A Texas scratch game whose top prizes have all been claimed still sells at exactly the same price, with the same big number printed on the front. Nothing on the rack tells you the prize you're chasing is already gone.
The Texas Lottery publishes enough to work it out — every game's print run, and how many of each prize have been claimed — so we do the arithmetic for all 75 games on sale: how much prize money is still unclaimed, how many tickets are left, and therefore what a dollar spent on that game actually buys today.
The clearest pattern: cheap tickets pay back least
Average value returned per dollar, grouped by ticket price, across every Texas game currently on sale.
This is the most reliable finding in the data, and it is remarkably consistent: the more a ticket costs, the larger the share of sales that comes back as prizes. A $1 ticket is the worst value on the rack by a wide margin. That does not make a $50 ticket a good bet — it is still a guaranteed loss on average, just a smaller one per dollar staked, and it puts far more money at risk per ticket.
Every Texas scratch game, 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 that across all the tickets still out there, players will get back about 70 cents per dollar spent. "At launch" is the same figure for the full print run — what the game was designed to pay.
The gap between those two 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. One above it still has unusually much prize money outstanding. The "riding on top prize" column is the health warning: where a large share of the remaining value sits in one prize tier, the rating depends on a couple of tickets that may already be sold, so treat it as fragile.
Every Texas scratch game launches returning roughly 60% to 80% of sales as prizes. That spread 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
Texas publishes unusually complete data. Each game's detail page states the total number of tickets printed, the overall odds, and a full prize table listing every tier's printed count and how many have been claimed — with no withheld rows. Subtracting claims gives what remains; comparing total claims against total prizes shows roughly how far through the print run the game is, which gives the tickets still available.
Two honest limitations. Texas does not publish a percent-sold figure, so we infer it from the share of prizes claimed; because small prizes often go unredeemed, that understates sales and therefore makes these value figures slightly conservative. More importantly, "remaining" means unclaimed, not unsold — a top prize counted as remaining may already sit in a ticket someone bought and hasn't redeemed. Late in a print run that gap dominates, so games over 90% sold are flagged and hidden by default.
Comparing states? See the same analysis for Idaho scratch tickets, or how your state's draw games stack up on the most winnable game map.
Estimates derived from Texas Lottery published prize and sales data — not official figures, and not a prediction about any individual ticket. Scratch 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.