Lottery Advertising Rules Around the World

Lottery advertising is regulated everywhere and regulated differently from other gambling almost everywhere. The carve-outs are consistent enough to be a pattern, and they are written down, so you can read them.

The United Kingdom: two codes, one product

The age rule, and the gap underneath it

National Lottery tickets could be sold to 16-year-olds until October 2021. The National Lottery (Revocation and Amendment) Regulations 2021 provide that "No National Lottery ticket shall be sold to a person who has not attained the age of 18 years", in force from 1 October 2021.

That change applied to the National Lottery only. For every other lawful lottery in Great Britain — society lotteries, charity lotteries — the minimum age is still 16. The mechanism is in the Gambling Act 2005: section 45 defines a "child" as under 16 and a "young person" as 16 or 17; section 56 makes it an offence to invite a child to participate in a lottery, and expressly provides that references to a child or young person are to be "treated as references only to a child". Section 46(2)(c) exempts lottery participation from the general prohibition on inviting under-18s to gamble.

So a 16-year-old cannot lawfully buy a UK Lotto ticket but can buy a charity lottery ticket. Whether that is defensible is a policy question; that it is the law is not in doubt.

The CAP Code puts lotteries in their own section

This is the detail almost nobody knows. The UK's non-broadcast advertising code deals with gambling in Section 16 — and Section 16 states explicitly that rules for lotteries "are set out separately in Section 17."

Compare the two on the same point:

Two differences worth naming. Section 17.14 says "should" where 16.3.13 says "must not" — in code drafting that is the difference between a requirement and a good-practice expectation. And the age floor in 17.14 is 16, not 18, except for National Lottery products.

The broadcast code repeats the split: gambling in BCAP Section 17, lotteries in BCAP Section 18, with 18.5 carrying the strong-appeal rule and 18.6 the under-25 rule.

The "strong appeal" test

CAP and BCAP announced tightened rules on 5 April 2022, in force 1 October 2022, replacing a "particular appeal" test with a stricter "strong appeal" test that applies to "gambling and lottery ads" (ASA). It captures top-tier footballers with large under-18 followings, reality-television personalities and video-game references.

An earlier step, effective 1 April 2019, prohibited targeting online gambling ads at groups likely to be under 18 on the basis of interest or browsing data.

The guidance was updated again on 14 October 2025, adding a working threshold: at least 100,000 social-media follower accounts registered to under-18s indicates strong appeal, though not conclusively (CAP/BCAP).

The licence conditions repeat the carve-out

The Gambling Commission's Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice contain two nearly identical provisions:

• SR code 5.1.6 — "All licences, except lottery licences"
• SR code 5.1.7 — "All lottery licences"

Both require compliance with the CAP and BCAP codes. The only textual difference is that 5.1.6 carries a carve-out allowing under-25s in non-remote point-of-sale material depicting the sporting activity being bet on, which is irrelevant to lotteries. The structural point stands: the regulator maintains a separate advertising condition for lotteries, and the advertising codes maintain a separate section for them.

What the rules actually catch

The most instructive UK ruling is against a charity lottery. In September 2023 the ASA upheld a complaint about a People's Postcode Lottery press advertisement featuring a couple who had resumed a postponed wedding after a £62,500 win. It breached CAP rule 17.3, which requires that ads must not suggest a lottery is "a solution to financial concerns, an alternative to employment or a way to achieve financial security" (ASA ruling).

That rule is doing real work. It is why lottery advertising in Britain talks about dreams and good causes rather than debt.

Italy: the ad ban that exempts lotteries

Italy's Decreto Dignità (Decree-Law 87/2018, Article 9) imposed one of Europe's broadest bans: "è vietata qualsiasi forma di pubblicità, anche indiretta, relativa a giochi o scommesse con vincite di denaro" — any form of advertising, even indirect, of games or bets with cash prizes.

The advertising ban took effect 14 July 2018; the sponsorship ban from 1 January 2019; pre-existing contracts became unenforceable after 14 July 2019. As converted by Law 96/2018 the penalty is 20% of the value of the sponsorship or advertising, with a minimum of €50,000 per violation, enforced by AGCOM (Osborne Clarke; AGCOM implementing guidelines resolution 132/19/CONS, 18 April 2019, Portolano).

And then the carve-out: the ban expressly excludes "le lotterie nazionali a estrazione differita" — national deferred-draw lotteries. Italy banned gambling advertising and exempted the state lottery. SuperEnalotto sits inside a country where sports-betting sponsorship is illegal.

Spain: lotteries are not exempt

Spain went the other way. Real Decreto 958/2020 on commercial communications for gambling was published in the BOE on 4 November 2020 and came into force the following day (BOE).

It restricts television and radio gambling advertising to a window of 01:00 to 05:00, bans celebrity and public-figure endorsement, and requires responsible-gambling and age messaging. Lotteries are within scope. Article 20 deals specifically with loterías instantáneas — instant lotteries — barring broadcast in reinforced child-protection slots and adjacent to children's programming.

There is one narrow carve-out, in the second and third additional provisions: communications by ONCE and SELAE that are about their public-interest, social, disability, cultural or sporting work are outside Title I provided they contain no reference to gambling products. That is an exemption for institutional messaging, not for La Primitiva advertising.

Two neighbouring EU states, two opposite answers on the same question. There is no European consensus here.

The United States: a federal exemption written into the criminal code

American federal law prohibits mailing and broadcasting lottery material under 18 U.S.C. §§ 1301–1304. Section 1307 then exempts "an advertisement, list of prizes, or other information concerning a lottery conducted by a State acting under the authority of State law", when published in that State or broadcast by a station licensed to a location in it.

That is the clean, citable version of "state lotteries are treated differently". A private lottery advertisement is a federal crime; the identical advertisement for a state lottery is expressly lawful.

On the frequently repeated claim that state lotteries are exempt from Federal Trade Commission truth-in-advertising oversight, the honest position is narrower: the FTC Act empowers the Commission to act against "persons, partnerships, or corporations" (15 U.S.C. § 45(a)(2)), and the definition of "corporation" in 15 U.S.C. § 44 covers entities "organized to carry on business for its own profit or that of its members". State agencies are not named in either. That is a limit on jurisdictional scope rather than a stated exemption, and we have not found a source that puts it more strongly than that.

The strictest lottery advertising rule we found

It is not in Europe. New York's courier regulations require that every advertisement be filed with the Gaming Commission in draft at least 15 days before publication, with the Commission able to block it within 10 days; prizewinner announcements need prior written approval (9 NYCRR § 5014.17). Prior notification beats post-hoc complaint adjudication for stringency, and it applies to the courier sector specifically — see lottery couriers explained.

The pattern

In three of the four, the lottery is more lightly regulated than the gambling around it. The consistent justification is that lotteries fund good causes and are lower-harm than continuous-play products — a claim examined in the good causes claim and, on the participation evidence, in who plays the lottery.

Rules change. Every citation above carries its instrument and date; check the current version before relying on any of it.