Florida scratch-offs: which games still have their top prize

This is the clearest example of the problem with scratch tickets. A Florida game advertising a $1,000,000 top prize can have zero of those prizes left — every one already claimed — while it continues to sell at full price with the million printed on the front.

The Florida Lottery publishes how many of each game's top prize remain of the number originally printed. We pull that daily and rank every game on sale, so you can check before you buy.

What this shows, and what it doesn't

The "still unclaimed" column is the number of that game's headline prizes not yet claimed, out of how many were printed. A game reading "none left" is still for sale with its top prize entirely gone. That is the single most useful fact on this page — and the one thing the ticket itself will never tell you.

What this page does not show is what a ticket returns per dollar. That calculation needs the complete prize table — every tier, not just the top — and Florida publishes only its top-prize counts. Rather than estimate the rest and present it as fact, we show what the data actually supports. Our Texas, California and Idaho pages do include value per dollar, because those states publish full prize tables.

One caveat applies everywhere: "unclaimed" is not the same as "unsold." A top prize counted as remaining may already sit in a ticket somebody bought and hasn't scratched or redeemed. So a game showing prizes left is not a promise that any are still on a shelf near you — but a game showing none left is a hard fact, and that is the one worth acting on.

The broader pattern

Across the states we analyse, the cheapest tickets consistently return the least: in Texas, $1 games pay back about 55 cents per dollar against 79 cents for $50 games, and California shows the same climb. If you play scratch-offs at all, the two things most worth checking are whether the top prize still exists — this page — and how much the game returns per dollar, on the other state pages.