BetOnline $500,000 NFL Survivor Contest: 2026 Rules, Pricing, and How to Play

Survivor pools are one of the simplest ways to add stakes to an entire NFL season, and BetOnline’s version raises the ante with a $500,000 guaranteed prize pool. Here’s everything you need to know before registration opens.

Registration and entry fees

Registration for the 2026 contest opens on Friday, July 17, and stays open through Monday, September 14, closing at 8:05 p.m. ET. Anyone registering on that final weekend should note that only Week 1 games still on the board at the time of sign-up will be eligible for selection — early games will already be locked out.

You’ll need an active BetOnline Sportsbook account to enter, and entries are purchased directly from your sportsbook balance. A single entry runs $30, but the price drops as you buy more: entries two through ten cost $25 each, and entries eleven through twenty-five drop to $20 each. The contest allows a maximum of 25 entries per contestant, and you don’t have to buy them all at once — you can return and add more anytime before the September 14 deadline. As with most contest formats like this, purchases are final and non-refundable, and registration can only be completed online, not by phone, chat, or email.

Early bird bonus entry

BetOnline is sweetening the pot for early registrants. Anyone who buys three or more entries between July 17 and August 30 will receive one additional entry at no extra cost. That bonus entry gets credited to your account by September 2, and while it’s a nice value boost, it’s non-transferable, so it stays tied to the account that earned it. BetOnline notes it can adjust the terms of this promotion at any time without notice, so it’s worth locking in your entries early if you’re planning to take advantage of it.

How the BetOnline NFL Survivor Contest

The format is classic survivor pool: each week, every entry picks one team to win its game outright. Spreads don’t matter — it’s straight up win or lose. Pick correctly and your entry survives to the next round. Pick a team that loses or ties and you’re out. The catch that makes survivor pools interesting is that once you’ve used a team, it’s gone for the rest of the contest, so you can’t just ride the same favorite every week.

The season runs 19 contest weeks total. Eighteen of those line up with the regular NFL schedule, and the nineteenth is a standalone week built around the Thanksgiving stretch — Wednesday, November 25 through Friday, November 27 — covering the Bills, Bears, Cowboys, Broncos, Lions, Packers, Chiefs, Rams, Eagles, and Steelers. If an entry has already used all ten of those teams by the time Thanksgiving week arrives, it’s eliminated automatically, since there’s nothing left to pick from.

The contest keeps going until either Week 18 wraps up or only one entry is left standing, whichever happens first. If more than one entry survives the full run, the $500,000 prize gets split evenly among the remaining entries.

A few grading rules are worth knowing ahead of time. If a game gets canceled or postponed and isn’t made up by the following Wednesday, both teams are graded as losses for anyone who picked them. In the rare case of a forfeit, the team awarded the win advances and the team awarded the loss is eliminated, regardless of whether the game was actually played.

Making your picks each week

Picks open at noon ET every Tuesday. Thanksgiving week is the one exception — since it overlaps with the Week 12 schedule, both the Thanksgiving contest period and Week 12 open together at noon ET on Tuesday, November 24. If your entry gets eliminated during the Thanksgiving games, any picks you’d already queued up for Week 12 are automatically voided.

Once picks open, you can change your selection as many times as you want right up until that specific game kicks off — at kickoff, the pick locks in for good. The hard deadline for getting a pick in is 8:15 p.m. ET Monday night; miss that window with no selection made and your entry is graded as a loss and eliminated. If you log in and a team isn’t selectable, it usually means one of three things: the game has already locked, you’ve already used that team earlier in the contest, or the team is on a bye. A “W2” marker next to a team just means you used it back in Week 2.

If you’re running multiple entries, you’ll need to repeat the selection process for each one — the system loads the current week’s matchups automatically when you select an entry, and you’ll get an on-screen confirmation each time a pick saves successfully.

BetOnline NFL Survivor Contest Prize Pool

The $500,000 prize is guaranteed, and BetOnline runs the contest with no rake — meaning if total entry fees collected end up exceeding $500,000, that extra money gets added straight to the final pool rather than kept by the house. Winnings are paid out as cash with no rollover requirement, credited to the winner’s BetOnline account within five business days of the contest wrapping up, and prize money itself can’t be transferred to another account.