How the £1 Million Prize Works

£1,000,000 is the headline ambition behind The Twenty's weekly reveal.

It's also not something being promised from day one.

A £1 million prize isn't an arbitrary number in the UK — it's a figure people already recognise from other well-established products. Premium Bonds, for example, award a £1 million jackpot twice a month, funded by NS&I's overall prize pool rather than any single bond. The National Lottery and EuroMillions can pay out far larger jackpots, but those are funded by ticket sales across millions of players and can roll over for weeks. The Twenty's £1,000,000 ambition sits in that same general territory, but the mechanic behind it is different again: it's meant to be funded by the collective £5 monthly allocations (each providing one weekly Skill Test opportunity per cycle) of a growing member base, not a single ticket sale or a rolling jackpot.

Under the current model, £5 of each member's £20 minimum monthly contribution unlocks their weekly Skill Tests, helps cover the cost of running their Vault account and supports the weekly prize pool and the wider participation infrastructure that runs it. Many accounts charge members a fee for access to better interest rates, and the £5 plays a similar role. That £5 is only ever taken from your first £20 — voluntary contributions above £20 go entirely into your own Vault, not the prize pool.

As the number of contributing members grows, so does the scale of what the prize pool can eventually support.

A £1,000,000 weekly prize needs real scale behind it.

The Twenty is being built in phases rather than launching that figure on day one:

• Phase 1: Founding Community — smaller prize events while the platform is tested
• Phase 2: Growing Prize Structure — prize values scale with participation
• Phase 3: £1,000,000 Weekly Reveal — the ambition, reached at sufficient scale

The exact participation threshold will depend on the final prize structure, operating costs, participation levels and regulatory requirements.

The £1M weekly reveal won't be activated until the economics and infrastructure can support it sustainably.

Because promising a headline figure before the underlying model can actually support it would be dishonest.

The Twenty would rather grow into the ambition in the open — with smaller, verifiable weekly reveals first — than launch a number it can't yet stand behind.

Growing from Phase 1 towards a £1,000,000 weekly reveal isn't something that happens quietly. Each week's actual reveal — whatever its size at that point — is designed to be independently verifiable rather than simply announced and trusted. As participation and the prize pool grow between phases, that same verification approach carries through, so the path from Phase 1 to Phase 3 is something members can actually watch happen, not just a promise made once at the start.

This is purely illustrative, not a forecast or a promise — but it helps to see the shape of the maths. Each member's £5 monthly allocation provides one Skill Test opportunity in each weekly cycle that month and helps cover the cost of running their Vault account. If a large enough number of members qualify and enter in a given week, those weekly opportunities pool together into that week's prize fund. The more members contributing in a given week, the larger that fund can be. Reaching a £1,000,000 weekly figure sustainably requires a correspondingly large, consistently active member base — which is exactly why it's a Phase 3 ambition rather than a day-one figure.

Regardless of the size of any given week's prize, the underlying mechanics don't change:

Qualification is earned through the Skill Test, not chance.

£15 of your £20 minimum stays in your own Vault, whichever phase The Twenty is in — and anything you add beyond £20 stays in your Vault too.

The weekly prize is the opportunity. The Vault is the foundation.

See how The Twenty works step by step and how Crack the Vault decides each week's winner.

• Is the £1,000,000 figure legally guaranteed? No. It's a Phase 3 ambition, reached only once participation and economics genuinely support it sustainably — not a promised or guaranteed prize amount.
• What happens to the prize pool before Phase 3? Smaller, verifiable weekly reveals run at Phase 1 and Phase 2, scaling up with participation, rather than nothing happening until the full ambition is reached.
• Does contributing extra to my Vault help fund the £1M prize faster? No — only the standard £5 monthly allocation (providing one Skill Test opportunity per weekly cycle) funds the prize pool. Anything you add above your £20 minimum goes entirely into your own Vault, not the prize pool.
• How does this compare to Premium Bonds' £1 million jackpot? NS&I pays out two £1 million Premium Bonds jackpots every month, funded by its overall prize pool and decided entirely at random by ERNIE. The Twenty's £1,000,000 ambition is a longer-term, phased target funded by collective member contributions, with qualification decided by skill rather than a random draw.

Join The Twenty waitlist to follow the phased rollout from the very first reveal.

• NS&I — Premium Bonds (nsandi.com/premium-bonds)