Which NY Scratch-Off Wins the Most? The Answer Is Not the One You Should Buy

Ask the question one way and the answer is easy. Ask it the way you actually mean it, and the answer gets interesting.

Over the last 30 days, the New York scratch-off that paid out the most prizes was Loose Change, a $1 game you have seen at every bodega counter in the state. It produced more than 1.25 million winning tickets in a single month — nearly double its closest competitor. By the raw numbers, no game in New York "wins" more.

It is also one of the worst tickets you can buy.

The 30-Day Winner Leaderboard

We track every prize claimed in New York, every day, from the official NY Lottery prize files. Here are the games that paid the most prizes over the last 30 days:

Prizes claimed over the trailing 30 days ending June 11, 2026, from official NY Lottery prize reports. *Instant Take 5 pays draw-style prizes, so its payout structure differs from standard scratch-offs.

Notice what is happening. The leaderboard is dominated by cheap games — not because they are generous, but because New York sells staggering volumes of them. A game that moves a million tickets a week at 1-in-4.7 odds will always produce more raw winners than a $30 game selling a fraction of the volume.

Winning Often Is Not Winning Money

Here is the number the leaderboard hides: Loose Change returns about 56 cents of every dollar wagered. Among all 65 active New York scratch-off games, that is near the bottom of the board. Its 1.25 million monthly "wins" are overwhelmingly $1 and $2 prizes — your own money handed back to you, minus the house's cut.

Compare that to Set For Life, the $10 game sitting fourth on the list. It paid out 589,000 prizes in the same window — less than half of Loose Change — but it returns about 76 cents per dollar, its tickets win at 1 in 3.95 instead of 1 in 4.70, and its prize ladder actually goes somewhere.

The Games That Win Most Often Per Ticket

If your question is "which ticket is most likely to win me something," the answer flips completely. The best overall odds on the board right now belong to the premium games:

A typical $1 game wins about once every 4.7 tickets. A top-tier $20 or $30 game wins about once every 3.6. That is not a rounding error — over a hundred tickets, it is the difference between roughly 21 winners and 28.

So Which Game Should You Actually Buy?

Neither raw winner counts nor overall odds fully answer that, because both ignore the thing that changes every single day: which prizes are still out there. A game with great printed odds becomes a bad buy once its top prizes are claimed and its remaining pool thins out. A middling game becomes interesting when its jackpots survive deep into the print run.

That is the entire reason our Smart Score rankings exist. Every morning we reprice all 65 active games using the official prize file — remaining prize value, depletion speed, top-prize survival — and rank the full board. The same model that had 300X The Money at #1 or #2 for six straight days before its $10 million prize hit.

And if you want to go a level deeper: where you buy matters too. Our store rankings track which of New York's 12,000+ lottery retailers are moving the freshest stock, and our vending machine finder locates self-serve machines — which our research shows often carry the freshest packs at high-volume stores.

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