Florida scratch-off games, ranked by what they pay back

Where these numbers come from

Florida publishes the complete prize structure of every scratch-off game as law. Each game is a rule of the Florida Administrative Code. Subsection (11) of that rule lists every prize tier, its odds, and exactly how many winning tickets were printed, alongside the ticket price and the size of the print run. Returns is total prize money divided by total ticket sales, from those figures. It is arithmetic on published values, not an estimate.

Each row links to its rule. Every tier is checked before it counts: odds × winners must reproduce the print run, or the game is dropped rather than reported with a wrong number.

What “top prizes left” does and doesn’t tell you

That column is live from the Lottery’s own feed and is the one number here that changes. It is shown separately on purpose. The Lottery publishes remaining counts for top prizes only, not for every tier, so it cannot be folded into the return figure. With eight top prizes in a game, “4 of 8” says very little about how much of the game has actually sold. A game whose jackpots are gone is worse than its stated return; how much worse is not knowable from published data.

Every one of these games is an emergency

Not one game on this page was adopted the way Florida adopts a rule. None of the 84 games below went through the notice, comment and hearing process the Administrative Procedure Act otherwise requires, and none of them expires. Every one arrived as an emergency rule, and they have been arriving that way, one ticket design at a time, since the first game went on sale in 1988.

That is not a figure of speech, it is the mechanism. An emergency rule ordinarily requires an agency to find an immediate danger to the public health, safety or welfare, and it dies in 90 days (s. 120.54(4), Fla. Stat.). Section 24.109(1) relieves the Lottery of both requirements. It may adopt emergency rules “at any time,” it “need not make the findings required by s. 120.54(4)(a),” and its rules “shall remain in effect until replaced.” The Legislature went on to write down what the emergency actually is. The statute names two things: the need to “provide additional funds to benefit the public,” and the need to “respond as quickly as is practicable to changes in the marketplace.”

The emergency is the marketing calendar. A new ticket design is, as a matter of Florida law, a circumstance urgent enough to set aside ordinary rulemaking, using a power the Legislature built for contaminated water and failing bridges. The exception has swallowed the rule so completely that for scratch-off games the ordinary process is never used at all. That is 38 years of continuous emergency, and counting.

The house edge is written into the statute

The percentages in the Returns column are not what a market settled on, and not what an actuary decided was fair. The Legislature told the Lottery how to set them. Section 24.121(1) directs that the share of gross revenue returned to players “shall be established by the department in a manner designed to maximize the amount of funds deposited” into the Educational Enhancement Trust Fund. Not a fair return. Not a competitive one. A return set to maximize the take.

And the take is heaviest where it is least affordable. The median $1 ticket on this board returns 61 cents on the dollar. The median $50 ticket returns 75. The cheapest tickets, the ones stacked by the register at every gas station in this state, are the worst deal on the board. That is what a regressive tax looks like with a scratch coating on it.

The same game is a felony when you run it

Florida never decided that numbers games were harmless. Setting up, promoting or conducting a lottery is a third-degree felony under s. 849.09(1)(a). Selling a ticket is a crime. Possessing one is a crime. And under s. 849.09(1)(j), so is possessing “any list or schedule of any lottery prizes.” The prize schedules this page is built from are exactly that. The state publishes them itself, in its own code, and they are what make this page possible.

This state prosecuted bolita for the better part of a century. Sagonias v. State, 89 So. 2d 252 (Fla. 1956), is a Florida Supreme Court opinion about a man convicted of running the same kind of game the state now advertises on television. What changed in 1986 was not the morality of it and not the arithmetic. Voters amended the constitution to allow lotteries operated by the state, and the state took the concession for itself. Everybody else kept the felony.

None of this is hidden. It is published, rule by rule, in tables nobody reads. All this page does is add them up.