What should you charge per ticket?
Raffle ticket pricing is the decision about what a single entry costs. The price sets both how much the raffle can raise and how attractive the odds look to a buyer, so it is chosen against two things at once: the value of the prize and the number of people who might realistically buy.
Start from what you have — a prize and a list of people — rather than a fundraising target. The calculator shows what each price raises and how good a deal the ticket looks from the buyer's side.
What you have
What the prize is worth, even if it was donated. This is what makes a ticket attractive.
Your list, your members, the room. Not everyone will buy.
$25
150 participants is past the free cap of 100. The one-time $25 upgrade removes it.
At this price the raffle takes less than twice what the prize is worth. Either the prize is too generous for this audience, or you need to reach more people.
Enter a prize value and how many people you can reach.
Every price, side by side
The last column is how the ticket looks to a buyer. Low numbers are a hard sell.
| Price | Raises | Prize worth |
|---|---|---|
| $1 | $300 | 500 tickets |
| $2 | $600 | 250 tickets |
| $5 | $1,500 | 100 tickets |
| $10 | $3,000 | 50 tickets |
| $20 | $6,000 | 25 tickets |
| $25 | $7,500 | 20 tickets |
| $50 | $15,000 | 10 tickets |
| $100 | $30,000 | 5 tickets |
The two numbers a price has to satisfy
There is no industry rate for a raffle ticket, and anyone quoting one is guessing. What there is instead is a pair of constraints, and a workable price is any number that satisfies both.
The first is the raise. Your ticket price multiplied by the number of tickets you can realistically sell has to be worth the effort — and if you bought the prize rather than having it donated, it has to clear that cost first. This is the easy half, and it pushes the price up.
The second is the buyer's side, and it pushes the price down. Someone deciding whether to buy is weighing what the ticket costs against what they might win. A $5 ticket for a $500 prize reads as a flutter; a $50 ticket for the same prize reads as a bad bet, because the prize is only worth ten of them. The table above shows that ratio for every price so you can see where it stops being attractive.
The suggestion below the inputs takes the highest price where the prize is still worth at least twenty tickets, then checks that it raises at least double what the prize is worth. Both of those are rules of thumb rather than findings — they are a starting point you can overrule, and the table is there precisely so you can. What you know that no calculator does is what your own supporters will pay.
One thing worth pricing in: the number of people, not the number of tickets, is what the free tier counts. A hundred supporters buying ten tickets each is still a free raffle on Rafflebase; a hundred and one people buying one each is not.
Pricing a ticket, specifically
- Is there a standard price for a raffle ticket?
- No, and be wary of anyone who quotes one. The right price depends on what the prize is worth, how many people you can reach and what those people will comfortably pay, and those vary enormously between a school fair and a golf tournament. What is consistent is the shape of the decision: price against the prize value on one side and your audience on the other.
- Should I sell tickets in bundles?
- Usually yes. A single ticket at $5 with five for $20 gives people a cheap way in and a reason to spend more, and most of your revenue tends to come from the bundle. Price the bundle so the discount is real but modest — if five tickets cost the same as two, you have just cut your ticket price to $4 and made the maths harder to follow.
- What if the prize was donated?
- Then everything you take is profit, and the only constraint left is the buyer's side — the price still has to look reasonable against what the prize is worth. Leave the prize value set to what it is actually worth rather than to zero, because that number is what makes the ticket attractive, not what you paid for it.
- Does a higher price always raise more?
- Only up to a point, and this calculator deliberately does not model where that point is, because nobody can. It assumes everyone you reach buys the same number of tickets at every price, which is optimistic at the top of the table. Treat the high rows as a ceiling rather than a plan.
- How many participants can I have on the free tier?
- A hundred, and it counts people rather than tickets — someone who buys twelve tickets is one participant with twelve entries. A one-time $25 for that raffle removes the cap and adds CSV export, multiple winners, redraws, payment reminders and signup alerts.
While you are planning
Now run the raffle
Share one signup link, sell your tickets, and draw a winner everyone can check.