Expiration Dates For Tickets

I’ve gotten a couple calls this week from people who had come across Iowa Lottery tickets that were several years old and well past their expiration dates. The callers wanted to know how expiration dates are triggered and how long you have to claim lottery tickets in Iowa. 

The expiration dates for lottery tickets can be triggered in several different ways. In our lotto games, the drawing date for which you have bought a ticket determines the deadline by which you must claim your prize (approximately one year from the date of the drawing in Powerball and Hot Lotto, about 90 days in Iowa’s $100,000 Cash Game, Pick 3 and Pick 4).

In our instant-scratch and pull-tab games, there are several possibilities that can establish the expiration date by which you must claim a prize. For example, if the last top prize in one of our games is claimed, we remove that game from sale, which begins the process of establishing the deadline by which you must claim your prize. Or, if a game sells out, that also can trigger the process to begin. So can the lottery’s decision to remove a game from the market if it is no longer one of our top sellers.

When we establish the expiration dates for our games, we announce them in a variety of ways. That information is always available on our Web site, we put up signs in our offices and many of our retail locations, and we send out news releases to alert folks to the upcoming deadlines. We ensure that we give our players a lot of time to claim their prizes and we take seriously our responsibility to keep them informed about lottery policies that affect them.

Here’s the next thing I’ll bet you want to know: What happens to the money from prizes that aren’t claimed? It goes into our future prize pools and is used to pay prizes in upcoming games, so ultimately players will receive the money.