Is your office sweepstake actually legal?

What the law actually says

A sweepstake where people pay in and teams come out of a hat is a lottery. Section 14 of the Gambling Act 2005 says an arrangement is a simple lottery where three things are true at once: "persons are required to pay in order to participate", one or more prizes are allocated to members of a class, and "the prizes are allocated by a process which relies wholly on chance". Names in a hat, a fiver each, teams drawn at random: all three elements are present, and promoting a lottery in Great Britain normally needs an operating licence or a registration.

A prediction game does not match that description. If people are calling scores or picking winners, the prizes are not allocated by a process relying wholly on chance, so section 14 does not describe it. That does not put it outside the Act altogether: section 9 defines betting as making or accepting a bet on "the outcome of a race, competition or other event or process", which is a separate regime with separate rules. The point worth holding onto is that the work-lottery exemption everybody quotes was written for the hat, not for the predictor.

The exemption itself lives in Schedule 11, the list of exempt lotteries that need neither a licence nor a registration. The one offices rely on is the work lottery.

The four conditions

Schedule 11 spreads the requirements over several paragraphs, and the Gambling Commission's guide How to run a lottery with people you work with restates them in about two hundred words. Grouped, they come to four.

1. One set of work premises

Paragraph 11 is the definition itself: a lottery is a work lottery if "the promoters work on a single set of premises" and "each person to whom a ticket is sold or supplied also works on the work premises". The Commission puts it more bluntly: everyone taking part "must all work at the same physical location, such as an office, factory or other place of work", and "you cannot run a work lottery across multiple sites".

2. Tickets sold in person, and on paper

Paragraph 15 requires that each ticket "must be a document". Paragraph 16 adds that a ticket "may be sold or supplied only by or on behalf of the promoters" and that the rights it confers are not transferable. The Commission translates that into the sentence that catches most modern offices out: "You can't sell tickets online, via email or over the telephone. You must provide physical tickets to the people playing." The law firm Pinsent Masons reaches the same reading in its guide Running a sweepstake at work: the law, noting that "selling entries via email, messaging platforms or other remote channels will not satisfy the requirement".

3. Nobody makes a profit

Paragraph 13(2) requires a work lottery to be either "organised in such a way as to ensure that no profits are made" or "promoted wholly for a purpose other than that of private gain". In practice the money either comes back out as prizes, less reasonable expenses, or goes to charity. Two smaller rules sit alongside it: every ticket has to cost the same and be paid for before it is supplied, and the arrangements must not include a rollover, so an unclaimed prize cannot be carried into the next sweepstake.

4. The draw happens on the premises

This one is Commission guidance rather than a line of the schedule, and the difference is worth knowing. The guide states: "You can only do the draw on your businesses' physical premises. It can't be done online." The advertising restriction in the schedule points the same way, since an advertisement for a work lottery may not be displayed or distributed anywhere except on the work premises.

Why remote and hybrid teams fail them

The exemption was drafted for a workplace where everybody is in the same building on the same day, and where the organiser walks round with an envelope. A distributed team breaks it in four places at once, and not by being careless.

• Two offices is two sets of premises. A company with a London site and a Manchester site is not running one work lottery.
• The group chat is the ticket desk. Almost every office sweepstake now collects entries through Slack, Teams or email and settles up by bank transfer. That is precisely the remote channel the Commission and Pinsent Masons both rule out.
• Nobody prints tickets. A row in a spreadsheet is not a document supplied to a player.
• The draw is an online wheel.Randomiser sites are the standard way to allocate teams now, and the Commission's guide says the draw cannot be done online.

What HR usually asks

Office World Cup ran in more than 250 companies over the summer of 2026, and the question that came back from HR and finance teams more than any other was not about Schedule 11. It was whether money was involved. Our answer was that none is, and that turned out to settle most of the conversation on its own.

The rest follows from the pot. Somebody becomes the custodian of other people's cash, in a personal bank account, for several weeks. A five pound entry fee is nothing to some people on the team and not nothing to others. Employers running responsible-gambling policies are wary of normalising a stake at work, however small. And a disputed result or a leaver who is owed a share turns a bit of fun into a grievance. Take the money out and all of it goes away together.

The free-to-play alternative

A prediction pool with no stake is a different animal. Nobody pays to participate, so the section 14 definition of a lottery has nothing to attach to, and there is no pot, no custodian and nothing to distribute at the end. The competitive part, which is the part people actually came for, survives intact.

That is the whole design of Office Rivals. It runs a season-long prediction pool inside your Slack or Google Chat channel: the bot sends each person a private card before kick-off, scores every match automatically, and posts the recap and the table back into the channel on the next working morning. It takes no stakes, holds no money between players and pays out no prizes. If your office wants a prize, someone buys it, the way they would for a quiz.

It also answers the thing the sweepstake was never good at. A random draw is over in one afternoon and half the office is out by the second round. A season-long pool keeps everybody playing to the last weekend, which is why the arguing lasts until May. It is free for your first 5 players, and a one-time season pass from $129£99€109 lifts the cap to 100 for the whole season. The pricing page has the full ladder.

Where to read more

If your company also has US colleagues, that question is settled state by state rather than nationally, and we wrote it up in Are office pools legal at work? For the football draw itself, the flaw in it and what to run instead, there is the Premier League office sweepstake guide.

Both primary sources are short enough to read in full: Schedule 11 of the Gambling Act 2005 on legislation.gov.uk, and the Gambling Commission's guide to running a lottery with people you work with.