Scratch-Off Value Report: We Analyzed 2,641 Lottery Tickets Across 40 States

You're at the counter and the rack has forty tickets on it. They all look about the same. Some of them are a much worse deal than others.

Every day we pull official prize data for thousands of scratch-off games. Then we work out what each one pays back. We almost never stop and look at the whole pile at once. So we did.

Here is what 2,641 active scratch-off tickets across 40 states say about what a lottery dollar really buys. That's our full dataset as of June 21, 2026.

The average U.S. scratch-off has an expected return of about $0.68 for every $1 spent. Expected return just means what a ticket pays back on average. The middle of the pack is almost the same number. So before you scratch anything, the typical ticket already keeps about 32 cents of your dollar.

Almost nothing beats the house

We could price 2,065 games. Those are the ones that publish enough data. More than 99% of them pay back less than $1 per $1 played. That's the house edge doing its job.

About 61% pay back less than 70 cents on the dollar. A few come in under 50 cents. Only 15 games, roughly 0.7%, currently pay back more than a dollar. Those are temporary quirks, not loopholes. More on that below.

The more a ticket costs, the more it pays back (per dollar)

This is the clearest pattern in the data. Pricier tickets are less bad, on average. Group every game by its price and the average return climbs from the $1 rack to the $30 rack.

A $30 ticket pays back about 84 cents on the dollar on average, versus 58 cents for a $1 ticket. That's a 26-cent gap. It doesn't make the $30 ticket a good deal. It still loses money. It just loses *less*.

The trend even flattens at the very top. The $50 games average a hair below the $30 games. You can sort the whole database by price and return on the all-games page.

The best tickets in America right now

These are the highest-paying single games in the data. Almost all of them cost $10 to $30. One pays back nearly five dollars per dollar. We'll explain that one below.

The leaders change every day as people claim prizes. So today's list always lives on today's top-returning tickets and the full rankings.

…and the worst

At the other end are games that are nearly tapped out. Most of their prizes are already gone. The tickets are still on the shelf. The single worst one pays back just 7 cents on the dollar.

A lot of the worst tickets are $2 and $3 crossword games late in their run.

This is the best reason to check before you buy. Two tickets at the same price, on the same counter, can be 50 cents apart on the dollar.

Does your state matter?

A little. But read the warning after the tables. We averaged every priced game by state. Here are the most and least generous, among the 30 states with at least 15 priced games.

Take this loosely. A state's average depends on which games it shares enough data about. A few odd games can swing it, too.

Massachusetts ranks first partly because several older, big-jackpot games are in that rare end-of-life window we describe next. So this is a snapshot of the data we have. It isn't proof that one lottery treats you better. You can pull up any state's live ranking from the all-games page.

The 15 tickets where the math flips

A small group of games currently pays back more than $1 per dollar. Kentucky's Wild Cash 300X leads at about $4.96 per dollar. These aren't loopholes. They're end-of-life games.

Here's how that happens. A game sells most of its tickets, but the top prize, the biggest prize in the game, is still sitting there unclaimed. All that value gets spread across the few tickets left. For a short while, it can add up to more than the ticket costs.

There's a catch. Your chances of actually hitting that prize stay tiny. And the average gets pulled way up by one huge annuity prize counted at full face value. We break it all down in how we calculate returns.

The jackpots still on the board

Maybe you play for the dream, not the math. The biggest unclaimed top prizes in our data are $25 million tickets. Two are left on Massachusetts's Mega Money. One each sits on a pair of Florida $50 games.

There's also a $20 million prize on Texas's $20 Million Supreme. On average return, those games are long gone. But those prizes are still technically in play. The current list lives on biggest unclaimed prizes.

How we did this

Every number here comes from official state lottery prize data. We collect it daily. This snapshot is from June 21, 2026.

We priced 2,065 of the 2,641 active games, about 78%. Those are the games that share enough detail. That means prizes left, plus either a print run (how many tickets the state printed) or overall odds (how often a ticket wins anything at all).

The rest we mark Return N/A instead of guessing. We leave them out of the averages. Annuity prizes are counted at their advertised face value, which can make a few end-of-life games look better than they are. The full method is on how we calculate returns. The beginner's guide is what a ticket pays back on average.

Here's the short version. Scratch-offs lose money on average. The typical ticket pays back about 68 cents on the dollar, so about $6.80 comes back for every $10 you spend. More than 99% pay back less than they cost. Numbers like these won't make you a winner. They just help you lose less and know what you're buying. Start with the full rankings before your next trip. And if it ever stops being fun, the helpline is free, confidential, and open 24/7.