Player Comment: I Think The Lottery Pays Out Less Today …

We heard this week from a man who was unhappy with the lottery, and let us know he’s convinced our prize payouts have gone down over time.

Now, I get that he wants to win big and likely won’t ever be truly satisfied unless that happens. But in fact, the Iowa Lottery’s prize payouts have gone up over time, not down. I’m sharing the numbers with you here so you’ll have the details involved.

In fiscal year 1986, the first year that the Iowa Lottery was in operation, 46 percent of each dollar in lottery sales in Iowa went to pay prizes. (Iowa Lottery sales that year totaled a little more than $85 million and prizes totaled $39.3 million.) 

In fiscal year 2020, our latest financial year that just ended June 30, 64 cents of each $1 in Iowa Lottery sales went to prizes. (Lottery sales in FY 2020 totaled about $372 million while prizes totaled $236.3 million.)  

That’s an 18 percent increase in our prize payouts since the lottery’s first year.

People can and do win Iowa Lottery prizes every day, and everyone has the same chance of winning. But you’re gambling when you play the lottery, so winning – and not winning – are both a part of it.

And if buying lottery tickets is making you unhappy or causing you stress, then take a break or maybe decide not to do it at all. It’s your decision as a consumer.

Comments

[Kerri Miller-Carlson]

I agree and my friends and I were just talking about it the other day and they always winning and haven’t been either we bought 50 in tickets this weekend and only got $8 so after we enter second chances we will be done

[CP James]

The game Xtreme Winnings is the worst 10 dollar ticket I have ever played in my life. I've spent well over $200.00 on that ticket and haven't won not once.

[Tom Cauklins]

The Iowa Lottery pay outs have really gone way down, but I'm not allowed why they try to make you think they went up. Sales is way down in all areas of the lottery, because of the covid-19 virus and job loss in Iowa.

[Mary Neubauer]

Hi, James. You've likely heard us talk about the odds of winning in our games many times, and I'll go over those details again here now. In a scratch game, if the overall odds of winning are about 1 in 3.41, that does not mean that if you buy four tickets in a row, one of them will automatically win a prize. Rather, it means that if you were to buy all of the tickets available in that game, about 1 in 4 of them would win a prize, with winning tickets randomly distributed throughout the game. (There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of tickets in one of our scratch games.) Remember that each play in a lottery game is random and the results of prior tickets have no impact on an upcoming play. The video in the link here explains more about lottery odds, including an easy reference to remember with a deck of cards:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N66WI9yzTRw

[Mary Neubauer]

Hi, Connie. Some winners are just more celebratory by their nature and want to take a photo to remember the moment they claimed their prize. Other folks are more subdued, and we understand that. Not everyone responds to life events the same way. We offer our winners the opportunity to take a photo and receive an oversized, ceremonial check, but not everyone chooses to do that.