A lottery jackpot does not pay what the sign says
Take the cash option on a top prize and you receive a fraction of the advertised figure. Everybody knows that in general. Almost nobody knows the number, because it varies by prize and by state and the lotteries do not publish an average. Florida publishes enough to count it, so we counted it.
Median across Florida's discounted top-prize claims
0.64 on the dollar
438 claims paid less than face value, out of 878 recorded between 9 Sep 2021 and 11 Sep 2026. That is 36% off the advertised amount.
The spread matters as much as the middle. The least discounted claim in the record paid 0.56 and the most generous paid 0.82 — so a single "cash option is about 60%" rule of thumb is wrong by a wide margin in both directions depending on the prize and the year it was claimed.
Why this is measured and not looked up
A lottery advertises an annuity: a headline figure paid over decades. The cash option is what the state would have had to invest to fund those payments, so it is smaller, and how much smaller depends on interest rates at the moment of the claim. That is why the number moves over the years in the range above, and why no fixed percentage is honest.
Florida's per-game "Top-Prize Winners with Retailer Information" reports print, for prizes large enough, both the advertised value and what was actually paid. That makes the discount observable rather than modelled. We read those reports, store the two figures, and take the median of the ratio.
Three kinds of payout, not two
This is the part that trips up every attempt to average these numbers, and getting it wrong drags the answer towards 1.
| What the record shows | Claims | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Paid less than advertised | 438 | An annuity taken as cash. These are the only claims the median above is taken over. |
| Paid exactly the advertised amount | 6 | Not generosity — the advertised figure already was the cash value. An odd amount like $3,089,000 is a cash prize, so there is nothing to discount. |
| No payout published | 434 | Florida drops the payout columns for prizes small enough to hand across a counter. These are unknown, not full-value, and counting them as full value is the mistake that flatters the number. |
We also publish no blended "cents per advertised dollar" figure, tempting as it is. Summing both payout columns and dividing mixes annuities with prizes that were already cash, so the result moves as the mix of games changes rather than as the discount does. The median over discounted claims answers the actual question.
What we do with it
Every expected-value figure on this site discounts a round-million top prize to what the cash option actually pays, using a factor measured from these claims rather than guessed. Without it, a game advertising a $1,000,000 annuity looks like it returns far more per dollar than it does, and the games with round-million prizes would sit at the top of every ranking for a reason that pays nobody.
Florida is inconsistent about which value it prints in the prize table, and the prize table gives no hint which is which. These claim records are the only thing that settles it.
See it yourself
Figures on this page are read from our database when the page is served, not typed in, so they change as claims are published. 50 of the claims in the record are from claimants exempt from disclosure; those still carry their payout. Winners' names are printed in the source reports and are deliberately not stored here — see what this site collects.