Data, records and curiosities
The record is not for the oldest lottery ever held — those are medieval. It is for the oldest that never stopped, and the Dutch state lottery has been drawing for three centuries.
The world's oldest continuously running lottery is the Dutch Staatsloterij, founded in 1726.
Three qualifications are doing real work in that sentence, and they are the whole story.
"Lottery" — meaning stakes, a random draw and a prize. Drawing lots to allocate land or office is far older, but it is not a lottery.
"Oldest" — the Staatsloterij is by no means the first lottery ever held. Cash-prize lotteries ran in the Low Countries in the 15th century, including a documented draw at L'Ecluse on 9 May 1445 that sold 4,304 tickets to fund town walls. Milan held one in 1449. Elizabeth I chartered England's in 1566. All of them predate 1726 by centuries, and none of them still exists. The full chronology is in lotteries through history.
"Continuously running" — this is the qualifier that decides the record. It is an award for survival, not invention.
The claim is not folklore. The European Lotteries, the umbrella body of European state lottery operators, states on its own site that "the oldest continously running lottery game in the world is the Dutch Staatsloterij, organised for the first time in 1726" — the misspelling is in the original (European Lotteries).
Two things worth knowing before you repeat it:
The Generaliteitsloterij — the lottery of the Generality, the Dutch Republic's central authority — was established in 1726. In 1848 it was renamed the Nederlandse Staatsloterij, and it has drawn under that name ever since (Staatsloterij, Dutch Wikipedia).
The operator's 2026 marketing is built around "300 jaar Staatsloterij" — three hundred years — and the line "Al drie eeuwen lang kijkt Nederland uit naar de trekking": for three centuries, the Netherlands has been looking forward to the draw. Two thousand and twenty-six minus 1726 is exactly three hundred, which corroborates the founding date from the institution itself.
Today the game is operated by Staatsloterij B.V., a subsidiary of Nederlandse Loterij B.V., which was formed in 2016 from the merger of Staatsloterij and Lotto. It was previously run by SENS — Stichting Exploitatie Nederlandse Staatsloterij — established in 1992, until 2018.
Second place has an equally precise date. Spain's Lotería Nacional held its first draw on 4 March 1812, and is described as "the second-longest continuously running lottery in the world, just behind Dutch Staatsloterij running since 1726" (Wikipedia).
Spain did have an earlier lottery — its first was in 1763, under Charles III — but 1763 is still later than 1726, so it does not displace the Dutch claim on either reading.
Its Christmas edition, the Sorteo Extraordinario de Navidad, began later the same year: the first Christmas draw was held on 18 December 1812 in Cádiz, with the grand prize going to ticket number 03604. Spain was under French occupation at the time and Cádiz was the seat of the resistance government — which is to say the lottery was launched, and has run without interruption ever since, from a besieged city.
The Navidad draw now takes place on 22 December, and has been held at Madrid's Teatro Real since 2012. See Lotería de Navidad.
Look at the format both share and the answer becomes obvious.
Neither is a jackpot game. The Staatsloterij is a raffle: each lot carries a unique printed number, and winning combinations are drawn from the lots actually sold. So is the Navidad draw, which issues 100,000 five-digit numbers across many identical series, with each full billete split into ten décimos. See Staatsloterij and the odds explanation in how lottery odds are calculated.
That structure has three survival advantages a rollover jackpot game does not have:
1. No rollover, so no runaway liability. The prize fund is a share of tickets actually sold. It cannot climb to a level the state has to fund out of reserves, and it cannot produce the boom-and-bust sales cycle that makes modern jackpot games financially lumpy.
2. Prizes are spread widely. The Staatsloterij's operator reports that about half of all full lots won at least the €5 minimum prize across 2025's draws. Navidad's prize structure is famously broad — €4,000,000 per series for El Gordo, which is €400,000 per décimo, alongside enormous numbers of smaller prizes. A game where a great many people win something modest is a much stabler institution than one where almost nobody wins anything enormous. The same arithmetic drives lower-division prizes are the real returns.
3. It is the state's own instrument. Both were founded as state finance and remain state-controlled. That is precisely what the lotteries that failed were not.
The instructive contrast is the Louisiana State Lottery Company, chartered on 11 August 1868 after bribing the state legislature, which grew into a postal operation reaching every American home — the Golden Octopus. In 1890 Congress banned interstate transport of lottery tickets and advertisements, removing roughly 90% of its revenue; the Supreme Court upheld the ban in 1892 and the charter expired in December 1893 (Wikipedia).
Private lotteries with captured legislatures do not last. State lotteries that pay out broadly and predictably do. Three hundred years of Dutch draws and two hundred-plus years of Spanish ones are the evidence, and the prohibitions catalogued in where lotteries are banned are largely reactions to the first kind rather than the second.
Age is not an edge. A three-hundred-year-old lottery is exactly as random as one launched last year, assuming both are properly run. There is no accumulated history to read, no pattern that three centuries of draws reveals — see the most drawn number for why long histories produce impressive-looking frequency spreads that mean nothing.
Age is not better value either. Whether a game is worth playing is a question about payout ratio and odds, not vintage. Compare on the numbers in the payout ratio league table and best jackpot odds in the world, or run a specific game through the expected value calculator.
What three centuries of continuity does buy is an unusually complete answer to a question people ask about every lottery: does the operator actually pay? For the Staatsloterij, the record runs from the reign of a Dutch Republic that no longer exists to a subsidiary company drawing monthly today.
Last verified: 2026-08-29