A Scratcher whose top prizes have all been claimed still sells at the same price, with the same headline number on the front. Nothing on the rack tells you the prize you're chasing is already gone.
The California Lottery publishes, for every prize tier of every game, how many prizes were printed, how many have been cashed and how many are still pending. That is enough to work out exactly what each game has left — so we do it for every active Scratcher.
Cheap Scratchers pay back the least
Average value returned per dollar, grouped by ticket price, across every active California Scratcher.
The pattern is strong and it is not a California quirk — the same steady climb shows up in our Texas data, where $1 tickets average 55% and $50 tickets 79%. Two independent state lotteries, same design decision: the cheap tickets on the rack are the worst value. That does not make an expensive Scratcher a good bet — it is still a guaranteed average loss, just a smaller one per dollar, with far more money at risk per ticket.
Every California Scratcher, ranked
How to read this
"Value per $1 now" is the unclaimed prize money divided by what it would cost to buy every remaining ticket. A game showing 70% means players will get back about 70 cents per dollar across the tickets still out there. "At launch" is the same figure for the full print run — what the game was designed to pay.
The gap between those columns is the point: a game well below its launch figure has had its big prizes claimed and is now a worse deal than designed. The "riding on top prize" column is the health warning — where much of the remaining value sits in one tier, the rating hangs on a couple of tickets that may already be sold.
Every California Scratcher launches returning roughly 63% to 83% of sales as prizes. That is the house edge, and no game escapes it — this table shows which are currently least bad, never which are good. See what expected value means and where your lottery dollar goes.
How we calculate it
California publishes the cleanest scratch data of any state we track. Its public game feed lists, for every prize tier, the odds, the total number of prizes printed, how many have been cashed and how many remain pending — so nothing has to be estimated. Multiplying any tier's total prizes by its odds gives the size of the print run, and we check that every tier agrees before trusting it.
Two honest limitations. California does not publish a percent-sold figure, so we infer it from the share of prizes already cashed; because small prizes often go unredeemed, that understates sales and makes these figures slightly conservative. And "pending" means unclaimed, not unsold — a top prize counted as pending may already sit in a ticket someone bought and hasn't cashed. Late in a print run that gap dominates, so games over 90% sold are flagged and hidden by default.
Compare states: Texas scratch offs, Idaho scratch tickets, or see how draw games differ on the most winnable game map.
Estimates derived from California Lottery published prize data — not official figures, and not a prediction about any individual ticket. Scratchers are negative-expected-value by design: every game listed returns less than it costs across all players. For information and entertainment only — not financial or gambling advice. You must be 18+ to play. If gambling is a problem for you or someone you know, call 1-800-GAMBLER.