Prize-Linked Savings Around the World: A Sourced Country List

Prize-linked savings — pool the interest, raffle it, return the capital — is not a British eccentricity. The structure has been sold in dozens of countries for centuries. It is also unusually badly documented online, because schemes close quietly and the lists nobody updates keep listing them.

So this page is organised by evidence quality, not by geography. The first table is schemes we checked on the operator's own site. The second is documented in the research literature but not verified live by us. The third is what we deliberately left out.

Verified live, checked 29 August 2026

The UK figures are worked through in detail — including why the median holder earns well below the headline rate — in UK Premium Bonds.

The US case is legally distinctive. Prize-linked savings was effectively illegal at federal level until the American Savings Promotion Act of 2014 carved "savings promotion raffles" out of the National Bank Act's lottery prohibition. Commonwealth reports that 34 states have since enabled state-chartered institutions to offer them.

Documented in the research, status not verified by us

The standard survey is Kearney, Tufano, Guryan and Hurst's Making Savers Winners (NBER Working Paper 16433, October 2010), whose Table 1 catalogues PLS products worldwide. We reproduce the country and institution pairs, not the balances or prize sizes, because those are 2010 figures and we have not re-checked them:

The paper's broader point is worth quoting because it is the reason this list is long: reviewing an 1896 survey of lottery bonds, it records that they "may be found in most of the financial markets of Europe." This is a very old product category.

Closed schemes, verified

Two closures matter because they explain the shape of the map.

New Zealand — Bonus Bonds (1970 to 2020). Established by the Post Office Savings Bank, later run by ANZ with Trustees Executors as trustee. At its peak roughly a third of New Zealanders held bonds, making it the country's largest retail unit trust with about NZ$3 billion under management, distributing around NZ$7.9 million a month in some 248,000 tax-paid prizes with a NZ$1,000,000 top prize. ANZ announced the wind-up in August 2020, stating that low interest rates had reduced the scheme's investment returns and therefore its prize pool.

That is the structural vulnerability of every PLS scheme in one sentence: the prize pool is the interest, so when rates fall the prizes fall. A scheme whose appeal is its top prize cannot maintain that appeal through a low-rate decade.

South Africa — First National Bank's Million-a-Month Account (2005 to 2008). A no-fee 32-day notice account paying 0.25% nominal interest, with one entry per 100 rand and 114 monthly prizes from 1,000 rand to 1 million rand. It reached over 1.1 million accounts and 1.4 billion rand of deposits before the South African Lottery Board sued to have it declared an illegal lottery and the Supreme Court found for the Board.

The closure is the more interesting half. FNB offered savers their money back or a roll into a conventional notice account, and fourteen months later still held "53 percent of the accounts and 83 percent of the balances" — a suggestion, though not proof, that a lottery hook can recruit savers who then stay.

What we left out, and why

The rule on this site is that unsourceable claims are omitted rather than hedged. These are the ones that did not make it:

• Current prize fund rates for Ireland, Sweden, Pakistan, Kenya and Indonesia. NS&I and State Savings publish terms clearly; the others either did not resolve or did not state a current rate on a page we could verify. Ireland's site confirms a revised prize fund rate effective 1 September 2026 but does not state the figure on the product page, so we have not quoted one.
• Live status for every scheme in the second table. A 2010 academic table is evidence a scheme existed; it is not evidence it exists now. Several almost certainly do; we have not checked and will not assert.
• Balances and prize sizes from the 2010 table. Sixteen-year-old currency figures presented as current would be worse than useless.
• India, China, Nigeria, the Gulf beyond the UAE. Widely claimed in listicles, not sourced to an operator or a paper we could read.
• Yotta-style fintech "prize savings" apps. Several launched, several changed structure or failed, and the deposit-protection position was not always what customers believed. We will cover them only with primary documentation.

If you know of a live scheme with a published prize fund rate that is not here, it belongs here. Meanwhile the PLS comparator holds the verified terms above, prize-linked savings explains the mechanism and the evidence on take-up, and UK Premium Bonds shows how to read a prize table properly.