Two $5 Scratch Tickets, 30 Cents Apart

Two scratch tickets sit on the same rack. Both cost $5. One currently returns about 53 cents per dollar across everyone who buys it; the other returns about 83 cents. Nothing on either ticket tells you which is which.

We showed previously that expensive scratch tickets pay back more than cheap ones, in all 18 states we can price. That's true, and it's the pattern most people find surprising. But it turns out to be the smaller of the two effects in the data.

The spread inside a single price band

Here is every price band with at least 20 games on sale, showing the worst, median and best value per dollar currently offered at that exact price. Pooled across 1,077 games in 18 states.

Every band spans 24 to 37 percentage points. Now compare that with the effect of price itself: the average $5 game returns about 68 cents, the average $20 game about 77. A 31-point spread inside the $5 band, against a 9-point step from $5 to $20. Choosing well where you already are is worth roughly three times more than moving up.

Concretely: the best $5 game on sale right now, Idaho's BBQ Bucks at about 83%, currently returns more per dollar than the worst $20 game, New Mexico's Cash Bonanza at about 61% — while costing a quarter as much per ticket.

The catch, and it's a real one

That comparison is cherry-picked by construction — best against worst. So we ran the honest version: every possible pairing of a cheap ticket ($1–$2) against an expensive one ($20+), all 71,586 of them.

The expensive ticket was the better value in 99% of those matchups.

Both things are true, and they aren't in tension once you see what each is measuring:

• Price is a reliable but modest effect. Trading up almost always helps a little. Pick blindly, and the dearer ticket wins nearly every time.
• Game choice is a large but conditional effect. The range within a band is wide enough to swamp the price effect entirely — but only if you actually know which game is which. Choose at random inside a band and you land near the median, which is exactly what the price comparison already assumed.

So the practical version is: the information is worth more than the upgrade. Thirty seconds of looking up your state's games beats spending four times as much on an unknown one.

Why identical prices diverge so much

Two reasons, and they compound.

The first is design. Lotteries run many games at the same price with deliberately different prize structures — a crossword game, a multiplier game and a seasonal game at $5 need not pay the same, and they don't. Games are also designed years apart, under different budgets.

The second, and larger, is age. A scratch game's value is not fixed: it falls as its biggest prizes are claimed. A game that launched paying 70 cents per dollar and has since had its top prizes won is genuinely worth less now — the remaining tickets are chasing a thinner pool. The price on the front never changes to reflect this, and neither does the advertised top prize. That is why we compute value today rather than at launch, and why our 180 games with no top prize left are concentrated at the bottom of these ranges.

What this actually means for a buyer

The same caution as always applies, and it applies harder here because this article sounds more actionable than the last one: none of these games is a good bet. The best $5 game in the country still hands back less than it takes. Picking a game at 83% instead of 53% moves you from a bad deal to a less bad one — it does not create a winning proposition, and nothing on this site ever will.

What the data does support is narrow and worth saying plainly:

• If you are buying a scratch ticket anyway, check the specific game, not just the price. That is where the big swing is.
• Avoid games whose top prize is already gone. It is the one figure with no statistical caveat attached, and those games cluster at the weak end of every band.
• Don't trade up in price as a strategy. It buys you a few points of payout while multiplying what you stake per ticket.

How we measured it

Value per dollar is unclaimed prize money divided by the cost of the tickets still unsold, computed per game from each state's published prize table. Figures are current, not launch values, so they reflect what a game has left today.

Three limits worth stating. Games more than 90% sold are excluded from every figure here — late in a print run the numbers swing on a handful of prizes, which is also why a few "best in band" entries sit near or above 100%: those are games where a large prize remains unclaimed near the end, and they are flagged on the state pages rather than treated as bargains. "Unclaimed" is not "unsold", so a remaining prize may already sit in a bought ticket. And these are snapshots — the numbers move daily as prizes are claimed, which is precisely the point: a game's value is not a fixed property of the ticket.

Full detail on our methodology page; live figures for every game on the state pages.

The bottom line

Across 1,077 scratch games in 18 states, value varies by 24 to 37 percentage points within every single price band — three to four times the average gap between one price band and the next. Price is the reliable effect; game choice is the big one.

Which is a slightly unusual conclusion for a lottery article to reach: the most valuable thing you can do at the counter isn't spending more or spending less. It's looking it up.

Derived from state lotteries' published prize data and describing averages across all players — not a prediction about any individual ticket, and not a recommendation to buy any game. Figures are a snapshot and change daily. Scratch tickets are negative-expected-value by design: every game described here returns less than it costs. For information and entertainment only — not financial or gambling advice. You must be 18+ to play (21+ in some states). If gambling is a problem for you or someone you know, call 1-800-GAMBLER (1-800-426-2537).