Florida’s love affair with scratch-off tickets paid off in a big way in calendar-year 2025, with instant games carrying the Florida Lottery to a new retail sales high and pumping a hefty chunk of cash into state education programs. Lottery officials and industry partners say the story is not one giant, headline-grabbing ticket, but a deep bench of popular game families and higher price points that kept players buying.
In a press release via Scientific Games, the company and the Florida Lottery reported that their long-running instant-game partnership generated $7.093 billion in retail scratch-off sales for calendar-year 2025, edging past the previous record of $7.091 billion set in 2022. According to the release, scratch-off sales climbed 6.84% year over year and produced more than $1.21 billion for the Florida Educational Enhancement Trust Fund.
Fiscal-Year Accounting Tells a Slightly Different Story
The numbers shift a bit depending on how you slice the calendar. The Florida Lottery’s Annual Comprehensive Financial Report dated Jan. 29, 2026, which covers the fiscal year ending June 30, 2025, shows roughly $9.1 billion in total ticket sales for FY 2024–25 and about $2.16 billion transferred to education during that stretch. Those fiscal-year tallies and the calendar-year totals cited by industry partners are tracking overlapping, but not identical, 12-month windows.
Which Games Hit Big and Who Cashed In
Scientific Games highlighted the Gold Rush Multiplier family as a workhorse in the lineup. The series accounted for about $1.29 billion in sales, more than 18.3% of total scratch-off revenue. The company said players collected over $5.23 billion in scratch-off prizes, while retailers earned roughly $425 million in commissions. “We are extremely proud of our partnership with Scientific Games,” Florida Lottery Acting Secretary Reginald D. Dixon said in the release, crediting data-driven portfolio planning for the bump in contributions to education.
Retailers and Local Impact
The partnership is not just about jackpot winners and statewide totals. Scientific Games and the Lottery point out that the company’s SGEP operations in Orlando support a retail network of more than 13,550 Florida locations, helping stores with product placement and ordering across the state. Local coverage and industry reporting note that commissions and bonus payments tied to winning tickets can translate into meaningful, if uneven, revenue for small businesses. For more on how the arrangement is described on the ground, see reporting from West Orlando News.
Where the Money Goes and Who It Helps
All that growth brings familiar policy debates along for the ride. Critics argue that state lotteries can function like regressive revenue sources, and they note that higher ticket sales do not automatically translate into proportional gains in per-pupil spending. Recent state-level reporting and analysis dig into those tradeoffs and urge scrutiny of how lottery dollars are actually distributed. One example is coverage from EdNC, which examines similar questions in another state’s education lottery.
For now, Florida Lottery leaders and Scientific Games are presenting the 2025 scratch-off performance as a shared win for students and retailers alike. Anyone looking to dive into the weeds on the figures can find detailed tables, methodology notes, and game-level breakdowns in the Scientific Games release and the Florida Lottery’s annual financial report, which will also serve as key references for future updates.
