The average scratch-off game lasts about 14 months

A scratch-off is a temporary product. It launches, sells for a while, and gets pulled once the prize pool is mostly gone, and every state runs that cycle at its own pace. Across the 1,866 retired US games where we have both a launch date and an end date, the median run was 427 days. Figures are from our database as of the second week of September 2026.

Around 25% of the games ended inside 278 days and another 25% of games lasted past 794 days, so a game that disappears in nine months and one that hangs around for more than two years are both ordinary.

The more a ticket costs, the longer it stays

A $50 game runs more than twice as long as a $1 game. Two things push that way. Premium tickets sell far fewer units, so a print run takes longer to work through, and their prize pools are deeper, so more of the money is still out there at any point in the run. A $1 game with a $2,000 top prize can empty out in under a year without anyone noticing.

Some states clear the games twice as fast as others

Idaho retires a game in a median 189 days, less than a quarter of what New Jersey takes and an eighth of Rhode Island. A fast shelf means the games in front of you are mostly new, with their prize pools intact, and which states refresh fastest tracks the same behavior from the other direction.

Florida and Georgia are left out of the table on purpose. Both post median runs of eight to ten years, and the Florida figures show why. That state routinely sets an end date about a decade after launch, so a game launched in August 2026 carries an end date in July 2036. The number records an administrative backstop, not a ticket sitting in a case for ten years. Georgia's long medians are a different story and closer to real, since it genuinely keeps games from 2018 on sale.

A ticket bought a month after launch and the same ticket bought a year later are the same ticket with a different amount left in it, which is what a game’s life cycle actually changes.

How we did this. Launch and end dates are as published by each state lottery. The sample is retired US games with both dates recorded and an end date after the launch date, 1,866 games in all. Medians are per game rather than weighted by sales. Florida and Georgia are excluded from the state table and noted separately because their recorded end dates run far beyond normal shelf life. Figures are from our database as of September 9, 2026, and cover active US scratch-off games.