listing, rather than a single platform-wide guarantee. Read the current host terms at raffall.com/en/terms before listing, and set out your own cancellation and refund policy clearly for entrants.

Should you raffle your house or sell it conventionally?

For most homeowners, a conventional sale is simpler, faster (once a buyer is found), and less risky. Raffling your house introduces: execution risk (ticket sales may fall short), legal complexity, significant tax uncertainty, marketing costs, and reputational exposure if the draw does not go as planned.

The case for a raffle improves if: the property has been genuinely unsellable, you have a large existing audience to sell entries to, or you have a specific charitable purpose driving the decision.

For an overview of established house draw operators who have already solved these problems at scale, see the win-a-house page and our guide to how house competitions work.