How Much Do Americans Spend on the Lottery? Sales, Per-Person Spending and Who Plays

How much do Americans spend on the lottery each year?

The most complete public count comes from the Census Bureau's Annual Survey of State Government Finances, which collects the books of every state government, lottery included. Its newest figures are for fiscal year 2024. For most states that means July 2023 through June 2024, though a few lotteries run on a different calendar.

In that year, the 45 states that run a lottery sold $104.7 billion in tickets. The Census Bureau's April 2026 summary of the data puts that next to fiscal 2008, when sales were $52.8 billion, so lottery spending roughly doubled in 16 years. The Bureau notes that those amounts are not adjusted for inflation.

Two other well-known totals are slightly different, and it helps to know why before quoting any of them:

• NASPL, the lottery industry association, says US lottery sales "totaled over $113.3 billion" in fiscal 2024 and that lotteries passed almost $30.6 billion to their beneficiaries.
• La Fleur's, an industry magazine whose sales-by-game table is reprinted in the Delaware Lottery's audited fiscal 2024 report, counts $105.4 billion.

The three sources do not count everything the same way. Some lotteries also run video lottery terminals, sports betting or online games, and each source treats that revenue a little differently. The gap between them is under 10%, and all three tell the same story: Americans spend somewhere above $100 billion a year on lottery games. This article uses the Census figures for national and state totals because they are official, cover every lottery state on the same basis, and can be checked against Census population counts.

What is that per person?

Dividing $104.7 billion by the Census Bureau's estimate of the July 1, 2024 US population (about 340 million) gives about $308 per resident for the year. That average includes children, people who never play and residents of the five states with no lottery, so it understates what a typical player spends. Because fewer than a third of adults now buy a ticket in a given year (more on that below), spending per actual player is several times higher than $308.

Which states spend the most on lottery tickets?

Raw totals favor big states. California sold $9.28 billion in fiscal 2024, New York $8.95 billion, Florida $8.85 billion and Texas $8.39 billion; the Census Bureau notes that each of those four sold more than $8 billion. Per person, the picture changes. The table below divides each state's fiscal 2024 Census ticket sales by its July 1, 2024 population estimate from the Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 series. The figures are our own arithmetic on those two official datasets.

A few notes on reading the table:

• Massachusetts is in a league of its own. At $858 a head it spends about 18 times as much per resident as North Dakota. The La Fleur's table in Delaware's report reaches the same conclusion by a different route, ranking Massachusetts first in per capita sales at $876 and first in per capita scratch-off sales at $573.
• Some rows mix in machine revenue. In the Census data, prizes take about 67% of ticket sales nationally, but only 21% to 34% in Oregon, South Dakota, West Virginia and Rhode Island. Those states also run video lottery terminals, so their totals are built differently from a lottery that sells only tickets. Treat their per-person figures as rough comparisons.
• The big four sit in the middle. Per resident, New York spends about $448, Florida $380, Texas $268 and California $236.
• Who is missing. Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada and Utah have no state lottery; our guide to states without a lottery explains why. Washington, DC and Puerto Rico do run lotteries but are outside the Census state survey, so they are not ranked here.

Per-person figures also count tickets bought by visitors. A lottery sells to anyone standing in the state, including commuters from next door and tourists. The Census data cannot separate those buyers, so the table measures sales per resident, not what residents themselves spend.

Where does the money from lottery sales go?

The Census Bureau breaks every lottery dollar into three parts. In fiscal 2024, of the $104.7 billion in sales:

• Prizes: $70.2 billion, or about 67 cents of every dollar.
• Administration: $4.9 billion, or under 5 cents.
• Proceeds available to the state: $29.7 billion, or about 28 cents.

The prize share has been creeping up for years. The Census Bureau found that states kept 39% of ticket sales as net revenue (sales minus prizes) in fiscal 2008 but only 33% in fiscal 2024, as prizes grew faster than sales. Virginia paid out the largest share, 80% of its sales in prizes, followed by Kentucky at 75%.

Retailer commissions, vendor contracts and the programs each state funds are covered in detail in our explainer on where lottery money goes, so we won't repeat them here.

How much do Americans spend on scratch-offs compared with Powerball?

