Idaho scratch tickets: what's actually left

Here is something the ticket rack will never tell you: a scratch game whose top prizes have already been claimed still sells for exactly the same price. The $20 ticket advertising a $200,000 jackpot may have no $200,000 prizes left at all — and nothing on the packaging changes.

The Idaho Lottery publishes enough data to fix that, so we do the arithmetic: for every game on sale, how much unclaimed prize money remains, how many tickets are left to buy, and therefore what a dollar spent on that game actually buys today.

How to read this

"Value per $1 now" is the unclaimed prize money divided by what it would cost to buy every remaining ticket. If a game shows 68%, then across all the tickets still out there, players will get back about 68 cents for each dollar they spend. "At launch" is the same figure for the full print run — what the game was designed to pay.

Comparing the two columns is the whole point. A game sitting well below its launch figure has had its big prizes claimed and is now a worse deal than it was designed to be. A game above it still has unusually much of its prize money outstanding.

The last column, "riding on top prize," is a health warning on that figure: it shows how much of the remaining value sits in the single largest prize tier. Where that share is high, the whole number depends on one or two tickets that may already have been sold — so treat a strong rating there as far more fragile than one built on thousands of mid-size prizes still outstanding.

Every Idaho scratch game starts life returning roughly 62% to 78% of sales as prizes. That range is the house edge, and no game escapes it — this table only shows which are currently least bad, never which are good. For the underlying idea see what expected value means and where your lottery dollar goes.

How we calculate it

For each game the Idaho Lottery publishes the ticket price, the overall odds, the percentage of tickets sold, and a prize table listing every tier's original count, unclaimed count and odds. From any tier, original count × that tier's odds gives the size of the print run — and we check that every tier agrees before trusting it. Multiplying by the unsold percentage gives tickets remaining; summing unclaimed prizes gives the money still in play.

Two honest limitations. First, Idaho withholds remaining counts for prizes under $25, so those tiers are estimated as their original count times the unsold share — they are numerous enough that they deplete very close to proportionally, and the large prizes that actually move the number carry published exact figures. Second, and more important: "remaining" means unclaimed, not unsold. A top prize counted as remaining may already sit in a ticket someone bought and hasn't scratched or redeemed. Late in a print run that gap dominates, which is why games over 90% sold are flagged and hidden by default — their apparent value is an artefact, not an opportunity.

Figures update daily from the Idaho Lottery's published data. See our methodology page for how we handle data across the site.