Entry fees and the law
Is it gambling?
Almost always, no. A competition nobody pays to enter is not gambling, whatever the prize is worth, and that is how most competitions on here run.
Charge an entry fee and it becomes a real question — but a narrower one than people expect. It comes down to whether anybody is making money out of it. If every penny goes back out as prizes, or to a cause you have named, nobody is, and that is the strongest position there is.
We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice. This page is written to be useful rather than evasive, so it says plainly where each common setup stands and what the law is actually asking. That is not the same as clearing your particular competition. Every claim links to the official page it came from, and if money is changing hands and anything here does not fit you exactly, put it to your local licensing authority before you run it — they answer this sort of question all the time, and it costs one phone call.
It takes three things
Regulated gambling in Great Britain needs all three of these at once. Remove any one and you are outside it.
A payment to take part
An entry fee, a stake, a buy-in. Not the price of your pint.
A prize
Money, or something worth money.
An outcome you do not control
Whether Arsenal win on Saturday.
A Last Man Standing competition always has the second and the third. Whether it has the first is entirely your choice as the organiser — which means you get to decide whether any of this applies to you at all.
Where the money goes
If you read one section, read this one. Who ends up with the entry money decides this, far more than what the competition is called or where it is played. The first three rows are the ones nearly everybody is in.
- Not gambling at allNo entry fee
- Free to enter, with a prize the venue or a sponsor puts up. No payment means no gambling, whatever the prize is worth. It still fills a room on a quiet night, which is usually the point.
- Clear in practiceEntry fee, all of it back out as prizes
- Players pay in, the winner takes the pot, the organiser keeps nothing. Nobody is trading and nobody is profiting, which is what the betting reliefs are built around.
- Firmest ground of allEntry fee, every penny to a named cause
- The same thing with the destination changed: a charity, a junior team, the club fund. Name the cause before you take a penny, keep it apart from the till, hand over the lot and announce the total - the players are the ones who raised it.
- Get advice firstThe venue or organiser keeps a share
- This is the one that changes the character of the whole thing, because it is the point at which somebody is making money out of other people betting. Get proper advice before running it this way.
The questions people ask
- Is a Last Man Standing competition gambling?
No, unless people pay to enter.
Gambling law in Great Britain turns on three ingredients together: a payment to take part, a prize, and an outcome nobody taking part controls. Take away any one of them and what is left is not regulated gambling.
A competition with no entry fee is missing the first, so it is not gambling however big the prize is. That is how most LMSLocal competitions run, and there is nothing further to think about.
- Can I charge an entry fee?
Yes. Nothing stops you charging one - it is where the money ends up that decides the rest.
People charge entry fees for these competitions all the time, and there are plainly lawful ways to do it. The question is never the fee on its own; it is whether anybody is making money out of other people betting.
If you would rather not have the question at all, put a free entry route alongside the paid one. The Gambling Commission is specific about what that takes: the free route must be no less convenient than the paid one, promoted just as prominently, and the competition must not be able to tell the two apart when it works out who won.
- Is it not just a sweepstake? Those are allowed at work.
No - and this is the misunderstanding that trips most people up.
The office sweepstake exemptions - work lotteries, private society lotteries - are exemptions for lotteries, and a lottery in law is one where the prize is allocated by a process relying wholly on chance. Names drawn out of a hat.
Your players choose their own team every round. That is judgement, not chance, so it is not a lottery and those exemptions are not the ones that apply. Picking a team to win a match is a bet on a future event, and betting sits in different parts of the Act with different reliefs. The useful part: those reliefs fit an ordinary pub or workplace competition better than the lottery ones ever did.
- So what does the law actually ask about a paid competition?
One question above all others: is anybody doing this in the course of a business?
That test is written into the Act. Section 302 makes betting non-commercial where no party enters into it in the course of a business or holds themselves out as being in the business of accepting bets, and section 296 puts private betting - between people living at the same premises, or employed by the same employer - outside the offence.
So the facts that decide it are who is running it and who keeps the money, not what the competition is called or whether the venue happens to be a club. A competition among colleagues where every penny goes back out and nobody takes a cut is the clearest case there is.
- What about a few mates, or everyone in the same house?
Two of these have a relief written into the Act by name. "Mates" on its own is not one of them.
