Scratch cards and instants
Expensive scratch cards genuinely return a higher percentage. Whether that makes them a better purchase is a different question.
This is one of the few lottery questions with a clean, operator-published answer — and one of the few where the obvious conclusion is half right.
The Minnesota Lottery publishes payout percentages by ticket price, defined as "the percentage of prizes that is expected to be paid out over the life of a game":
| Ticket price | Payout percentage |
|---|---|
| $1 | 63% |
| $2 | 65% |
| $3 | 66% |
| $5 | 68% |
| $10 | 70% |
| $20 | 72% |
| $50 | 74% |
Source: Minnesota Lottery.
The pattern is monotonic: the more the ticket costs, the higher the percentage returned. It holds broadly across operators, though the exact figures differ by jurisdiction, and it is stable enough to plan around.
Percentages and absolute losses point in opposite directions, which is the whole trap:
| Ticket price | Payout | Expected return | Expected loss per ticket |
|---|---|---|---|
| $1 | 63% | $0.63 | $0.37 |
| $5 | 68% | $3.40 | $1.60 |
| $10 | 70% | $7.00 | $3.00 |
| $20 | 72% | $14.40 | $5.60 |
| $50 | 74% | $37.00 | $13.00 |
A $50 ticket has the best percentage on the board and loses you 35 times more money per ticket than a $1 ticket. Both statements are true, and which one matters depends entirely on what is fixed in your decision.
Minnesota does not explain the mechanism, so the following is reasoning rather than a sourced claim. Two structural pressures point the same way:
Fixed costs per ticket. Printing, distribution and retailer commission are roughly per-ticket rather than proportional to price. On a $1 ticket those costs are a large share of revenue; on a $50 ticket they are trivial. More of the higher price is available to be returned as prizes.
Competitive pressure at the top end. Expensive tickets compete for a smaller, more deliberate group of buyers who are more likely to notice a poor prize structure. A weak $1 game still sells on impulse.
Play rate destroys the advantage.
A percentage is a loss per ticket, and higher price points are not usually bought one at a time as a substitute for cheaper ones — they are bought by people spending more. If moving from $1 to $20 tickets means your weekly spend rises from $5 to $40, the improved percentage is irrelevant: your expected loss went from $1.85 to $11.20 a week.
This is the same effect that makes instant games worse in practice than their headline returns suggest, despite beating draw games on percentage — see do scratch cards have better odds than the jackpot draw? and model your own history in the lifetime spend calculator.
Given a fixed budget, buy the highest price point that budget covers in whole tickets. That is a real, if modest, improvement — worth about 11 percentage points of return between the $1 and $50 tiers.
Do not let the percentage justify a larger budget. The percentage improves slowly; the stake improves it away instantly.
And check the specific game rather than assuming the tier average: a $20 game whose top prizes are already claimed can be worse than a fresh $5 game, as shown in prizes remaining and printed odds are not your odds.
Last verified: 2026-08-29