Thirty-four Georgia scratchers on sale today have zero top prizes left. Every one already claimed — and every one still on the rack at full price, with the headline number printed on the front.
The Georgia Lottery publishes, for every prize tier of every game, how many winning tickets were printed and how many have been paid out. The difference is what's genuinely still unclaimed, so we pull it daily and rank every active game.
Cheap scratchers pay back the least
Average value returned per dollar, grouped by ticket price, across every active Georgia instant game.
This is now the third state where the same pattern appears, and it appears independently each time: Georgia climbs from 62% on $1 tickets to 80% on $50 ones, matching the same climb we find in our Texas, California and every other state's data. Three unrelated state lotteries making the same design decision is no longer a coincidence — the cheap tickets on the rack are the worst value in the shop. 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 Georgia 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 Georgia scratcher launches returning roughly 66% to 81% 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
Georgia's public game feed lists every prize tier of every instant game with the number of winning tickets printed and the number already paid out, so the unclaimed count is exact and nothing is estimated. Each game's published overall odds — "1 in 3.56" and so on — turn the total number of winning tickets into the size of the print run.
Two honest limitations. Georgia does not publish a percent-sold figure, so we infer it from the share of prizes already claimed; because small prizes often go unredeemed, that understates sales and makes these figures slightly conservative. And "unclaimed" is not the same as "unsold" — a top prize counted as remaining 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, California scratchers, Florida scratch-offs, or see how draw games differ on the most winnable game map.
Estimates derived from Georgia 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.