By Jim Turner, The News Service of Florida
Sales have been brisk for state lottery games after a brief period where inflation apparently caused consumers to dial back purchases of scratch-off tickets.
The Florida Lottery reported $9.7 billion in sales for all games in the fiscal year that ended June 30, a 6.35 percent increase from the prior year.
“Scratch-Off games continued to be a strong contributor to the Lottery’s success, generating $7.14 billion in sales, an increase of more than $308 million compared to Fiscal Year 2025,” Lottery Director of Communications & Strategic Partnerships Alecia Collins wrote in an email. “Draw game sales also experienced significant growth, reaching $2.56 billion, an increase of more than $271 million.”
The draw game sales figure doesn’t include state revenue from the recent rollover jackpots in the multi-state games of Powerball and Mega Millions, where the winning ticket on Tuesday was sold at a Wawa in Bradenton.
But the overall total indicates a potential reversal of an expected two-year slowdown in play, with sales down to around $9.1 billion in fiscal year 2024-2025 and $9.4 billion in fiscal year 2023-2024 after reaching $9.8 billion in fiscal year 2022-2023.
In September 2024, state economists attributed the drop in play to a decline in scratch-off sales as consumers faced inflationary pressures coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic period, which saw a spike in Lottery purchases.
At the time, the economic forecast for the games projected Lottery sales to decline to $8.8 billion in the 2024-2025 fiscal year and slowly return to the $9 billion mark by the 2027-2028 fiscal year.
By January of this year, however, the Revenue Estimating Conference noted the increase in people playing scratch-off games as it revised its economic outlook for the state.
“The gain to the (Lottery) forecast in the current year was largely attributable to higher-than-expected Scratch-Off sales,” the conference wrote on Jan. 15. “The new sales data suggests that there will be stronger year-over-year growth than originally anticipated.”
“In its new forecast, the Conference projects 5.2 percent growth in the current year, before a return in the outer years to growth rates that mirror population growth as expected in August 2025,” the conference report continued.
State economists will again look at the Lottery numbers on Aug. 7, ahead of an overall update of the state’s general revenue on Aug. 14.
Collins noted that sales in the past fiscal year, along with earnings on investments and unclaimed prizes, generated about $2.36 billion from the Lottery to the Educational Enhancement Trust Fund.
Be the first to leave a comment on this article.