Most lottery money is spent on scratch-off tickets, not on the jackpot games that make the news. The La Fleur's sales-by-game table in the Delaware Lottery's fiscal 2024 report breaks the national total down like this:

• Instant (scratch-off) tickets: $61.8 billion
• Powerball: $7.6 billion
• Pick 3 and other three-digit games: $6.2 billion
• Pick 4 and other four-digit games: $5.2 billion
• Keno: $5.2 billion
• Mega Millions: $5.1 billion
• State lotto games: $3.8 billion
• "For Life" games: $0.7 billion
• Video lottery terminals: $7.9 billion, plus smaller amounts in pull-tabs and other products

Leave out the video lottery machines and scratch-offs account for about 63% of the remaining $97.5 billion, close to two-thirds. Powerball and Mega Millions together come to about 13%. The daily-numbers games, Pick 3 and Pick 4, sell almost as much as the two big jackpot games combined, even though they rarely get headlines.

The "For Life" line in that table was Lucky for Life and Cash4Life. Both were retired in February 2026 and replaced by Millionaire for Life, a $5 game; our guide to the for-life games covers the switch.

Why scratch-offs dominate

A scratch-off settles on the spot, and it usually pays back more in prizes than the jackpot games. Maine's fiscal 2024 annual report shows both effects in a single state: instant tickets brought in $326.4 million, 75.9% of the lottery's $430.2 million in ticket sales, while Powerball took 7.9% and Mega Millions 4.3%.

The same report shows where scratch-off money goes by price. In Maine, tickets priced at $5 or more made up about 87% of instant sales, and the $30 ticket alone brought in $55.4 million, 12.9% of all lottery sales. Pricier scratchers also return more: Maine's $30 games paid out 78.5% of sales in prizes and its $1 games 58.2%, against 49.3% for Powerball and 50.5% for Mega Millions. Our explainer on how scratch-off tickets work covers the odds printed on the back.

Who plays the lottery in America?

Fewer people than you might guess, and fewer every year. In a phone poll conducted June 1 to July 19, 2026, Gallup found that 31% of US adults said they had bought a state lottery ticket in the past year. Gallup writes that the figure had been in "the high-40% range between 2003 and 2016, before the sharper decline to 31% in the current survey." In the same poll, 45% of adults said they had done any kind of gambling in the past year, down from 64% a decade earlier.

Put that next to the sales figures and a pattern emerges: lottery spending has roughly doubled while the share of adults who play has fallen. More money is coming from fewer players, and those who play are spending more each.

Do lower-income Americans spend more on the lottery?

This question gets a lot of confident answers, and the evidence is more careful than most of them. Two findings hold up:

• Lower-income adults are not more likely to play. Gallup's 2016 survey, which broke lottery play down by household income, found that 40% of adults in households earning under $36,000 had bought a ticket in the past year, compared with 56% of those earning $36,000 to $89,999 and 53% of those earning $90,000 or more.
• When lower-income households do play, the cost weighs more heavily. In a study published in the Journal of Public Economics in 2005, economist Melissa Schettini Kearney found that household lottery spending crowds out about $38 a month, or 2%, of other household spending, "with larger proportional reductions among low-income households." Kearney also found that lottery demand rises when the expected value of a ticket rises, which she read as a sign that players are not simply uninformed about the odds.

So participation tilts toward the middle and upper-middle of the income scale, while the burden of each dollar spent falls hardest at the bottom. Those findings come from different years and methods, and neither proves that the poorest households spend the most in dollars. Treat any precise claim about the share of income poor households spend on tickets with care, and check which year and sample it comes from.

Do big jackpots increase lottery sales?

Yes, and you can see it in the national totals. The Census series shows US ticket sales rising every year since fiscal 2012 with only two dips, and the biggest jumps line up with record jackpots or unusual years:

• Fiscal 2016: sales up 9.0%, to $72.2 billion. That year included the $1.586 billion Powerball jackpot of January 13, 2016, shared by tickets sold in California, Florida and Tennessee.
• Fiscal 2017: sales down 1.2%, with no comparable jackpot run.
• Fiscal 2021: sales up 19.3%, to $95.5 billion, the largest jump in the series. The pandemic changed spending habits across the board that year, so not all of the increase is down to jackpots.
• Fiscal 2023: sales up 5.5%, to $103.3 billion, in a year that included the $2.04 billion Powerball jackpot of November 7, 2022, still the largest ever.