Schedule 15 defines private betting as either domestic betting - "made on premises in which each party to the transaction lives" - or workers’ betting, "between persons each of whom is employed under a contract of employment with the same employer". Section 296 then puts private betting outside the offence altogether. A houseshare running one between themselves, or colleagues at one employer, are the two cases the Act names.
Friends scattered across a town do not fit either description, however small and friendly the group is, and neither does a club just by being a club - the relief there is the different one above: nobody acting in the course of a business. In practice a competition among friends where nobody takes a cut is exactly what that describes. But it is a judgement about the facts rather than a category you fall into automatically, so if yours is large, public, or run by somebody who stands to gain, read Schedule 15 and section 296 below and put it to your licensing authority.
- What if every penny goes to charity or a good cause?
Then you are on the firmest ground a paid competition can be on.
An organiser who takes nothing, holds the money for a cause named in advance and hands over the lot is not accepting bets in the course of a business on any reading. That is the question the Act asks about betting, and a named cause answers it about as plainly as it can be answered. It is also how the competitions we see raising money are run - an under-12s football team, a local foodbank.
Be clear about what is doing the work, though: it is the absence of profit, not the word "charity". There is no charity exemption in the betting sections - the tidy charity and society exemptions belong to lotteries, and this is not a lottery. So do the things that make the absence of profit obvious. Name the cause before you take a penny, keep the money apart from the till, hand over all of it, and publish the total. If the pot is unusually large, or the "cause" is really your own running costs, put it to your licensing authority first - it is one phone call.
- Can a members club run one for its members?
Yes, in the ordinary case - members only, no profit, money accounted for.
A club running a competition for its own members, not for profit, with the money going back to the players or into club funds, sits comfortably inside the non-commercial betting relief - the "nobody is in the course of a business" one. Note that it is that relief and not the private betting one: a club is not a household and not an employer, so Schedule 15 does not cover it.
Just do not lean on the reason people usually give for it. The tidy "members of a society" exemption is a lottery exemption and needs a result decided by chance, which this is not. What carries the weight is that nobody is trading and nobody is profiting - so keep it that way, write down where the money went, and if your club is large or the pot is significant, put it to your local licensing authority rather than to this page.
- Can a pub run one?
Yes - provided none of the entry money stays in the till.
A pub takes more care than a club for one reason: a landlord is running a business on business premises, and "in the course of a business" is the exact phrase the law turns on. That does not put it out of reach, and pubs run these lawfully week in, week out.
The one fact most likely to put a competition on the wrong side of the line is the venue keeping a slice. Money that goes straight back out as prizes, or to a named cause, is a different picture entirely from money that ends up behind the bar. And if the real aim is a busy Tuesday - it usually is - a free-to-enter competition with a prize the pub puts up gets there without raising the question at all.
- Does LMSLocal handle the entry money?
No. We never touch it, by design.
We never take entry fees, never hold stakes and never pay prizes. We sell you the tool that runs the competition - fixtures, picks, eliminations - and whatever your players pay, if anything, is collected and paid out by you, in whatever way you choose.
That keeps us out of anybody else’s gambling arrangements. It also means how your competition is funded is yours to get right rather than ours, and we cannot be your route to being compliant.
Check it yourself
The actual sources, not summaries of summaries. They are short, and they are written for the public rather than for lawyers.
- Free draws and prize competitions
Gambling Commission
What keeps a prize competition outside gambling regulation, and exactly what a free entry route has to look like.
- Types of lottery you can run without a licence
Gambling Commission
The exempt lotteries - work, private society, residents, customer - with their limits. Worth reading to see why they do not fit a competition where the players choose.
- The status of lotteries under the Act
Gambling Commission
The formal definition, including the "wholly on chance" test that decides whether you are looking at a lottery at all.
- Gambling Act 2005, section 296
legislation.gov.uk
Private betting, and the line about acting otherwise than in the course of a business.
- Gambling Act 2005, section 302
legislation.gov.uk
Two lines, and the most useful two on this page: betting is non-commercial where no party is acting in the course of a business or holding themselves out as accepting bets.
- Gambling Act 2005, Schedule 15
legislation.gov.uk
What counts as private betting: domestic betting and workers betting, defined.
All of the above is the law in England, Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland has its own gambling legislation and none of this transfers to it.
Next
Raising money with one
How clubs and pubs actually structure a competition that raises something — what a typical one brings in, and the three ways of setting it up.