Last updated Written by Lottery reporter
El Gordo de Navidad is the Christmas draw of the Spanish national lottery, held every year on 22 December. It works unlike almost any other lottery: the same number is sold many times over, so a single winning number makes hundreds of people rich at once — usually the whole of one street, one office or one village.
How El Gordo works
Every ticket carries a pre-printed five-digit number, somewhere between 00000 and 99999. You do not pick it — you buy the number that the seller happens to have. Each number is then printed in a large run of identical series: 198 of them in the 2025 draw, which put 19.8 million tickets on sale.
That is the whole difference. In an ordinary lottery one winning combination means one winner. Here it means 198 winning tickets for the same number, each worth the full first prize. It is why a bar in a small town can end up handing out several hundred million euros in one morning.
The draw itself is a piece of national theatre. Pupils of the San Ildefonso school in Madrid pull the numbers and the prizes from two revolving drums and sing them out, one by one, live on television. It runs for hours, and it has been done this way since the nineteenth century. If you want to know what actually guarantees that a draw is honest, we go into that in how a lottery draw is checked for reliability.
What a ticket costs, and what it pays
A full ticket, a billete, costs €200. Almost nobody buys one. What people buy is a décimo — literally a tenth — for €20, and that is what the prize tables below are usually quoted in. Buy a décimo and you win a tenth of everything.
| Prize | How many | Per décimo | Per full ticket |
|---|---|---|---|
| First prize, El Gordo | 1 number | €400,000 | €4,000,000 |
| Second prize | 1 number | €125,000 | €1,250,000 |
| Third prize | 1 number | €50,000 | €500,000 |
| Fourth prize | 2 numbers | €20,000 | €200,000 |
| Fifth prize | 8 numbers | €6,000 | €60,000 |
| La pedrea | Around 1,800 numbers | €100 | €1,000 |
Amounts from the 2025 draw. Roughly 70% of everything spent on tickets goes back out as prizes, and about one ticket in six and a half wins something — usually the €20 you paid for it, or the €100 pedrea. Those are far better odds than any jackpot game, for the obvious reason that most of the prizes are small.
If the appeal is a steady payout rather than one enormous cheque, EuroDreams works on the opposite principle: €20,000 a month for thirty years instead of a lump sum.
Buying a ticket from outside Spain
Inside Spain you buy at a lottery administration, at a kiosk, or from the queue outside Doña Manolita in Madrid, which people join for hours out of superstition. From anywhere else you need an agent: a company that buys the official décimo in Spain and holds it in your name. GiantLottos is one of the six we compare, and El Gordo is one of the draws it carries.
The thing to check is not the size of the catalogue but what sits on top of the €20. Every agent adds a fee, and they differ. We go through that in where and how to buy lottery tickets online and in the side-by-side comparison of all six.
After the draw
The winning numbers are published the same morning, and by lunchtime Spanish television is broadcasting from whichever village got lucky. Results and prize breakdowns appear on our Spanish national lottery page as soon as they are confirmed.
Prizes above €40,000 are taxed at 20% in Spain, and what happens after that depends on where you live rather than on the lottery. If you bought through an agent, the ticket is registered to your account and you are notified — but checking the official result yourself takes a minute and costs nothing.
Questions
What is the Spanish national lottery?
Lotería Nacional is one of the oldest lotteries still running anywhere, drawing since 1812. It holds ordinary draws throughout the year and two extraordinary ones: El Gordo on 22 December and El Niño on 6 January.
How often does it draw?
Several times a month. Ordinary draws run on Thursdays and Saturdays; the special draws, which carry much larger prize funds, fall on fixed dates in the calendar.
Can I play El Gordo online?
Yes. Spanish residents can buy through the official channel, and everyone else can buy an official décimo through an agent, without travelling to Spain for it.
How is this different from EuroJackpot?
El Gordo spreads a very large prize fund across thousands of winners; EuroJackpot concentrates a rolling jackpot on one or two. Your chance of winning something is far higher in El Gordo, and your chance of becoming exceptionally rich is far higher in EuroJackpot.
Is buying a lottery ticket online safe?
It is, provided the seller is a licensed agent that buys a real ticket and registers it to you. Check which regulator licenses them and in which country. If that is not stated plainly on the site, treat the absence as an answer.
loterij.online is an independent reference. We run no lotteries and sell no tickets.
Prize amounts are from the 2025 draw and are checked against Lotería Nacional each December.
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