How much can a store pay on a winning scratch-off?

Hand a winning scratch-off to a store clerk and whether you walk out with cash depends on two things, the size of the prize and the state you are in. Each lottery sets a max amount on what a retailer can pay. Anything above it goes to a lottery office or through the mail.

Across nine of the largest lottery states, that ceiling for how much a store can pay runs from $599 to $2,500.

The old $599 line exists because $600 was the federal point at which a lottery had to issue a W-2G tax form, and a store counter isn't set up to take a Social Security number. That reason has now weakened. The tax reporting threshold rose to $2,000 for 2026, and the Florida Lottery now tells players they won't get a W-2G for a claim between $600 and $1,999. Most states have kept their store limit where it was anyway.

Tickets over the limit hold up to 19% of the money

More than 99.8% of winning tickets are small enough to cash at a counter in all eight states we could measure. The picture changes when you count dollars.

In Ohio, nearly one dollar in five still waiting in active games sits in a prize too large for a regular store to pay. Texas has the smallest share of the eight.

The exact $600 prize is where the rules bite hardest. Georgia's active games still hold 30,692 unclaimed $600 prizes, and all of them can be cashed at a store. Florida has 154 of them, and each one requires a trip to a district office. Michigan's higher limit, by contrast, reaches very few tickets so far. Its active games hold just 24 unclaimed prizes between $601 and $999.99, all of them $999 prizes in one game.

Pennsylvania is the outlier

At $2,500, the Pennsylvania ceiling sits above the new federal reporting line. Its games carry at least 114,726 unclaimed prizes between $600 and $1,999 that a Pennsylvania store can pay on the spot and that a store in California, Texas, or New York could not. The Wizard of Oz: The Great and Powerful Oz, a $10 game, alone has 21,084 prizes of $600 left.

Two practical notes apply everywhere. Sign the back of the ticket before you hand it over, and check the result yourself first, since a store scanner and the lottery app will tell you the same thing. If a clerk won't pay a prize under the limit, your options are covered here, and the paperwork for larger claims is in how to claim a scratch-off prize.

Sources

California Lottery: Claim a prize

Texas Lottery: Claim your prize

Pennsylvania Lottery: How to claim your prize

Ohio Lottery: How to claim

New York Lottery: How to claim a prize

NC Education Lottery: Claim prizes

Georgia Lottery: How to claim

Florida Lottery: Winning FAQ