Lottery

You are not betting against a house. You are buying a share of a prize pool whose size is fixed by rule, and every state publishes where the rest of your dollar went.

A casino sets its own margin and keeps the difference. A lottery does something structurally different: the game rules state, in writing, what percentage of every dollar of sales goes into the prize pool, and the remainder is split between the retailer who sold you the ticket, the cost of running the operation, and a state beneficiary named in law. All four of those numbers are published, audited, and available to anyone who looks.

Almost nobody looks. These 37 guides cover the practical side: how each game works, where and when you can buy, how to check a ticket, what to do in the first hours after a win, and what the tax bill actually looks like. Below the post list is the part almost no lottery site prints. The real split of a sales dollar in six large states, taken from their own audited reports. The prize pool percentages written into the Powerball and Mega Millions rules. What the advertised jackpot number actually is, in the operators' own words. The federal tax figures from the IRS rather than from a rounding. And where unclaimed prize money goes.

To work out what a specific prize leaves you after tax, the lottery calculator does the arithmetic. This page is about the numbers going into it.

Six large state lotteries, from their own audited reports

Every state lottery publishes an annual financial report, most of them audited, and the report shows the split. These are the most recent published figures for six of the largest lotteries in the country. The percentages are of total sales.

Compiled from each lottery's own published annual or profit report for the fiscal year shown, checked 17 August 2026. Ohio's figures pool traditional games with video lottery terminals and sports betting, which is why its prize and commission percentages sit so far outside the others. Florida's running-cost figure is the legislature's appropriation rather than a reported actual. Pennsylvania excludes online-only profit reported separately. Categories do not always sum to 100 percent because some states carry unitemized game costs.

What the pattern shows

Strip out Ohio, which is measuring something broader, and the five comparable states agree closely. Prizes take roughly two thirds. The state takes roughly a fifth to a quarter. Retailers take five to nine percent. Running the operation costs under four percent. That consistency is not a coincidence, and section 02 explains why: the prize share is not a business decision made each year, it is written into the game rules.

The most useful way to read the table is as an answer to a question people ask constantly, which is whether the lottery is a good deal. Of every dollar you spend, around 67 cents is returned to players as prizes, though not to you specifically. Around 23 cents goes to a purpose your state named in statute. The rest pays the store and the administration. Where Does Lottery Money Go? covers what the state does with its share.

What the advertised figure means, in the operators' own words

The single most misunderstood number in the lottery is the one on the billboard. It is not the amount of money sitting in an account. Powerball says so directly.

The advertised figure is the annuity total: thirty payments, each five percent larger than the one before, spread over twenty-nine years. Mega Millions describes its own the same way, as one immediate payment followed by twenty-nine annual payments each five percent bigger than the last, which it says is intended to protect a winner's purchasing power against inflation.

The cash value is the different number, and it is the one that corresponds to actual money.

Read those two together and the relationship inverts from how people usually describe it. The cash value is not a discounted version of the jackpot. The cash value is the real pot. The advertised annuity is what that pot grows into if it is invested over twenty-nine years, and Powerball is open about how that works: the annuity factor is built from interest rates on securities purchased to fund the payments, and the association takes bids on those securities after the drawing.

Both numbers are estimates until the drawing closes

Powerball states that the advertised annuity and cash value are estimates until ticket sales are final. That is a direct consequence of section 02. Since the jackpot is fed by a fixed share of sales, and sales are still happening right up to the cutoff, nobody knows the exact figure until the window shuts. A jackpot that is announced at one number and confirmed at another has not been revised for any dramatic reason. Sales came in above or below the forecast.

The complete official prize tables for both national games

Most coverage quotes one number, the jackpot odds, which is the least useful of the nine. Both operators publish the full ladder, and the lower tiers are where nearly every prize actually gets paid.

Taken from the official prize charts published by powerball.com and megamillions.com, checked 17 August 2026. Mega Millions prizes shown are at the base multiplier. Powerball figures are the base game without Power Play. Odds are rounded to whole numbers below the top two tiers.

