How we figure these numbers
Worked example — real numbers, check our arithmetic
Take MEGA BUCKS, a $20 Florida ticket.
- How many tickets exist? The lottery prints 5,109,546 prizes in this game and publishes overall odds of 1 in 2.98 — meaning about one ticket in every 2.98 wins something. Multiply: 5,109,546 × 2.98 ≈ 15,226,447 tickets printed.
- How many are already sold? The smallest prizes get cashed almost immediately, so they track sales closely. In the 2 smallest prize levels, 743,782 of 3,554,574 prizes are already claimed — about 21% sold.
- How many tickets are left? 15,226,447 × (100% − 21%) ≈ 12,040,367 tickets still out there.
- How much prize money is left? Add up every unclaimed prize: $188,438,170.
- So what comes back per dollar? $188,438,170 ÷ 12,040,367 tickets ÷ $20 a ticket ≈ 78¢ back for every $1 spent.
That last number is what we show. It is an average across every ticket still on shelves — not a prediction about the one in your hand, and it is always less than the dollar you put in.
Every number on this site is an estimate, built only from the prize counts each state lottery publishes itself. Nothing here predicts what any single ticket will do, and no scratch-off pays back more than it costs over time.
What the numbers mean
"Pays back about 62¢ per $1." Add up the value of every prize still unclaimed in a game, divide by how many tickets we estimate are still out there, then divide by what a ticket costs. That is the average return across the whole remaining pool — a few tickets pay out, most pay nothing.
"About 88% of tickets already sold." Nobody publishes sales figures. But the smallest prizes get cashed within minutes of being scratched, so the share of those already claimed tracks sales closely. We use the 2 smallest prize levels, weighted by how many of each were printed.
"1 in 4.5 tickets wins something." That is the lottery's own published overall odds, the same figure printed on the back of the ticket. It counts any prize, including winning your $2 back.
"Top prize is gone." Every prize at the game's headline amount has been claimed. The tickets often stay on sale for months afterward — that is the single most useful thing on this site.
"Top prize hasn't hit yet." Fewer of the top prizes have been claimed than the sales pace would suggest. That does not make one more likely on your next ticket; each ticket is independent, and the prize may already be sitting unscratched in someone's glovebox.
Free-ticket prizes count as the price of the ticket. "For life" prizes count only the payments the game rules guarantee — 20 years' worth — because that is the amount the state commits to in writing.
When we hold a number back
We would rather show nothing than show something wrong:
- A game we have only seen once gets no payback estimate — we need at least 2 readings to say anything about how fast it is selling.
- If a lottery does not publish overall odds, we cannot estimate how many tickets exist, so that game gets its prize table and nothing else.
- Some states publish only their top-prize counts. Those states get game lists and top-prize tracking, and we do not guess at the rest.
- Anything that fails our internal sanity checks — impossible prices, impossible counts, a payback figure outside 35¢–105¢ per dollar — is pulled from the rankings until a human looks at it.
- Where a state publishes the same data twice (per-game pages and a combined report), we read both and compare. Disagreement means we publish neither.
Where the data comes from
Directly from each state lottery's own public pages, read on a schedule, at a polite pace, honoring each site's robots.txt. We are not affiliated with any lottery, we sell nothing, and we never handle tickets or prizes.