Are Scratchcards Worth It?

Scratchcards are probably the first form of gambling most people in Britain ever try. They’re on the counter when you buy your milk, they turn up in Christmas cards, and they don’t feel like gambling at all. There’s no account to open and no casino lobby to walk through. You hand over a couple of pounds, grab a coin and find out whether or not you’re lucky in about thirty seconds.

It’s also a product that’s rarely looked at the way we’d look at a slot or a sports bet. I’ve written plenty on this site about what games really pay back, so I thought it was time to give scratchcards the same treatment. And the good news is that you don’t have to take anyone’s word for it. The National Lottery publishes a set of game procedures for its scratchcards, with the full prize table for each one. That’s why most of this article looks at National Lottery cards, which are also the ones you’ll see on almost every shop counter. I’ll come to the other kinds further down.

What “1 in 4” actually means

Let’s take a real example: £100,000 Teal, a £1 card. Its terms give overall odds of 1 in 4.06 of winning a prize. On the face of it, that’s a win on about one card in every four. What it doesn’t tell you is what most of those wins are worth.

When you add up the prize table, about three in every four wins on that card are for just £1 or £2. So the most common “win” gives you your stake back, or doubles it. That feels great at the counter, and it’s usually spent on another card straight away, which is exactly why the prize tables are built that way. Winning something, even if it’s only your pound back, keeps you playing.

That last figure is the one to remember. The big number printed across the front of the card is what sells it, yet only six of those top prizes were among more than 44 million cards. It’s a much longer shot than most people imagine when they scratch off the panel and picture what they’d do with the money.

How much National Lottery scratchcards pay back

Each game’s terms state the total prize money as a share of the face value of the cards. That’s effectively the card’s return to player rate, the same measure used for slots. Here’s what I found across the cards I checked.

There’s a clear pattern: the more expensive the card, the better the payback. That doesn’t mean you should buy a dearer card, though. You’d keep a slightly bigger share of each pound, but you’d be risking more pounds. A £5 card at 70p in the pound still loses you about £1.50 on average, while a £1 card at 62p loses you about 38p.

Those are averages over millions of cards, so your own results will swing around a lot. But over time, they add up. If you buy a £1 card every day for a year, you’d spend £365 and could expect to get back around £226. If you buy a £5 card every Saturday, you’d spend £260 and could expect to get back around £182. Neither figure is going to ruin anyone, but it’s worth knowing that it’s a cost, and a statistically inevitable one.

To put that in context, the money that doesn’t come back as prizes doesn’t all go to one place. It pays for good causes, Lottery Duty, the shop that sold you the card and the operator, Allwyn. That’s a perfectly good reason to feel better about losing a pound. It’s not a reason to think you’ve got a good bet. If you want to compare this with other forms of gambling, the thing to look at is the house edge. A scratchcard’s built-in cost is far higher than you’d accept on most casino games. What keeps the damage down is that you can only scratch so many cards in a day, while a slot can take hundreds of wagers in an hour.

Are scratchcards rigged?

This question gets searched for a lot, and the answer is no. The number of prizes in a National Lottery game’s first print run is recorded and notified to the Gambling Commission before any cards go on sale. Whether your card wins is fixed when it’s printed, so nothing you do at the counter changes it. It isn’t rigged any more than a slots game is. The maths is published for the public to read – it’s simply against you.

That also takes care of most of the folklore. Picking the third card from the end of the roll, waiting until someone else has just lost, or buying from a “lucky” shop won’t make any measurable difference. A shop that sells a big winner is usually just a shop that sells a lot of cards.

Do remaining prize lists help?

The National Lottery lists how many top prizes are left on each game, and many people check that list before they buy. I think it’s worth doing, for one simple reason: if all the top prizes on a game have gone, there’s no point paying for the dream of winning one. A card you buy because of the headline prize should still have that prize available.

Don’t read too much into it, though. The list tells you about top prizes across the whole country, not what’s left in the roll at your local shop. Even with several top prizes left, your chance of winning one is still a tiny fraction of one per cent. It stops you making a bad buy, but it doesn’t make a good one.

One other tip: check your old cards. You generally have 180 days from a game’s closing date to claim a prize, and after that the money goes to good causes. If you’ve got a pile of unchecked Christmas scratchcards in a drawer, it’s worth looking at them.

Paper cards or online instant win games?

The National Lottery’s website and app also sell online instant win games, which look a lot like scratchcards. I’d treat these with much more care. The odds of winning something can look even better, with one Christmas game claiming 1 in 2.60, but the biggest difference is speed. With a paper card, you have to go to a shop, and that gives you a natural break. Online, you can play again in seconds from your sofa, which is exactly how a small treat turns into a habit. If you do play online, set a limit on your account before you start.

What about scratchcards that aren’t from the National Lottery?

The National Lottery isn’t the only place to buy a scratchcard, and what you get back depends a lot on where you buy it.

How to get the most from them

If you enjoy scratchcards, you don’t need to stop. Just buy them with your eyes open. Set a price you’re happy to lose, and don’t spend small wins on more cards, because that’s where a £2 treat quickly becomes £10. Check that the top prizes are still left on the game you’re buying. And if you find that you’re buying them every day, or hiding how many you buy, take that seriously, in the same way you would with any other kind of gambling.

Are scratchcards worth it, then? Not as a way of making money. On a National Lottery card, you’re likely to get back somewhere between 62p and 70p for every £1 you spend, most of your wins will just hand your stake back, and the headline prize is a very long shot indeed. As a bit of fun that costs about the same as a coffee, and helps fund good causes along the way, they’re worth it if you enjoy them and you’re happy to see that money as spent. See it as the cost of a bit of fun, and you won’t go far wrong.