What "worth" means here
A scratch-off ticket costs a fixed price, but what it pays is random. Most tickets pay nothing. A few pay a little. A very few pay a lot. To put one number on a ticket, you use its expected value: the average amount a ticket pays out if you average over every ticket printed.
You find it by taking each prize, multiplying it by the chance of winning that prize, and adding the results. You don't need to guess at any of this. State lotteries publish the prize table for every game, with the odds of each prize and how many of each were printed.
The ticket: Straight 8's
Take a $1 ticket from the California Lottery called Straight 8's. Its prize table lists 10 possible prizes, from a free ticket up to $888. These are the stated odds for each one:
- $888: 1 in 493,152
- $100: 1 in 16,069
- $88: 1 in 7,477
- $30: 1 in 960
- $18: 1 in 240
- $10: 1 in 120
- $8: 1 in 60
- $4: 1 in 48
- $2: 1 in 16
- A free ticket: about 1 in 10
Working out the expected value
Each row adds its share. The $2 prize comes up 1 time in 16, so it adds 2 ÷ 16, or 12.5 cents, to the average ticket. The $888 prize is so rare it adds less than a fifth of a cent. Do this for all nine cash prizes and add them up, and the cash comes to about 55 cents per ticket.
That leaves the free ticket. It has no cash value, but it isn't worth nothing, because it's another Straight 8's ticket. And we just worked out that a ticket is worth about 55 cents. A free ticket comes up about 10.4% of the time, so it adds 10.4% of 55 cents:
55.1¢ + 0.104 × 55.1¢ ≈ 60.8¢
But now a ticket is worth 60.8 cents, so the free ticket is worth more than we said. Plug the new value back in and you get 61.4 cents. Again, and you get 61.5. Each round changes less, and the value settles at about 61.5 cents. There's also a shortcut: dividing the cash value by the chance of not getting a free ticket gives the same answer in one step.
55.1¢ ÷ (1 − 0.104) ≈ 61.5¢
So the $1 ticket is worth about 61.5 cents. On average, each one loses about 38.5 cents.
Every game on sale
The same method works for all 55 scratchers the California Lottery was selling in late October 2026. Grouping them by price and averaging the share of the price each one pays back:
- $1 to $3 tickets: about 61% to 62%
- $5 tickets: about 68%
- $10 tickets: about 73%
- $20 tickets: about 76%
- $30 and $40 tickets: about 79%
So the pricier the ticket, the more it pays back per dollar. But the loss per ticket still grows. A $1 ticket loses about 39 cents on average. A $40 ticket paying back about 79% loses about $8 on average. A better rate on a bigger stake is still a bigger loss.
How many tickets were printed
The prize table also tells you how big the game is. Straight 8's has 90 tickets that win $888, and the odds of that prize are 1 in 493,152. If 1 ticket in every 493,152 is a winner and there are 90 winners, the total printed is:
90 × 493,152 = 44,383,680 tickets
That's about 44.4 million. The top prize gives the cleanest count, because its odds are listed with the least rounding. About 4.6 million of those tickets are free-ticket prizes, which nobody pays for, so about 39.8 million tickets actually get bought. At $1 each, that's $39.8 million in sales. The cash prizes add up to about $24.5 million. The other $15.3 million stays with the lottery and the stores that sell the tickets.
Run the same count over all 55 games, assuming every ticket sells and every prize is claimed, and you get about $10.5 billion in sales and $7.8 billion in prizes. The remaining $2.7 billion gets split between funding for California's public schools, the retailers' share, and the cost of running the lottery.
What it means
Every scratcher on sale is built to pay back less than it costs. That isn't a flaw in any one game. It's how the game is designed, and it's printed in the prize tables for anyone to check. Expected value doesn't tell you what will happen on a single ticket. It tells you where the average lands across many tickets, and for every game here, that average is a loss of roughly 20 to 40 cents on each dollar spent.
Sources: California Lottery scratcher prize tables (calottery.com), including the Straight 8's prize table, for the 55 games on sale as of October 27–28, 2026.