How often do new scratch-offs come out?

How often do new scratch-offs come out? It's more often than you may think. Across the roughly 44 US states that run a lottery, new scratch-offs arrive at a rate of roughly 160 new tickets a month, and our own launch data has held remarkably steady there, between 158 and 167 new games a month from February through July 2026, with January's New Year wave the busiest at 219 (as of this writing, August 17, 2026). That's an average of around 3.6 new scratch-offs launching every month per US state that runs a lottery.

Most states work on a monthly or twice-monthly cycle, and a lot of them favor the first business day of the month, which is why so many of our new-game roundups cluster around the same dates. A given state might put out anywhere from one to a dozen games in a release, depending on its size. That steady drip is deliberate: a fresh game gives players a reason to come back, and the lottery rotates its shelf the way a store rotates stock.

It also means a lot is on sale at once. A typical state keeps dozens of scratch-offs live at the same time, and the biggest run well past a hundred games. There's usually a mix of games just weeks old and games that are many years old.

The temptation is to read that new is always better, and that is the one thing to be careful of. A brand-new game does have its whole prize pool intact, which genuinely helps a little, but the launch does not set the payout, and older games often rate higher on ValueScore™. An example of this is a game that's been on sale for 6 months but all of its top prizes are still remaining, meaning you will have better odds to win the bigger prizes as a good portion of the tickets have sold. If you want to see what actually launched this week, our new-game coverage tracks it state by state, and the full boards live on each state page.