The Receipt Says My Ticket Has Expired. Can I Still Claim The Prize?

A message from a player this week is a reminder about why we emphasize the expiration dates for Iowa Lottery prizes.

In this particular instance, the player had purchased an InstaPlay ticket several months ago that won a $5 prize. He checked his ticket last week and received a customer receipt stating that the ticket had expired. The player reached out to us to ask if the information was correct. It is, and it’s too late for him to claim the prize.

From a record-keeping perspective, the lottery establishes end dates for its scratch, pull-tab and InstaPlay games and the corresponding expiration dates for prizes in them. There also are deadlines for claiming prizes in our lotto games (365 days from the date of the drawing in the Powerball®, Mega Millions®, Lotto America®, and Lucky for Life® games; and 90 days from the date of the drawing in Iowa’s Pick 3 and Pick 4 games).

In the case of the player who contacted us, the expiration date for his ticket in the Jumbo Bucks Progressive InstaPlay game was 90 days from the date of purchase.

Here is further background about the issue of ticket expiration dates: Technology has changed so much that our equipment today can’t read the results of tickets from years ago. And simply from a space perspective – physical or electronic – it would be nearly impossible to maintain decades’ worth of the detailed records necessary for a lottery prize to be claimed.

Those realities dictate that there are deadlines by which lottery prizes need to be claimed.

The good news is that money from unclaimed prizes here in Iowa goes into the lottery’s prize pools for future games and promotions, so it will be used to pay prizes, just not those prizes that have expired.

We keep several items on our website to help you track our games and prizes. For our pull-tab and scratch games, we keep lists of those games where ticket distribution has recently ended and the deadlines by which prizes must be claimed in those games with official end dates.

For our lotto and InstaPlay games, we provide a list of prizes of $600 or more that are still unclaimed.

Bottom line, if you’ve won a lottery prize, claim it quickly so you don’t have to worry about bumping up against the expiration date!