How to check a lottery ticket.
Three mistakes make people throw away winning tickets. All three are avoidable in about thirty seconds.
Order never matters
Lottery numbers are a set, not a sequence. A ticket played as 25-10-05-20-15 against a drawing of 05-10-15-20-25 is a five-number match, not a one-number match. People compare position by position, see two that line up, and bin a winner. So did the previous version of this site, which is why the current one has a test asserting that all 120 orderings of a winning ticket win.
The bonus ball is a separate pool
The Powerball, Mega Ball, Star Ball and their equivalents are drawn from their own set of balls. A 7 among your main numbers does not match a 7 drawn as the bonus ball. They are different balls that happen to share a number.
This cuts the other way too, and in your favour: in most lotteries the bonus ball on its own is a winning ticket, with no main numbers at all. A lot of people never check for it.
Small prizes are where the losses are
Nobody forgets to check after a billion-dollar roll. The tickets that expire unclaimed are the ones worth four dollars, bought on a Tuesday and left in a coat pocket. Prizes expire between 90 days and a year after the drawing depending on the state, and hundreds of millions of dollars go back to the states every year because of it.
Then check it properly
Enter your numbers in any order. Say where you bought the ticket, because California prizes are calculated differently from everywhere else. Say whether you paid for the multiplier, because it changes what you are owed. We will tell you what matched and what it is worth, or tell you plainly when the amount is not something anyone can know yet.
Then have the physical ticket validated at a retailer. Whatever any website tells you, the ticket is the only thing that can be claimed.
Check a ticket now
Common questions
- Is it free?
- Yes, and there is no account to create.
- Do you store the numbers I enter?
- No. They are compared in memory and discarded when the page loads. Nothing is written to our database or our logs.
- Where do the results come from?
- Official sources: the lottery operators and state open data portals. Your physical ticket is still the only thing you can claim with.
- How long do I have to claim a prize?
- Between 90 days and a year, depending on the state where you bought the ticket.