The number worth remembering

Powerball publishes an overall figure: the odds of winning any prize at all are 1 in 24.87. That is a genuinely different fact from 1 in 292 million, and it explains something people find puzzling, which is why so many tickets turn out to be worth four dollars. Roughly one ticket in twenty-five wins something, and the overwhelming majority of those wins are the smallest two tiers.

The bottom two rows are also where the two games differ most. Matching the Mega Ball alone pays ten dollars at odds of one in thirty-five. Matching the Powerball alone pays four dollars at one in thirty-eight. Those tiers are the ones that decide how often a game feels like it is paying out, which is a different question from how much it pays. How Many Numbers to Win Powerball? goes tier by tier, and What Are the Odds of Winning the Lottery? puts the top line in perspective.

Tickets go unclaimed constantly, and the law says where the money goes

Every drawing produces winning tickets nobody claims. Small prizes on tickets that were never checked, tickets lost in a car, tickets thrown away by someone who assumed they had lost. It happens at every prize level, occasionally at very large ones, and the scale is not small.

California's lottery has stated that more than 1.1 billion dollars in prizes have gone unclaimed since it began selling tickets in 1985, and that when nobody claims a ticket, the money goes to public schools in line with the lottery's statutory mission. Texas handles it differently and in more detail: state law directs unclaimed prize money first to indigent health care and to hospitals in border areas, up to annual caps, then to a fund for veterans' assistance, with anything remaining going to the state's school fund.

Two useful things fall out of that. First, unclaimed money is not kept by the lottery as profit. It is redirected to a beneficiary named in statute, usually the same one the lottery's normal proceeds go to. Second, the rules are state-specific, so the answer to what happens to unclaimed money in your state is a question with an actual published answer.

How long you have

Claim deadlines are set by the selling jurisdiction rather than by the game, which is why there is no single answer. Powerball's own guidance puts the range plainly: ticket expiration dates typically vary from ninety days to one year depending on where the ticket was sold.

That range is wide enough to matter. A ticket bought on a trip may be governed by a ninety-day deadline in a state you no longer live in, and there is no mechanism that reminds you. The practical response is unglamorous and effective: check tickets promptly, keep the ones you have checked until you are certain, and know the deadline in the state where you bought rather than the state where you live. Do Lottery Tickets Expire? covers the deadlines state by state, and How to Check Lottery Tickets covers doing it properly.

Three lottery claims that circulate everywhere and appear in no official document

These turn up in almost every article about winning, including on sites that are otherwise careful. None of them comes from a lottery, from the IRS, from the Census Bureau or from the trade association.

• The cash value is about 60 percent of the advertised jackpot. Neither Powerball nor Mega Millions publishes any fixed ratio. Both define the cash value only as the money actually in the jackpot pool on the day of the drawing, which moves with interest rates and with ticket sales. The ratio is real in the sense that you can calculate it after the fact for any given drawing, and it is not a constant, and it is not published as a rule of thumb by anyone official. Interest rates in particular move it: higher rates mean a smaller pot buys a bigger annuity.
• Seventy percent of lottery winners go broke. This is repeated constantly and we could not trace it to any study, agency, lottery report or trade body. No official source we checked publishes a figure for what happens to winners' finances over time. That does not mean large sudden wealth is easy to manage, and the guidance in this collection about assembling professional help before claiming is sound advice regardless. It means the specific statistic has no visible origin, and it should not be presented as a finding. Financial Advisor for Lottery Winners and Famous Lottery Winner Stories deal with the real version of this concern.
• Hot and cold numbers. Frequency tables of past draws are widely published, and they are accurate records of what has happened. What no official source endorses is treating them as predictive. The published game rules describe each drawing as an independent event, and a number drawn frequently in the past has exactly the same chance next time as one that has never come up. Luckiest Lottery Numbers and How to Pick Lottery Numbers explain what number selection can and cannot do.

All 37 lottery guides, grouped by where you are

The archive above runs newest first. These groups follow the sequence most people actually need: understand the game, buy a ticket, check it, and then, in the unlikely event, deal with what happens next. To work out a take-home figure, use the lottery calculator, and the rest of the money tools sit in calculators.

Lottery questions, with the source named