Premium Bonds saver scoops £50,000 prize with a £10 bond bought in 1990!

A Premium Bonds holder has turned £10 into £50,000 in this month’s prize draw, a huge return of 499,900 per cent.

The winner, from Essex, bought the winning £10 bond in June 1990 and hasn’t added any additional funds into the National Savings and Investments account since.

The bond was bought when Kylie Minogue was dominating the charts with Better the Devil You Know and Julia Roberts was box office dynamite with film Pretty Woman.

Other lucky Premium Bonds winners this month include two newer bonds purchased in 2023.

A Premium Bonds holder based in Cambridgeshire won a £100,000 prize from £2,500 worth of bonds bought in August 2023.

Another winner, based in Brighton and Hove, bagged a £100,000 prize from a bond worth £5,795 purchased in February 2023.

The coveted £1million jackpot prizes were won by Premium Bond holders in Dorset and the London borough of Wandsworth.

The Dorset winner holds £28,501 in bonds with the winning bond purchased in March 2008. The Wandsworth jackpot winner has a total of £10,400 in bonds, with the winning bond bought in May 2021.

For this draw, the underlying prize rate of Premium Bonds was 4.65 per cent and the odds of winning a prize are 21,000 to 1.

But the prize fund will be cut to 4.4 per cent and will take effect from next month’s draw.

NS&I says the cut is due to its ‘requirement to strike a balance between the interests of our savers, taxpayers and the stability of the broader financial services sector.’

Premium Bonds savers will not see odds go down and they remain at 21,000 to 1.

It is doing that by reducing bigger prizes – excluding the two £1million offerings – and adding in far more £25 wins.

For example, there is expected to be 85 £100,000 prizes in March versus 91 in January, and 170 £50,000 prizes in March versus 182 in March.

Meanwhile, there will be 1,425,338 £25 prizes in March versus 1,037,784 in January – a rise of 37.3 per cent.