LotteryIf you've seen an old Cash Five jackpot number that looks nothing like what the game pays today, it's not a typo. On September 24, 2018, the Texas Lottery relaunched Cash Five with a genuinely different number pool and a genuinely different prize structure — not a cosmetic update. Anyone comparing "back then" numbers to "now" numbers without accounting for that switch is comparing two different games that happen to share a name.
What Actually Changed
Two real, separate changes happened at once on that date:
- The number pool shrank from 37 to 35. Players went from picking 5 numbers out of 37 to 5 numbers out of 35 — a smaller field, which mechanically improves every prize tier's odds. Jackpot odds went from 1 in 435,897 (C(37,5)) to 1 in 324,632 (C(35,5)).
- The jackpot stopped rolling and became fixed. Before the relaunch, Cash Five's top prize grew over time the way Lotto Texas's still does — it could climb well past what a single fixed number would pay (the largest pre-2018 Cash Five jackpot on record was over $360,000). After the relaunch, every tier pays a guaranteed, fixed amount: $25,000 for the jackpot, with no rollover, ever. If more than three tickets match all five numbers in the same drawing, those winners split a $75,000 liability cap instead of each getting the full $25,000.
Why This Site's Cash Five History Starts on 2018-09-24, Not Earlier
This site's Cash Five results and statistics only go back to September 24, 2018 — not further, even though Cash Five itself has been running since 1995. That's a deliberate scope decision, not missing data: mixing 5-of-37 drawings in with 5-of-35 drawings in the same statistics page or trend chart would silently produce numbers frequency counts and odds comparisons that don't mean anything, since the two eras drew from genuinely different-sized pools. Rather than build a second, more complex system just to handle that one transition, this site's Cash Five statistics and trend chart only ever show data from the current 5-of-35 era, so every number on those pages is directly comparable to every other number on them.
Does Any of This Affect How You Should Play Today?
No — today's Cash Five is a single, consistent game, and has been since that September 2018 relaunch. There's no ongoing transition to think about; every drawing since then has used the same 5-of-35 pool and the same fixed $25,000 top prize. The history above matters mainly for context (so an old jackpot figure you might see referenced elsewhere makes sense) and for understanding why this site's own historical tools are scoped the way they are — not because there's anything unresolved about the current rules. See the Cash Five results page for the current game as it actually runs today, or the number generator to build a set within the current 1–35 range.