The Free Entry Route (UK Compliance)

Most UK raffle sites operate under the free entry route: an exemption from the Gambling Act 2005 that lets you run paid prize draws as long as you also offer a meaningful free way to enter. Get this wrong and the competition becomes an illegal lottery. Get it right and you don’t need a UKGC licence.

Turbo IT ships with a working free-entry route on day one, but you need to fill in your postal address and confirm a few operational details. This doc walks the lot.

The legal test

Under the Gambling Act 2005, a prize draw is exempt from licensing if entrants can enter via a route that is:

• Free. No payment required. (A second-class stamp counts as the cost of communication, not payment.)
• Equal. Free entrants have the same chance of winning as paid entrants.
• Reasonably available. Customers can find and use the route without unreasonable obstacles.
• Clearly advertised. The free route is visible on the website and any advertising material.

The most common implementation is “send a postcard to this address with your name, email, and the competition title”. That’s what Turbo IT ships with.

What Turbo IT does out of the box

• A dedicated /free-entry page on your site explaining the postal route. The page renders your postal address from tenant_config.postal_address (empty by default).
• Footer link to /free-entry on every page.
• The same draw pool for free and paid entries: once you receive a postcard, you create a free entry in the admin and it’s assigned a ticket number from the same pool as paid tickets. Equal chance.
• T&Cs template (your /terms-and-conditions page) includes the relevant disclosures.

What you need to do

1. Set tenant_config.postal_address in admin Settings. Use a real postal address you actually receive mail at. A Royal Mail PO Box works (~£305/yr), and most operators use one rather than their home address.
2. When postcards arrive, log into the admin, open the relevant competition, and add free entries via the Free entries panel. Each free entry creates a real ticket in the ticketstable; the cron and draw don’t distinguish paid vs free.
3. Keep the postcards. The Advertising Standards Authority can ask to see them as proof that entries were received.

Ad copy implications

Because you offer a free entry route, you can call your competitions prize draws or competitions in your ads. You cannot call them lotteries, though: that word is UKGC-reserved.

For Meta and TikTok ads, you must include a line in creative or landing-page copy that mentions the free entry route. Boilerplate:“No purchase necessary. Free postal entry available.” We have it pre-baked into the ad-friendly variant of your hero copy.

What you should NOT do

• Don’t make the free route hard.Hiding it in the T&Cs only, charging postage to a premium-rate number, or requiring social-media follows fails the “reasonably available” test.
• Don’t give paid entries better odds. Anything that creates non-equal probability (e.g. paid tickets get extra prize tiers free entries don’t) breaks the exemption.
• Don’t cap free entries per person below paid entries. One free entry per competition per person is standard and defensible; restricting them more aggressively is a flag.
• Don’t skip the audit trail. Keep postcards filed by competition until 6 months after the draw closes.

When you actually need a UKGC licence instead

If you can’t (or won’t) run a real free entry route (for example, if you want to sell instant-win tickets where the free-entry equivalence is unclear), you need a UKGC remote operating licence. That’s a much bigger undertaking (£3k+ application fee, ~6 months processing, ongoing compliance).

Most Turbo IT tenants choose the free entry route. We can talk you through both: email info@turboit.uk.

Background reading: The UK Free-Entry Route Explained and UKGC Licence vs Free-Entry Route, both long-form guides with the legal background.