50/50 raffles

A 50/50 raffle flips the usual model: instead of sourcing prizes, you award a share of the cash pot itself. Every ticket sold grows the pot, winners take their percentage of it, and your organisation keeps the rest. No prizes to buy, store, or deliver — the more tickets you sell, the bigger both the prizes and your fundraise.

The name comes from the classic split — half to the winner, half to your organisation — but the split is yours to set.

Choosing a 50/50 raffle

When you create a raffle, you'll be asked to Select raffle type:

• Standard Raffle — "Add your own prizes to gift to winners"
• 50/50 Raffle — "Award a percentage of the total cash pot as a prize"

Two things to know before you choose, because the type can't be changed later:

• 50/50 raffles are digital-only: no paper tickets (the pot only counts online and Ticket Booth sales, so untracked paper sales can't be part of it) and no early bird draws. In-person selling through the Ticket Booth — including Tap to Pay — works as normal.
• Prizes on a 50/50 are calculated from your splits, so there's no prize list to build or edit.

A shorter create flow

Because there are no prizes to add, the wizard drops from six steps to four: Raffle Basics, Operating Details, Tickets & Prize Splits, and Optional. The usual Prizes, Tickets, and Compliance steps fold into the combined Tickets & Prize Splits step, which has its own Compliance Checker panel alongside.

Setting your splits

On Tickets & Prize Splits you set your Single Ticket Price and Ticket Capacity (if you're unsure, we recommend starting at $5–10 per ticket), then divide the pot under Cash Pot Prize Splits:

• Your organisation's share (Org Split) plus your prize tiers must total exactly 100% — the step shows a running total and tells you how much to add or remove.
• You can add up to 10 prize tiers (1st Prize, 2nd Prize, and so on), each a smaller share than the one above it.
• Each tier can carry an optional minimum and maximum. Guarantee a minimum to drive early sales — if the pot share comes in under a tier's minimum, your organisation tops up the difference, so treat a minimum as a real commitment. A maximum caps what that tier pays out; anything above it stays with your organisation.

The Compliance Checker

State raffle rules are checked against your raffle's maximum possible earnings — your ticket price × capacity — because that's the biggest the pot could legally get. Each state you've selected shows Pass or Over limit, and an over-limit state offers one-click fixes: reduce the ticket price or capacity, cap or shrink a prize tier, or remove the state.

Two things work differently from a standard raffle:

• Permits can't be added to a 50/50 raffle. If a state's rules would need a permit at your configured size, the fix is to adjust your setup until it passes, or not sell in that state.
• Victoria is off the table. VIC doesn't allow cash prizes, and a 50/50's prizes are always cash — so a 50/50 raffle can't sell in Victoria at any size.

There's also a hard ceiling: no single prize share may be able to reach more than $1,000,000, even if every ticket sells.

What ticket buyers see

Your raffle page shows the Current Prize Pool, growing live as tickets sell, with each tier listed as a share — "1st Prize — 50% of the cash pot" — alongside its Current value and any Guaranteed minimum or Capped at amounts. The purchase confirmation email snapshots the pool at the time of purchase and reminds buyers it keeps growing until sales close.

In the public directory, buyers can filter specifically for 50/50 Raffles.

Once you're live

The advertised terms are what people bought into, so once the raffle is live your prize splits, ticket price, and ticket packs lock. Ticket capacity is the one lever you keep — changing it notifies your ticket buyers, and RaffleLink re-checks every state's rules against the new maximum before the change is accepted.

The close and the draw

When sales close, each tier's final value is calculated from the actual pot and locked in — from that moment the prize amounts are fixed, and the draw itself runs exactly like any other RaffleLink draw. Winners are drawn per tier, notified, and published the same way.