Father’s Day scratch-off gift wins Michigan family a record $8 million

A $50 scratch-off bought as a Father's Day present has produced the largest instant-game prize in Michigan Lottery history. The three-member Lucky Dogz lottery club, made up of two siblings and their father, won $8 million on an $8,000,000 Payout ticket from the Caseville One Stop Shop in Huron County.

"Our family often buys lottery tickets for holidays and special occasions, so my brother and I bought our dad a $8,000,000 Payout ticket for Father's Day," a club member said. "Our dad scratched the ticket and then handed it to us to check when he saw he'd won $8 million."

"We looked it over and then I scanned it to confirm what we were seeing," the member said. "It was unbelievable when we found out it really was an $8 million winner!" The three agreed to split the prize equally and took the cash option, about $5.5 million, rather than annual payments for the full amount. They plan to save it. The winning ticket was sold at Caseville One Stop Shop, located at 7095 Port Austin Road in Caseville.

The record holds up

No Michigan scratch-off in our records has ever carried a top prize above $8 million. The next tier down is a cluster at $6 million, including 500X Money Maker, $300,000,000 Extraordinaire, Millionaire Maker and $6,000,000 WEALTH, all $50 tickets. The Lucky Dogz did not just win the biggest instant prize ever paid in the state, they won it on the only game that has ever offered one that size.

Two more $8 million prizes are still out there

The game printed three top prizes of $8 million and two remain unclaimed. It went on sale March 3, 2026 and is about 27.7% sold.

It is also a genuinely strong ticket by our numbers, which is not something we get to say about most games attached to a record headline. $8,000,000 Payout returns 81% of sales as prizes, one of the highest payout percentages we track anywhere, with overall odds of 1 in 3.17. It rates 90.9 on our ValueScore™, third among the 108 active Michigan games we score behind Diamond 7s at 94.5, and 34th of the 2,804 active games we score in the United States.

Below the top tier it still holds 62 of its 81 prizes at $10,000, 1,475 of 1,953 at $2,000, and 53,644 of 74,226 at $500.

Why splitting it three ways was the right move

The cash option of about $5.5 million against an advertised $8 million works out at 68.75%, a much gentler discount than the roughly 43% a billion-dollar Powerball jackpot pays in cash. Nearly every winner takes the cash, and we went through the reasoning in lump sum versus annuity.

The three-way split does something quieter. Each claimant is taxed on their own share, so the graduated federal brackets apply three times over rather than once. One person claiming the full $5.5 million would face about $1.99 million in federal tax. Three people claiming roughly $1.83 million each face about $635,000 apiece, or $1.91 million in total. The difference is around $86,000 kept, purely from how the claim was structured.

Michigan then takes its flat 4.25%, about $233,750 on the full amount, which leaves the group close to $3.36 million between them, or roughly $1.12 million each. Our lottery tax calculator and how lottery winnings are taxed handle the arithmetic for any prize and any state.

The lesson for anyone who plays in a group is that the paperwork matters as much as the ticket. Lotteries generally let a club or pool register its members and claim as a group, and doing it properly means each person is taxed on what they actually receive rather than one person taking the whole hit and gifting the rest, which creates a far worse tax outcome.

Current scores for every Michigan game are on our Michigan ValueScore™ rankings, and the national rankings cover the rest of the country.

Sources

WNEM: Scratch-off bought in Huron County sets new state record