Massachusetts man wins $20,000 a month for 10 years on $10 scratch-off

A Worcester man won the grand prize on the Massachusetts State Lottery's Decade of Dollars $10 scratch ticket, a prize of $20,000 a month for 10 years.

Vrushab Jadhav took the cash option instead, a one-time payment of $1,560,000 before taxes. He plans to invest the money and put some of it toward school. He bought the $10 ticket at Jayzi Mart, 9 Pleasant St. in Leominster, and the store gets a $24,000 bonus for selling it.

It is the second big Massachusetts ticket to come out of Leominster this month. A Leominster woman claimed $500,000 on a different game, bought at a different store in the same city.

What the cash option actually costs

Paid out in full, the grand prize is $20,000 a month for 120 months, or $2.4 million. The cash option is $1,560,000, exactly 65% of that. Most jackpot games price their cash option around 50% these days.

Turning $1,560,000 into $20,000 a month for 10 years takes a 9.3% annual return, compounded monthly, and the money has to last exactly as long as the payments do. That is the hurdle rate. Anything below it and the annuity would have paid more.

The tax line is the part people miss. Massachusetts adds a 4% surtax on taxable income above $1,107,750 for 2026. A $1.56 million lump sum clears that threshold by about $452,000 in a single year, at a cost of roughly $18,000 extra. Spread as $240,000 a year, the annuity never gets near it if you don't have an additional $867,750 in income. Federal brackets work the same way, since $240,000 a year sits below the 37% rate that a $1.56 million payday lands in.

Jadhav said he plans to invest it and pay for school, and money in hand now is money that can compound, or cover tuition, on his schedule instead of the lottery's. How the tradeoff works in general is in our guide to annuity versus cash on scratch-off top prizes, and our lottery tax calculator runs the withholding.

Five grand prizes left in about 12 million tickets

Decade of Dollars went on sale on August 11 with six grand prizes. Five of those remain. The game was printed with about 15.1 million tickets, so a grand prize is about a 1 in 2.52 million shot, and about 18% of the run has been claimed so far.

The game pays back 83.3% of sales as prizes and rates 84.0 on our ValueScore™, second among Massachusetts $10 tickets behind Strike It Rich at 86.2. Massachusetts runs the most generous scratch tickets in the country, averaging 77.8% across its 119 active games. Current rankings are on our best value list.

Sources

MassLive: Worcester man wins $20K a month for 10 years in new Mass. Lottery game

Massachusetts Department of Revenue: 4% surtax on taxable income

Massachusetts State Lottery: Instant tickets and prizes remaining