The 10 Best-Value Scratch-Offs in America Right Now

A scratch-off's published odds tell you how often it wins, but it doesn't say anything about how much of the money comes back to the players.

That second number is what our ValueScore™ is for, and it folds a game's payout percentage together with its prize structure and whatever is left of its top prizes to land on a rating between 0 and 100, so a $2 ticket in Iowa can be held up against a $50 one in Ohio.

These are the ten highest in the country, current as of this writing on July 29, 2026.

Nothing cheap made the cut

The cheapest game on this list costs $20, and seven of the ten are above $30. There's a reason for that, and it comes down to the size of the prize table: a $30 or $50 ticket simply has more money to work with, so a state can hand back a bigger share of sales and still put a seven-figure prize on the front of the ticket, and the overall odds tend to come out a little better in the process.

For anyone who plays with any regularity, the upshot is that your money stretches further a tier or two above the dollar games, even though each individual ticket costs you more at the counter. We went through why this is in do more expensive scratch-offs give better odds.

A week changes a lot

California 200X only launched a few days ago on July 27, and by the 29th it had already climbed to number four, which shows how quickly a strong new game can land near the top of the country. Georgia's Millionaire Maker travelled the opposite way over the same stretch, sliding from third place at 98.6 down to 83.7.

So, what happened? Its payout percentage is still 83.5% and ten top prizes are still waiting to be claimed, but enough of the print run has been sold that the pool left behind has thinned out, and the score follows whatever remains rather than whatever was originally printed.

Most of the scores above slipped a little across that same week, which happens to nearly every game as the game gets older. A scratch-off tends to be at its strongest the day it launches and the scores usually go down, while the odds that were printed on the back of the ticket stay frozen at whatever they were on day one.

If your state is missing from here

Your state almost certainly has decent tickets on sale right now, and the reason none of them turn up here is that the ten highest individual scores sit in ten other places this particular week. By next month the rankings will have rearranged itself again.

What matters far more is the spread inside your own state, because the gap between the best and the worst game in the same state is usually much wider than the gap between one state and another. Sort the full ValueScore rankings here, or go straight to payout percentage if that's the number you care about most, and look the game up before you pay for it.