Search for who can run a compliant prize draw in Australia and you get two kinds of answer. Law firms explain what the legislation says. Permit bureaus offer to file the application. Both are useful, and neither of them runs the draw.
That gap matters, because the parts of a prize draw that go wrong are rarely the parts on the application form. The permit is a one-off task with a fee and a processing time. The obligations that follow it run for the life of the campaign, and most are operational — who drew the winner, how, on what date, witnessed by whom, and what you can produce if someone asks.
What is a compliant prize draw in Australia?
A compliant prize draw is a free-to-enter trade promotion where winners are determined by chance, the promotion holds any permit or authority required in the states where it’s open, and the draw, winner notification, prize delivery and record keeping all follow the conditions those regulators set. Compliance isn’t a status you get approved for once — it’s a set of obligations that apply before, during and after the draw.
The word “free” does a lot of work there. Every state allows purchase-linked entry — participants can be required to buy the promoted product at its normal retail price. What they can’t be charged is a fee to enter on top of that. South Australia’s rules even cap phone entry at 50 cents plus GST, which tells you how literally regulators read this.
Where the permit thresholds sit
Three jurisdictions require approval for a chance-based promotion, and they don’t agree on when.
New South Wales requires an authority when the total prize value for a single trade promotion exceeds $10,000. Since the Community Gaming Regulation 2020, that authority is issued for one, three or five years and covers multiple promotions — at the published 2025–26 rates, $506 for one year and $1,013 for five. The catch is that each individual promotion still has to be notified, with a copy of the rules, at least ten working days before it starts. Plenty of teams secure the multi-year authority and then discover the notification step the week before launch.
The ACT sets the bar much lower. A permit isn’t required only where the total prize value doesn’t exceed $3,000, and the Commission must approve the lottery before it can be advertised or conducted. Not before the draw — before the advertising.
South Australia sits between the two at $5,000, above which you need a major trade promotion licence, with fees scaling by prize pool from $261 up to $5,274. There’s one carve-out worth knowing: if the mechanic uses instant scratch or break-open tickets where the number, letter or symbol is concealed, it’s an instant prize trade promotion lottery and needs a licence regardless of prize value. A $2,000 scratch-card promotion needs an SA licence. A $4,000 online random draw doesn’t.
Games of skill sit outside all of this — if the winner is determined by judged merit rather than chance, no permit applies anywhere. But SA is explicit that a token skill question in front of a random draw doesn’t convert a chance promotion into a skill one. Trevor Services covers the thresholds in more detail in our competition permits guide and state-by-state permit guide.
The obligations that bite come after approval
This is the part the permit conversation tends to skip, and where a promotion is most likely to come unstuck.
South Australia requires the draw to happen at the stated day, time and place, supervised by the promoter, open to any entrant who wants to attend, and — where the total prize value exceeds $30,000 — conducted in front of an independent scrutineer, who must be a JP, notary, or someone otherwise authorised to take declarations. Winners of any prize over $250 must have their first initial, surname and postcode published within 30 days. A winner who wasn’t present at the draw has to be notified in writing within seven days. Records must be kept for at least three months.
New South Wales is looser on paper and arguably riskier because of it. Its own guidance states there is no requirement to keep records for trade promotions, while recommending you do. If an entrant questions the randomness of your draw six weeks later, the absence of a legal record-keeping obligation isn’t much of a defence — you either have the draw log and the entry file, or you have an argument. NSW also requires the authority number on all advertising, mandates that unclaimed prizes be held at least three months where the rules are silent, and prohibits some prizes outright, including tobacco and vaping products and more than 20 litres of liquor at 20% ABV or below.
SA’s penalty provision is the one that tends to focus minds. Acting dishonestly in connection with a lottery carries a maximum of $50,000 or two years’ imprisonment, and where the promoter is found guilty, the same exposure extends to the board, the chief executive and any employee responsible for the conduct of the lottery. Compliance doesn’t sit with the agency.
So who can actually run one?
In practice a prize draw involves three parties, and only one of them carries the legal risk.
The promoter — the brand — is the licensee. Permits are issued to them, advertising carries their authority number, and the penalties attach to their people, no matter how much of the work is outsourced. A legal adviser can tell you whether the mechanic is a game of chance and whether the terms are compliant. A permit agency can lodge and track the applications. Neither holds your entry database, runs the randomisation, or pays the winner.
The third party is the promotional platform, and this is the “who can run it” question most people are actually asking. There’s no licence to be a promotions provider in Australia, so the thing worth testing isn’t a credential — it’s whether they can produce evidence on demand. Can they show you the entry file as it stood at the moment of the draw, the randomisation method, and who authorised it? Can they hold the draw on the date published in the terms rather than whenever the reporting is ready? Can they notify an absent winner inside seven days and evidence that they did, publish winner details in the format the state requires, and hold an unclaimed prize for the specified period before a redraw? Those questions are far more revealing than asking whether a provider has “handled compliance before.”
Trevor Services runs this end of the campaign for brands including Electrolux, Vinarchy and Jacob’s Creek — entry collection, receipt and code validation, the draw itself, winner notification and prize fulfilment, on a Salesforce-native platform where every entry and every draw is auditable after the fact. Roughly seven in ten campaigns on Trevor’s books are simple-entry or sweepstake mechanics, which is exactly the territory these thresholds and draw conditions cover.
What to sort out before you apply
Two things are worth settling before anyone touches an application form.
The first is your total prize value, calculated honestly, because it decides which thresholds you cross and therefore your timeline. SA’s standard assessment takes at least ten business days for a major promotion and fourteen for an instant prize lottery, the ACT asks for seven, and NSW needs its ten working days’ notification on top of whatever the authority took. If the media booking is locked and the permits aren’t, the promotion moves — the regulator won’t.
The second is the terms and conditions, because almost every downstream obligation traces back to them: draw date, claim period, unclaimed prize process, where winners get published. Get those wrong and you’ve written yourself a problem that’s hard to fix once live, since SA won’t amend a licence after a promotion has started. Our guide to what to include in promotion terms and conditions covers this, and the Kill Sheet is a quick way to pressure-test the whole thing beforehand. If you’re also pitching the promotion to a retailer, Bamboo Marketing’s take on the S.O.S. framework pairs well with it — buyers ask operational questions, not legal ones.
Do you need a permit for a prize draw in Australia?
You need one if the promotion involves an element of chance and is open to residents of a state that requires approval at your prize value: New South Wales above $10,000, South Australia above $5,000, and the ACT above $3,000. South Australia also requires a licence for any instant scratch or break-open ticket promotion regardless of prize value. Games of skill don’t require a permit anywhere in Australia.
The summary is that the permit is the easy part. It has a form, a fee and a published processing time. What separates a promotion that survives scrutiny from one that doesn’t is whether the draw was run the way the terms said it would be, and whether you can prove it. If you’re planning a draw and want to work through where the operational obligations land before you’re committed, Trevor Services is happy to talk it through. For the design side, our piece on how prize draws work in Australia covers the mechanic, and how promotion winners get paid covers what happens once the draw is done.
