By Jim Turner, The News Service of Florida<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cScratch-Off games continued to be a strong contributor to the Lottery\u2019s success, generating $7.14 billion in sales, an increase of more than $308 million compared to Fiscal Year 2025,\u201d Lottery Director of Communications & Strategic Partnerships Alecia Collins wrote in an email. \u201cDraw game sales also experienced significant growth, reaching $2.56 billion, an increase of more than $271 million.\u201d<\/p>\n
The draw game sales figure doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe gain to the (Lottery) forecast in the current year was largely attributable to higher-than-expected Scratch-Off sales,\u201d the conference wrote on Jan. 15. \u201cThe new sales data suggests that there will be stronger year-over-year growth than originally anticipated.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIn 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,\u201d the conference report continued.<\/p>\n
State economists will again look at the Lottery numbers on Aug. 7, ahead of an overall update of the state\u2019s general revenue on Aug. 14.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Jim Turner, The News Service of Florida Sales have been brisk for state lottery games after a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":356621,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[232,234,233],"class_list":["post-356620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tallahassee","tag-tallahassee","tag-tallahassee-headlines","tag-tallahassee-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=356620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356620\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/356621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=356620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=356620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=356620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}