The most (and least) drawn numbers in four Aussie lotteries

What we actually went looking for

"Numbers that have never been drawn" is one of the most searched lottery questions there is. It is easy to see why. It feels like the closest thing to inside information a random game could offer. So we pulled every real draw on file, 90 per game, and checked every number in every pool.^[1]

The four games here are the Australian draws we hold full history for: Oz Lotto, Powerball, Saturday Lotto and Weekday Windfall. Australia has others, including Set for Life, Super 66, the Strike games and the Lotterywest draws, and this article says nothing about those.

What we actually found

Every number, in all four games, has been drawn at least once. Zero exceptions.^[2] That is not a disappointing result. It is what honest randomness looks like at this scale. Across 90 draws per game there is no room left for a number to hide. It is the law of large numbers doing its work, covered properly on our Statistics Explained page. Repeat a random process enough times and the counts settle near what the maths predicts. Nothing gets quietly exempted.

So instead of a list that does not exist, here is the honest version: which numbers have run hottest, and which have run coldest, across the real data we actually have.

Most drawn, by game

Least drawn, by game

Is the spread bigger than chance would give you?

It is a fair objection to everything above. Seven appearances against twenty-three is a wide gap, and a wide gap looks like it means something. So we tested it rather than asserting it.

For each game we simulated twenty thousand fresh 90-draw windows, drawing at random from that game's real format, and recorded how often the least-drawn number came up and how often the most-drawn one did. That gives a range for what pure chance produces over a window this size.³

Eight figures, eight bands, and every one lands inside. Oz Lotto's coldest number came up seven times where chance gives four to eight. Its hottest came up twenty-three where chance gives nineteen to twenty-five. Powerball, Saturday Lotto and Weekday Windfall all do the same thing.

That is the whole answer. The gap between the hottest and coldest number in each of these games is not evidence of a bias, a lucky number or a tired machine. It is the gap you get for free when you count anything random forty-odd ways.

What about overdue numbers?

Frequency is one question and drought is another, so it is worth doing separately. An overdue number is one that has not appeared for a while, and every game has some right now.

Counting back from the most recent draw in each window: Oz Lotto's 12 has been missing for 23 draws. Powerball's 19 has been missing for 14. Saturday Lotto's 38 has been missing for 30, and Weekday Windfall's 27 for 40.¹

Weekday Windfall draws three times a week, so forty draws is about seven months. That sounds like a long time to be hiding, and it is exactly the kind of figure that gets a number called due.

It is not. The barrel has no memory of the last forty draws, and 27 starts Wednesday on the same footing as every other number in the pool. A drought is a description of the past, in precisely the way a hot streak is. Our game pages print the current overdue numbers for the same reason we print the frequency grid: they are genuinely interesting to look at, and they carry no information about what comes next.

Why ninety draws and not thirty years

Ninety draws is a small window, and we should say so plainly. It is roughly twenty-one months of Oz Lotto and about seven months of Weekday Windfall. Everything above describes that window and nothing wider.

A longer history does not fix the problem people want it to fix. It flattens the counts, because the more you count the closer every number gets to its expected share, which means the hottest and coldest numbers in a thirty-year window are separated by less, not more. The gap that looks meaningful over ninety draws looks like nothing at all over three thousand.

We hold ninety because it is what our own fetchers verify draw by draw against the operator's published results, and because a figure we can check is worth more than a longer one we cannot. If a site quotes you a window without saying how long it is or where it came from, that is the part to be suspicious of, well before the numbers themselves.

The genuinely interesting twist

None of this predicts next week. Every draw is independent, so a number's history has no bearing on its next appearance. Our hot and cold numbers review goes through why. There is a subtler point though. The "never been drawn" claims you find elsewhere usually rest on decades of history, not a recent window like ours. And the longer the history, the closer every count creeps toward what chance predicts. So a number that looks cold over 30 years is almost certainly an ordinary wobble. Not a hidden pattern.

The straight version

This piece did not end up where I expected. I went looking for a neat list of forgotten numbers and found a demonstration of the law of large numbers instead. That is the better outcome. A page confidently listing "numbers that never come up" would feed the exact myth this site exists to push back on.

There are no numbers hiding from the barrel, at least not in any window big enough to check. The hottest and coldest above are real. They are also descriptive, not predictive: a record of what already happened, not a hint about what is next. Enjoy them as trivia.

Correct as at 21 August 2026. The counts above are a snapshot of the 90-draw window on that date, not a live figure: they are counted here from this site's own rolling windows rather than quoted, and will shift every time a new draw is added and an old one ages out. Past frequency does not predict future results. This is entertainment and data reporting, not advice. Explore the live frequency charts for the current picture, updated with every new draw.

References

1. All figures above are computed directly from this site's own stored draw history for each game, the same dataset powering the frequency charts on every game page. ↩
2. The Lott, official results archive, the source every draw on file is checked against: thelott.com/oz-lotto/results ↩
3. The simulation is twenty thousand random 90-draw windows per game, drawn from that game's real format (7 from 47 for Oz Lotto, 7 from 35 for Powerball, 6 from 45 for Saturday Lotto and Weekday Windfall), recording the least and most drawn count in each. The bands shown are the middle 90 per cent of those twenty thousand results. Same method as the split test in our piece on hot and cold numbers. ↩ ↩