The 1% Club

Did You Know?

• BBC Studios holds international format and distribution rights; as of February 2026, the series has been licensed in over fifteen territories.
• A table-top board game based on the show, under the Ideal label, was released on 18 July 2023.
• A video game adaptation, The 1% Club World Challenge, was released on iOS and Android in February 2026, with a Nintendo Switch port a month later.

Gameplay

One hundred contestants start the game with one thousand pounds each. The show’s host, Lee Mack, presents fifteen questions that get harder as the game goes on, from a ninety-percent difficulty level down to one percent. Every question comes from a set that was tested on ordinary people beforehand, and the difficulty is based on how many of those testers got it right. Contestants have thirty seconds to lock in their answers secretly on their phones or tablets. Anyone who gets a question wrong is out, and their thousand pounds goes into the prize pot.

When the players reach the fifth question, which has a fifty-percent difficulty, each remaining contestant can choose to skip one question—except the final one percent question. To use this pass, they must put their thousand pounds into the prize pot. At the ninth question, the thirty-percent level, anyone who still has their pass can either keep their thousand pounds and leave the game immediately, or keep playing. Those who already used their pass have to continue.

The finalists are the people who answer the fourteenth question correctly—the five-percent difficulty—or pass it, or, if all one hundred are eliminated, the ones who got the furthest. Each finalist can either take an equal share of ten thousand pounds and leave, or go for the one percent question. Anyone who tries that question and gets it right splits the prize pot equally; anyone who gets it wrong gets nothing. Contestants who reach the one percent question without using their pass or giving a wrong answer keep their thousand pounds no matter what happens.

History

The show was originally scheduled for filming in early 2020 but was delayed by COVID-19 lockdowns, eventually airing in April 2022. A children's version was filmed on 27 October 2025 and aired on 24 May 2026. In November 2025, ITV released a trailer for The 1% Club Rollover, a new edition broadcast over five consecutive nights from 8 December to 12 December 2025. In this version, anyone who reaches the 1% question in any of the first four shows returns the following episode to try for more money; if the jackpot is not won, it rolls over. The maximum prize during the week quintuples to £500,000.