Now that holiday celebrations are winding down for a lot of us, we’re hearing from folks asking if they can use gift cards to buy lottery tickets in Iowa. The quick answer is: Yes. But there are more details involved, so please keep reading.
From a legal perspective, a gift card is the same as cash, so under Iowa law, it can be used to purchase lottery tickets.
But some retail locations may have policies that bar the use of gift cards for lottery purchases, just as they may ban personal checks for any purchase. Stores can and do develop their own policies for what’s allowed in their place of business, and we understand that.
The same thing applies to the use of debit cards to buy lottery tickets. While it’s legal for debit cards to be used to buy lottery products in Iowa, some stores may have policies against that. To be sure, please check with the business involved.
(Here are some further notes about the use of debit cards: In Iowa, state law prohibits the use of credit when making a lottery purchase. But a debit transaction is always tied to available funds, so as long as the card says DEBIT on the front, it’s OK to use it for a lottery transaction so long as the store involved allows that. If it’s a CREDIT card, it’s illegal to use it to buy lottery tickets in Iowa.
When you’re using a DEBIT card, even if it’s run on the credit setting, the money involved is still coming from available funds, so it is still a DEBIT transaction. A debit card never involves anything other than available funds, meaning cash. We had wondered about that particular detail ourselves, so we checked with the network folks who process the transactions. They confirmed that DEBIT always = available cash.)