Why Payout Percentage Beats Overall Odds
Most scratch-off rankings you will find are sorted by overall odds — the chance of winning any prize at all. It is the number printed on the ticket, so it is the number everyone uses.
It is also the number most likely to mislead you, because a prize does not have to be worth anything.
What each number measures
Overall odds answer: how often does a ticket win something? A game at 1 in 3 produces a winner every third ticket on average. That prize might be a free replacement ticket.
Payout percentage answers: of the money still going into this game, how much comes back out? If a game’s unclaimed prizes are worth $780,000 and the tickets still to be sold will take in $1,000,000, its current payout is 78%.
The first is a frequency. The second is a rate of return. They measure different things, and they routinely rank the same set of games in a different order.
Why they disagree
The disagreement is structural, not accidental. A game’s designers choose how to distribute a fixed prize budget. They can spread it thin across many small prizes, or concentrate it in a few large ones.
- Spread thin, you get high overall odds and low payout: you win constantly, and what you win is a free ticket or your money back.
- Concentrated, you get low overall odds and high payout: you lose most of the time, and the money is really there in the prizes that remain.
A $5 game paying a $5 prize every 2.5 tickets has fantastic-looking odds — 1 in 2.5 — and returns almost nothing, because the prize is the ticket price. A $5 game at 1 in 9 whose remaining prizes are mostly $100 and up can hand back far more per dollar spent.
The break-even trap
The specific case worth naming is the break-even prize: a win equal to the ticket price. On a $10 ticket, a $10 prize.
These inflate the overall odds enormously, because they are the cheapest prize a designer can seed. They return you to where you started, minus the time. Some competitor sites charge for a metric that strips them out. We publish it free on every game as profit odds — the chance of winning strictly more than you paid — alongside overall odds, so you can see the gap yourself. On most games it is large.
So which should you use?
Payout percentage, as the primary sort. It is the number that tracks what happens to your money. Our state hubs are ranked by it by default for that reason.
Overall odds, as a secondary consideration, if the experience of winning frequently is part of why you are buying. That is a legitimate reason to buy a lottery ticket. It is just not a financial one, and it is worth being clear with yourself about which you are doing.
Profit odds, when you want the honest version of overall odds, with break-even prizes removed.
A caution about payout above 100%
You will occasionally see a game listed with a current payout over 100% — meaning the unclaimed prizes appear to be worth more than the remaining tickets will cost.
This is genuinely possible late in a game’s life, when large prizes have gone unhit while most tickets have sold. It is also where the estimate is weakest, because payout depends on estimating how many tickets remain, and that estimate is least reliable exactly when a game is nearly sold out. We flag those games on the page rather than quietly presenting the number as fact.
Read a payout above 100% as “unusually rich”, not as an edge. The tickets holding those prizes may not be in any store near you, and there is no way to find out.
The bottom line
Every scratch-off has negative expected value. Payout percentage does not change that; it tells you how negative. A game at 82% takes 18 cents of every dollar. A game at 62% takes 38. Over a year of buying the same ticket every week, that difference is the only thing on the shelf you actually control.
See it applied on any state hub — California, New York, Michigan — or read how we calculate payout.
Other guides
- Making a Scratch-Off Budget Last — If you are going to spend $20 on scratch-offs, the arithmetic of how you spend it is not neutral. Here is what the numbers say about price tiers, splitting, and chasing.
- Claiming a Scratch-Off Prize, and the Tax That Comes With It — Where to claim by prize size, what deadlines apply, what gets withheld, and what you still owe afterwards. General information, not tax advice.
- How Scratch-Off Odds Change After a Game Goes on Sale — The odds printed on a scratch-off ticket are fixed for the life of the game. The odds you actually face are not. This explains the difference and how to measure it.
- New Game or Old Game: Which Scratch-Off Is the Better Buy? — New games have every prize intact and no information. Old games have fewer prizes and a full history. Neither is automatically better, and the reason is worth understanding.
- How to Read a Scratch-Off Remaining-Prize Table — Every state publishes a table of prizes still unclaimed for each game. It is the most useful public document in the lottery, and it is not hard to read once you know what the columns mean.