Raffle for an Individual: The QLD Exception

Someone in your community is having the worst year of their life. A cancer diagnosis and the bills that come with it. A house lost to fire or flood. The instinct is immediate and it’s a good one: run a raffle, get the community behind them, hand over the money.

Then you look up the rules and hit a wall.

Why the answer is almost always no

Raffles in Australia sit under charitable and non-profit gaming law. The whole legal architecture assumes the proceeds go to an organisation pursuing a purpose — a charity, a school, a sporting club — and not to a private individual. That’s the line between a raffle and an unlicensed lottery, and every state guards it.

So in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania, the ACT and the Northern Territory, the answer to “can I raffle something to help my friend?” is no. Not with a permit, not with paperwork, not with the best intentions in the world. There’s no mechanism.

Queensland is the single exception.

What Queensland allows

Under the Charitable and Non-Profit Gaming Act 1999 (Qld), an individual can run one raffle for the benefit of a person who is disadvantaged or affected by a disaster — a medical fund, a fire or flood recovery — under a special Category 3 gaming licence issued by the Office of Liquor and Gaming Regulation (OLGR).

Note what’s unusual here. Everywhere else, the licence holder is an incorporated association. Here it’s a person: you, the organiser, named on the licence, running a single art union for someone else’s welfare.

That narrowness is the point, and it’s also where organisers get caught out. The rules below aren’t the general Queensland raffle rules — they’re specific to this licence.

The six rules that catch people out

1. Your ticket sales must exceed $5,000. This is a floor, not a ceiling, and it surprises everyone. The special Category 3 licence only covers an art union whose gross proceeds top $5,000. If your raffle is too small to get there, this licence doesn’t cover it — and there’s no smaller version to fall back on, because the smaller categories don’t permit an individual beneficiary at all.

2. Queensland only. Because the authority is Queensland law, tickets sell in Queensland and nowhere else. You can’t open it up to family interstate.

3. Four months, start to finish. The licence runs for a maximum of four months and your draw has to fall inside that term. Plan the draw date before you apply, not after.

4. One licence, one raffle. A special licence authorises a single art union. If you want to run another, that’s another application.

5. Sales can’t exceed five times your prize pool. Queensland’s standard Category 3 rule applies — the flip side of the requirement that prizes be worth at least 20% of ticket sales. A $5,000 prize pool caps you at $25,000 raised. If you want to raise more, the prize has to grow with it.

6. Lodge at least 28 days before you start. That’s the statutory minimum; in practice allow four to six weeks. The form is OLGR’s Form 2C, and this is the step that decides whether your raffle happens on the timeline the family actually needs.

After the draw

Three obligations outlive the raffle itself, and they’re easy to forget once the money’s handed over:

• Lodge a financial return with OLGR within two months of the draw
• Keep every record, including financial records, for five years
• Deliver prizes within one month — and insure any prize worth over $5,000 from the moment tickets go on sale until it reaches the winner

Running one on RaffleLink

We built a dedicated path for this, because the general raffle setup flow asks the wrong questions. It wants an ABN and an organisation category; an individual fundraiser has neither.

Choose Set up an individual fundraiser (QLD) when you register, and the setup reframes around the cause. You give the beneficiary’s first name — first name only, since it can appear on the public page — your relationship to them, and a confirmation that you have their consent (or their guardian’s) to fundraise for them and name them publicly.

From there the platform holds the rules for you rather than trusting you to remember them:

• Every other state is switched off on the raffle, so a Queensland-only sale isn’t something you have to police
• The $5,000 floor is checked live while you set your ticket price and capacity — and if you’re under it, it tells you the minimum ticket count that clears the line at your current price, rather than just flagging a problem
• Your licence dates are checked against your raffle dates — sales can’t start before the licence takes effect, and the draw can’t fall after it expires
• The licence number is checked for reuse, because one licence covers one art union
• A new raffle is blocked while one is still open, for the same reason

You record your licence number, issue and expiry dates, and upload a copy of the licence on the Compliance step. That’s what lets the raffle go live. Separately, we confirm the licence with OLGR, and once it checks out a Licence Verified badge appears on your public page — a trust marker for buyers who, reasonably, want to know that a raffle benefiting one named person is above board. It doesn’t hold up your raffle.

Queensland Category 3 draws also run under the state’s electronic-draw controls: a signed, tamper-evident draw record rather than a barrel and a promise. For a raffle where the whole community knows the beneficiary personally, being able to point at a verifiable result matters more than usual.

Before you start

The honest summary: this is a real path, it is narrower than people expect, and the $5,000 floor plus the 28-day lodgement window are what most often turn a good intention into a raffle that can’t legally run in time.

If you’re in Queensland and the cause fits, start with the licence application — everything else can be built while you wait. Our help centre has the full regulatory detail in Special Category 3 raffles (QLD), including the official OLGR forms and guides, and a step-by-step setup walkthrough.

If you’re outside Queensland, the path that does work is partnering with an incorporated organisation — a registered charity, a club, a school P&C — that can hold the permit and direct the funds to the cause. Our compliance overview explains who can run a raffle in each state, the Queensland rules guide covers the wider QLD picture, and the free permit checker will tell you where an ordinary raffle sits against your state’s threshold.

Not sure which applies to you? Talk to us — this is one of the few areas where the answer genuinely depends on where you’re standing.