Game-level figures make the link clearer. In the La Fleur's table, Powerball sales rose 15.9% in fiscal 2024, a year that included the $1.765 billion jackpot of October 2023 and the $1.326 billion jackpot of April 2024. Mega Millions sales fell 12.4%. Jackpot runs don't line up neatly with fiscal years, though: the $1.602 billion Mega Millions jackpot of August 2023 fell inside most states' fiscal 2024, yet the game's sales still fell for the year.

Jackpot fever brings in occasional players who skip the smaller drawings, and they drift away again once the prize resets. Our article on why Powerball jackpots get so big explains how the game's design produces those runs. You can follow the current run on the Powerball results page.

Is lottery spending going up or down?

Over the long run, up. The Census series climbs from $59.3 billion in fiscal 2012 to $104.7 billion in fiscal 2024, and the prize share rose from 62.5% to 67.0% over the same stretch. In the short run, the trend has flattened. National growth slowed to 1.3% in fiscal 2024, and the La Fleur's table shows scratch-off sales down about 2% from fiscal 2023.

Two things will shape the next few years of data. Mega Millions moved to a $5 ticket with a built-in multiplier in April 2025, so its dollar sales and its number of tickets sold will no longer move together. And Gallup's 2026 drop to 31% participation suggests the pool of regular players is shrinking even as each player spends more. The Census Bureau releases each year's state finance data in the first quarter of a later year, so fiscal 2025 totals had not been published on the same basis when this article was written.

Is the lottery a good use of money?

As entertainment with a budget, it can be. As a plan to build wealth, it isn't. Nationally, prizes return about 67 cents of every dollar spent, and much of that goes to a small number of large winners. For the typical player, the expected return on a ticket is well below what it costs. Our breakdowns of lottery odds and of whether a ticket is ever worth buying go through the numbers game by game.

A few habits keep the lottery in the entertainment column:

• Set a monthly amount you would happily spend on a movie or a meal out, and stop there.
• Don't chase losses or buy more because a jackpot has grown. The odds of winning it stay the same.
• Watch out for scratch-off creep. Moving from $5 to $30 tickets multiplies the cost of each play by six.

If lottery spending has stopped feeling like a choice, the national problem gambling helpline is 1-800-MY-RESET, run by the National Council on Problem Gambling.

Sources: US Census Bureau, "Sales of Lottery Tickets Nearly Doubled and Prizes More Than Doubled From 2008 to 2024" (April 2026) and the underlying Income and Apportionment of State-Administered Lottery Funds table, fiscal years 2012 to 2024; Census Bureau Vintage 2025 state population estimates; NASPL FAQ; Delaware State Lottery Annual Comprehensive Financial Report, FY2024 (Exhibits XVI and XVII, reprinting La Fleur's Magazine); Maine Bureau of Alcoholic Beverages and Lottery Operations FY2024 Annual Report; Gallup, "Fewer U.S. Adults Say They Gamble" (August 2026) and "About Half of Americans Play State Lotteries" (July 2016); Melissa Schettini Kearney, "State Lotteries and Consumer Behavior", NBER Working Paper 9330, published in the Journal of Public Economics (2005).

Lottery spending FAQ

How much do Americans spend on the lottery per year?

US state lotteries sold $104.7 billion in tickets in fiscal year 2024, according to the Census Bureau's Annual Survey of State Government Finances. The industry association NASPL, which counts slightly differently, puts fiscal 2024 sales at over $113.3 billion.

How much does the average American spend on lottery tickets?

About $308 per resident in fiscal 2024, which is total Census ticket sales divided by the US population. Because only about 31% of adults bought a ticket in the past year, according to Gallup's 2026 poll, the average among people who actually play is much higher.

Which state spends the most on the lottery?

Massachusetts, at about $858 per resident in fiscal 2024, followed by Virginia at about $601 and Rhode Island at about $539. In total dollars, California sold the most, $9.28 billion, ahead of New York, Florida and Texas.

Do people spend more on scratch-offs or Powerball?

Scratch-offs, by a wide margin. In fiscal 2024, instant tickets sold $61.8 billion nationally, against $7.6 billion for Powerball and $5.1 billion for Mega Millions, according to the La Fleur's sales table reprinted in the Delaware Lottery's annual report.

What percentage of Americans play the lottery?

31% of US adults said they bought a state lottery ticket in the past year in Gallup's June to July 2026 poll, down from 49% in Gallup's 2016 survey and 57% in 1996 and 1999.