A Scratch-Off whose big prizes have already been claimed keeps selling 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 Indiana Lottery publishes, for every prize tier of every game, how many prizes were printed and how many are still unclaimed. That is enough to work out exactly what each game has left — so we pull it daily and rank every active game.
Cheap tickets pay back the least
Average value returned per dollar, grouped by ticket price, across every active Indiana game.
We don't draw a price/value curve for Indiana, because there aren't enough price points in the data we can trust to show one — only 2 survive the limits described below. In states that publish complete prize tables the pattern is consistent and strong: see the eighteen states where it holds.
Every Indiana game we can price, 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.
Across every state we analyse, cheaper tickets return less — we tested that on 1,275 games in 18 states and it held in all of them: read the full analysis.
Every Indiana game launches returning roughly 75 % to 78 % 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
Indiana is the one state where we publish only a fraction of the rack, and the reason is worth stating plainly. Indiana's prize tables are truncated: the site's own footnote says the table 'may not be inclusive of all prizes in the game', and in practice no prize below $30 is ever listed. The missing tiers are winning tickets, so working from the published table alone understates how many tickets were printed and overstates what a game returns — by roughly 15-30% on cheap tickets. The clearest proof is a $1 game called $50 Frenzy, whose published table would imply it pays back more than ten times its price. The full prize ladder exists only inside scanned rules PDFs with no extractable text, and we will not invent the missing tiers. So this page covers only games priced at or above Indiana's $30 publication floor, where every prize in the ladder is actually published and the arithmetic is sound. Note that a plausibility check alone would not catch this: the inflated cheaper games produce payout figures that look entirely normal.
Two honest limitations. Indiana 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 on the scratch games hub, or see how draw games differ on the most winnable game map.
Estimates derived from Indiana Lottery published prize data — not official figures, and not a prediction about any individual ticket. These games 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.