Methodology
How The Scratch Sheet turns the Florida Lottery’s published remaining-prize data into a single number: the return you can actually still get on a ticket today.
Tickets printed
Each prize tier tells us how many prizes were printed and the odds of hitting that tier. Multiply them and you get an estimate of the total print run. We take the median across every tier to smooth out rounding — in practice all tiers agree within a fraction of a percent.
Tickets remaining
The two lowest prize tiers hold millions of near-identical prizes, so how fast they deplete tracks ticket sales almost exactly. Remaining tickets ≈ print run × the unclaimed share of those two tiers. From that we get how much of the game has sold.
Return now vs. printed
Current return = the value of all prizes still unclaimed ÷ tickets still in circulation ÷ the ticket price. The printed return is the same math using the original print run — what the game paid on day one. A game runs hot when unlucky tickets get bought out faster than the good ones, and cools off when the big prizes are claimed early. The black tick on every bar marks the printed return; the gold fill is the return today.
The honest caveats
Estimates carry sampling noise near the end of a game’s run. Prizes over $600 are taxable and top-tier jackpots are effectively unwinnable at any realistic scale — a return propped up by one seven-figure prize is not money you can harvest at retail. Free-ticket tiers are valued at face. Treat the sheet as a filter for avoiding bad tickets — not a money machine.
Draw games
The draw-games board answers a different question with the same honesty: what does a $1 buy in tonight's drawings?
Fixed prizes: from the official tables
Pick 2–5, Cash Pop, the add-ons and the lower tiers of every jackpot game have published prizes and odds. Their expected return is arithmetic — prize × probability, summed — from tables we transcribed from the Lottery's own pages and verify in tests against the published overall odds. These numbers are constants: every Pick straight returns exactly 50¢ per $1, the Fireball half about 60¢, boxes 48¢.
Jackpots: cash value, not the billboard
The advertised jackpot is a 30-year annuity. Nearly every winner takes the lump-sum cash value — typically ~45% of the headline — so that's the figure our math starts from. Where the lottery publishes it (Powerball, Mega Millions) we scrape it; where it doesn't, we estimate using the live Powerball cash ratio and say so on the page.
Taxes and co-winners
A jackpot-sized prize lands in the 37% federal bracket (Florida adds no state income tax); we apply that haircut to any prize at or above the $5,000 withholding line. Then the part everyone forgets: other people play too. We model the number of tickets sold as a function of the jackpot (stated on each page as “assumes ~N million tickets”), treat other winners as Poisson-distributed, and multiply by your expected share of the pot. Bigger jackpots sell more tickets — the split adjustment bites hardest exactly when the billboard looks best.
What we refuse to publish
No “hot numbers,” no lucky picks, no number-pattern statistics — every combination is equally likely, and content that pretends otherwise is the opposite of what this site is for. Where a game's multiplier distribution isn't published (Florida Lotto), we estimate it from observed winner counts in the results feed and label it as an estimate. Pari-mutuel tiers (Fantasy 5) are valued at observed average payouts, not the promotional maximums.