The best scratch-off in every state right now

We score every active scratch-off game in the United States from 0 to 100. Here is the single highest-rated ticket in each of the 44 states we cover, ranked from best to worst, current as of August 27, 2026.

The top of the list is a $20 ticket in a city, not a state

Washington, D.C. runs the best-rated scratch-off in the country in Money, a $20 game at 99.3 with a 77.8% payout and three top prizes of $250,000 unclaimed. It is a reminder that catalogue size has nothing to do with quality: D.C. keeps 20 scored games where Georgia runs 195.

The two behind it are the expensive end of the rack. Oklahoma's $100 $5 Million Jackpot returns 81% with odds of 1 in 2.37, and Washington's $30 Diamond Dazzler returns 78.9%.

Price tiers

Twenty-six of the 44 state leaders cost $20 or more, and only three cost $10 or less. That matches what we found measuring the whole country, where payout climbs from 61.9% on $1 tickets to about 80% at $50 and $100. A state's best game is usually near the top of its price ladder.

The exceptions are worth knowing. Nebraska's leader is a $5 PAC-MAN ticket, Montana's is a $5 game, and New Hampshire, South Carolina, Virginia and Vermont all top out at $10. In those states the cheap end is genuinely competitive, which is unusual.

The highest payout is not the highest score

Indiana's MONEY BAG MULTIPLIER returns 86.3% of sales as prizes, comfortably the most generous game on this list, and it ranks 14th. Massachusetts's leader returns 84.3% and ranks 28th.

Payout is one of four things we weigh. A game returning a great percentage while its top prizes are gone is worth less than the percentage suggests, which is why the ranking rewards games with full prize tables. The full method is on our ValueScore™ page.

Five states are scored with a handicap

Kansas, Tennessee, Missouri, Maine and Vermont appear near the bottom, and it is partly a data problem rather than a quality one. Those lotteries do not publish prize payout percentages, so we cannot compute expected value and their games are capped at 79 out of 100. Kansas at 78.1 is close to the ceiling available to it.

Treat their positions as incomparable to the rest rather than as evidence their tickets are worse. Everything else on the list is scored on complete data.

How we did this. Rankings cover every active scratch-off game in our database across the 44 US jurisdictions we score, current as of August 27, 2026. The leader is the highest ValueScore™ active game in each state. Games priced at $0 and promotional tickets not sold at retail are excluded, which removes a Virginia entry that is not for sale. Payout percentage is the share of total sales a game returns as prizes across the full print run, as published by each lottery. States marked "not published" do not release that figure, and their games are capped at 79 by our data-completeness rule.