New York scratch-offs: what's actually left

A scratch-off whose top prizes have all been claimed stays on the rack at the same price, advertising the same headline number. New York publishes the data to see through that — it just never puts it in front of players.

The New York Lottery releases a daily prize status report covering every scratch-off game: for each prize tier, how many were printed, how many have been paid, and how many are still unpaid. We turn that into a ranking of which games still hold their prize money and which have been hollowed out.

How to read the value index

The value index compares how much of a game's prize money is still unclaimed against how many of its prizes are still unclaimed. It answers one question: has this game kept its big money, or spent it?

• 1.00 — the game still holds exactly the mix of prize money it launched with.
• Above 1.00 — unusually much of the large prize money is still out there.
• Below 1.00 — the big prizes have been claimed and mostly small ones remain, even though the ticket still costs the same and still advertises the top prize.

Also watch the top prize column. Games showing "all claimed" are still on sale with their headline prize entirely gone — the single most useful thing this data reveals.

Why New York has no "value per dollar" figure

Our Texas, California and Idaho pages show what each game returns in cents per dollar spent. That calculation needs the ticket price and the overall odds, and New York publishes neither in any machine-readable form. Rather than guess a price and present the result as fact, we use the price-independent index above, which measures the same underlying thing — whether a game is better or worse than when it started — using only data the state actually publishes.

If New York begins publishing prices, we'll add the full calculation here too.

How we calculate it

Every figure comes from the New York Lottery's Scratch-Off Game Daily Prize Status Report, published as open data by the state and refreshed daily. For each game we sum the cash value of prizes printed and prizes still unpaid, and compare the two shares. Annuity prizes — paid per week or per year for life — have no single cash value, so they are excluded from the value maths, though they still appear as top prizes.

One limitation carries across every state we cover: "unpaid" means unclaimed, not unsold. A top prize counted as unpaid may already sit in a ticket someone bought and hasn't redeemed. Late in a game's life that gap dominates, so games with more than 90% of prizes claimed are flagged and hidden by default — with few prizes left, the index swings on very small numbers.

Compare with other states on the scratch games hub, or see how draw games differ on the most winnable game map.