What Is Scratch-Off Expected Value?

What Expected Value means

Years ago at a stock and options trading meeting, I learned the framing that has stuck with me ever since. I was running high-probability options trades and feeling smart about winning often. The trader at the front of the room shut that down in one sentence: it doesn’t matter how often you win, it matters what the math actually looks like across many trades. That is Expected Value in plain English.

The same math principle applies to scratch-offs, with one structural difference. State lotteries design their games so the long-run average return is below the ticket price; the lottery’s margin is built into the game. EV/Dollar is a tool for comparing scratch-offs against each other, not for beating them.

For a scratch-off, Expected Value (EV) is the average dollar amount a single ticket is statistically worth, based on the prizes still unclaimed and the tickets still on the shelf. EV is a long-run average across many plays, not a guess about any individual ticket you buy. Most tickets pay nothing. The average across many is what EV measures.

The math, walked through

The EV calculation has two pieces. First, sum the dollar value of every prize still unclaimed across all tiers. For a $5 game with two $100,000 prizes, fifty $1,000 prizes, and fifty thousand $10 prizes still on the shelf, that is:

(2 × $100,000) + (50 × $1,000) + (50,000 × $10)
= $200,000 + $50,000 + $500,000
= $750,000 in unclaimed prize dollars

Second, divide by the total tickets still in circulation. State lotteries don’t publish that number directly, so Scratch IQ derives it from two values they do publish: the total prize-winning tickets still unclaimed across all tiers (here 2 + 50 + 50,000 = 50,052), multiplied by the published overall odds. If overall odds are 1 in 4, then tickets remaining is 50,052 × 4 ≈ 200,208.

EV = $750,000 / 200,208 ≈ $3.75 per ticket
EV/Dollar = $3.75 / $5 ≈ $0.75

A ticket on this game is statistically worth about $3.75 on average, or about 75 cents per dollar spent. That is in the typical launch-state range for a healthy scratch-off (60 to 75 cents on the dollar). The full formula and per-state derivation lives on the methodology page.

Same math runs across every game in the dataset. The raw EV value depends on ticket price, though, so a $1 ticket and a $30 ticket with the same $0.83 EV are wildly different bets. To compare across price points, Scratch IQ normalizes by dividing EV by the ticket price. The result is EV/Dollar: the average dollar value returned per dollar spent. A $1 game in Florida and a $30 game in California can be compared on the same scale.

What moves the number

EV/Dollar isn’t static. It moves as prizes get claimed, and sometimes it moves a lot. One worked example from Scratch IQ’s dataset: Scorching Hot 7s, a $10 Florida game with a $2 million top prize and overall odds of 1 in 3.39. Across late April and early May 2026, the game’s EV/Dollar drifted from around $1.36 down to around $1.02. The Florida ranking shows the live value today; the snapshot here is the trajectory, not the current state.

The drop happened because top-tier prizes got claimed. When a few headline prizes come off the board, the remaining prize pool loses a chunk of dollar value relative to the tickets still in circulation. EV/Dollar follows the math down.

The opposite happens too. If small prizes get claimed faster than the headline prizes, the remaining ticket pool now has a richer mix of top-prize dollars per ticket. That is how a game late in its life can push EV/Dollar above $1.00, even though the lottery designed the game to start in the $0.60 to $0.75 range. The math doesn’t care which tickets are still on the shelf; it just measures what is left.

Scratch IQ re-runs the EV/Dollar calculation every day after collecting the latest published remaining-prize counts from each state lottery. Most states publish those counts daily; three (Minnesota, Colorado, and Montana) publish only launch counts and no daily depletion data, so their EV/Dollar values are static: frozen at the launch payout. A handful of other states publish partial tier data; Scratch IQ reconstructs the rest using modeled tiers.

How to use it

Scratch IQ ranks every active scratch-off in 41 states + DC by current EV/Dollar. Pick a state from /scratch-offs and you’ll see every game sorted by the number, refreshed daily. Florida’s ranking is at /scratch-offs/fl; same pattern for any other launched state. You can also see the actual prize charts on each state lottery’s own website, including the Florida Lottery’s scratch-off page and the New York Lottery’s scratch-off games page; those are the source of every number on this site.

EV/Dollar is decision-support, not a prediction. It tells you which games have the most prize value still on the shelf right now. Whether you play any game is your call; Scratch IQ is informational only, not gambling, financial, or investment advice.

Bottom line

Back to the trader at the front of the room. The lesson was always about the math, not the win rate: the long-run average is what matters, not any single trade. EV/Dollar is the per-dollar version of that lesson applied to scratch-offs. It is a number, not a winning system. Read it, decide for yourself, and remember that every individual ticket is still random by design.