Surprising Lottery Facts, Numbers, and Trivia

Every number below is something we actually verified while building this site — cross-checked against real sources, not pulled from a trivia list. A few of these surprised us too.

The Money

• New York has the highest state tax rate on lottery winnings in the country, at 10.9% — on top of the mandatory 24% federal withholding. Nine states, including Texas, Florida, and California, charge 0% state tax on lottery winnings at all. See our multi-state tax comparison for the same jackpot compared across every state at once.
• Not every state sends lottery money to education. Colorado is a genuine exception: 50% of its lottery revenue funds Great Outdoors Colorado, supporting parks, wildlife, and conservation projects, not schools. Georgia, by contrast, sends roughly a third of its revenue directly to education programs including the HOPE Scholarship.
• Texas Lottery prizes have paid out more than 60% of ticket sales revenue since the game launched in 1992, with profits funding the state's Foundation School Fund — which has received roughly $19 billion since inception.
• The D.C. Lottery has transferred more than $2.3 billion to the District's general fund since 1982, supporting city services.

The Math Actually Checks Out

• The theoretical average sum of a Powerball drawing's 5 main numbers is 175.0 — a pure math calculation, not based on any real drawings. The actual historical average across real Powerball drawings comes out to 176.9. Those two numbers landing within 2 points of each other, from two completely independent calculations, is exactly what real randomness looks like — see our sum distribution histogram for the visual.
• A stack of $1,000,000 in $1 bills would stand about 358 feet tall — taller than the Statue of Liberty (305 feet). At $100 bills, that same million dollars is just a few feet tall. Try the big number visualizer with any jackpot amount.

Behind the Scenes

• Lottery drawing machines aren't connected to the internet at all. The equipment used for major drawings like Powerball is fully analog specifically so it can't be hacked remotely — see how lottery drawings actually work for the full security process, including the rule that opening the vault where the machines are stored requires at least three separate people together.
• A Maine lottery winner of a $1.3 billion Mega Millions jackpot was ordered to reveal his identity as part of an unrelated court battle, despite Maine's anonymity protections — a real reminder that privacy rules can still be overridden by other legal proceedings. See can you stay anonymous after winning the lottery.
• In 2026, a group in Texas used a lottery courier service to buy nearly every possible number combination for a drawing, legally claiming a roughly $95 million jackpot — a strategy that's only mathematically viable when a jackpot's advertised value exceeds the total cost of covering every combination. It triggered a formal regulatory review. See are lottery courier services legal.

The Takeaway

None of this changes anyone's odds on the next drawing — every combination is still exactly as likely as every other one, regardless of what the numbers above say about taxes, history, or how the machines work. But the actual mechanics behind a lottery turn out to be more interesting than most people realize, and every figure here is something we checked, not something we assumed.