How the draw works

This page explains exactly how slots are allocated, in enough detail that anyone can check the result for themselves. Nobody, including the council and the people who built this system, can influence the outcome once the numbers are published.

The short version

1. Every approved organisation gets a reference: ORG-001, ORG-002, and so on, in the order registrations were approved. This list is published before the draw.
2. After the preference window closes, we take the six main balls from the National Lottery Lotto draw of Saturday, 22 August 2026.
3. Those numbers are combined with each organisation's reference and run through a standard one-way calculation called SHA-256. This produces a long string of letters and numbers for each organisation.
4. Sorting those strings from smallest to largest gives the draw order.
5. Going down that order, each organisation receives its highest ranked slot that nobody ahead of it has already taken.

Why this is fair

Preferences were locked before the numbers existed. The window for submitting preferences closed at Saturday, 22 August 2026 at 19:00, and the draw took place afterwards. Preferences closed at 7pm, before the draw took place and before ticket sales for that draw had even closed at 7.30pm. Nobody submitting a preference could have known the numbers, because the numbers did not yet exist.

The lottery numbers are not known to anyone until they are drawn in public, on television. SHA-256 is a one-way calculation: there is no way to work backwards from a desired draw order to the numbers that would produce it, and no way to nudge the result.

The organisation list and their references are published before the draw takes place, so nobody can claim a reference was picked afterwards to suit a particular outcome. The numbers come from outside this system entirely.

Because the calculation is fixed, anyone running it on the same inputs gets the same answer. There is no randomness in the software, no seed, and no hidden setting.

The detail, for anyone who wants to check

For each organisation we calculate:

SHA-256( "<the six numbers>:<the organisation reference>" )

The numbers are written smallest first, each as two digits, joined by hyphens. So if the draw were 4, 11, 23, 29, 41 and 48, then for ORG-001 the exact text fed into the calculation is:

04-11-23-29-41-48:ORG-001

You can paste that into any online SHA-256 tool and compare the answer with the hash published on the results page. They will match.

Ties within the draw

Two organisations producing the same hash is not something that happens. There are more possible SHA-256 results than there are atoms in the observable universe, so the system has no tie-breaking rule, because it would never be used.

If all your choices are gone

If every slot you ranked has been taken by the time your turn comes, then what happens depends on the box you ticked:

• If you said you would accept any remaining slot, you go into a second round. Once everyone's ranked choices are settled, those organisations are given the remaining slots, again in draw order, each taking the earliest remaining slot in the week.
• If you did not, you are not allocated a slot, and that is recorded in the results.

"Earliest remaining slot" means the week read in order: Monday first, then Tuesday and so on, and within a day the earliest hour first.

The reserved slot

Monday 5pm is held for the disability football session. It is not part of the draw, it cannot be ranked, and it is never allocated.

Check it yourself

Start with the numbers. Everything else follows from them, so the first thing worth checking is that the numbers we published are genuinely the ones drawn. Check these numbers on the National Lottery website and compare them with the six shown on the results page.

Then you can download two files from the results page:

• draw.json, containing the numbers, every organisation, every ranked preference, every hash, the draw order and the outcome.
• verify.js, a short script that recalculates the whole thing from that file and reports any discrepancy.

With Node.js installed, put both in the same folder and run:

node verify.js draw.json

It recalculates every hash, redoes the draw order, and reruns the allocation. It is written separately from the software that produced the result, so that it can catch a mistake rather than repeat one.