358 Scratch-Off Games Are Still on Sale With No Top Prize Left

Picture a $50 scratch-off. The front promises a $3 million top prize. You buy it, you scratch it, you lose. Nothing strange there. Except in some games, that $3 million was won months ago. Nobody on Earth could have hit it. The ticket just never mentions that.

We call these dead tickets: games still on sale after every advertised top prize has been claimed. We checked the claim data that 28 states publish. As of August 15, 2026, we count 358 dead games still on shelves.

Those 358 games still advertise a combined $254,815,025 in top prizes that can no longer be won. 60 of them promise $1 million or more. The live list is on our dead tickets page, updated daily.

The most expensive dead tickets in America

The bigger the buy-in, the more this matters. These are the priciest tickets still selling with their jackpot already gone.

That first row is a $100 ticket whose $20 million prize is gone. Every copy of it was claimed. The game is still legal to sell, and the claim data is public. It's just that almost nobody reads it at the counter.

The twist: a dead jackpot isn't always a dead game

Here's what surprised us. Losing the top prize doesn't always gut a game. Some dead games still hold lots of smaller prizes. A few actually pay back more than the average living game.

Across the 311 dead games we can price, the average payback is 61¢ per $1, versus about 68¢ for scratch-offs overall. So dead games are worse on average. Even so, 58 of them still beat the national average on payback. The jackpot is gone. The math isn't always.

The floor is ugly, though. The worst dead game we can price pays back about 37¢ on the dollar. Two tickets can sit side by side at the same price and be worlds apart.

How do lotteries get away with this?

It's legal. A game can stay on sale until its official end date, and states do publish the claim numbers. The catch is where they publish them: buried in tables and PDFs that almost no player ever sees. The ticket face never changes. The $3 million banner stays printed on it long after the $3 million is gone.

Some states are better about pulling dead games quickly. Others let them ride for months. That's why the list skews toward certain lotteries.

How to protect yourself

Three habits cover it. First, check the game before you buy. Our dead tickets list refreshes every day. Every game page on this site also shows a warning when the top prizes are gone. Second, if you play for the jackpot dream, make sure the jackpot exists: the biggest prizes still in play are listed too. Third, remember that the return number matters more than the banner on the front. The method behind all of it is on how we calculate returns.

How we did this

Every number comes from official state lottery claim data, collected daily. 28 of the 40 states we track publish live top-prize counts. The rest can't appear in this report. A prize can be claimed between updates, so treat the list as a strong signal, not a real-time guarantee.

The short version: the jackpot printed on a ticket can already be gone, and the ticket won't tell you. Thirty seconds on the dead tickets page before you buy fixes that. Scratch for fun, budget what you spend — and if it stops being fun, the helpline is free, confidential, and open 24/7.