Does the clock start when I buy the ticket or when the draw happens?

The draw. A ticket bought on a Monday for Saturday's Lotto Max draw expires a year after that Saturday, not a year after you paid for it. Scratch tickets are the opposite case, since there's no draw: their deadline is set per game and printed on the ticket.

Can a lottery corporation extend a claim deadline?

Only the corporation can, and it's rare. OLG pushed back the deadline by six months for tickets that would have expired between March 17 and September 17, 2020, because its Prize Centre was closed during the pandemic. Nothing you do on your own end extends a date.

How do I check whether a big prize is still unclaimed?

Each corporation publishes a list. OLG posts major unclaimed prizes on its site and through lottery terminals. Loto-Québec's prize claim status report goes further, covering more than 30 scratch games and showing how many prizes remain at each prize level, updated weekly. They exist so winners come forward before a ticket expires.

Do the territories follow the same rules as the provinces?

Yes. The Western Canada Lottery Corporation is owned by Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, with Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut as associate members, so a ticket bought in Whitehorse or Iqaluit runs on the same one year deadline as one bought in Calgary.

How Long You Have to Claim a Lottery Prize in Canada

One year from the draw date. That’s the deadline for a draw-game prize anywhere in Canada, whether the ticket came from a corner store in Halifax or a gas station in Prince George.

It’s also only half the answer. Scratch tickets don’t follow that rule anywhere in the country, sports bets run on a clock of their own, and in Atlantic Canada most scratch prizes don’t expire at all. So what the deadline actually is depends on which ticket is in your hand and who sold it to you.

How long do you have to claim a lottery prize in Canada?

One year from the draw date printed on the ticket. That’s the rule at all five of Canada’s lottery corporations, which between them cover every province and territory. The clock runs from the draw itself, not from the day you bought the ticket and not from the day you got round to checking it.

Where you bought it	Who runs the lottery	Draw games	Scratch tickets
Ontario	OLG	12 months from the draw	The date printed on the back
Quebec	Loto-Québec	One year, or the ticket’s own date if sooner	A fixed date per game, published game by game
British Columbia	BCLC	One year, unless BCLC says otherwise	The date on the ticket, not the one year rule
Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and the three territories	WCLC	One year from the draw	The date printed on the back
New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, P.E.I. and Newfoundland and Labrador	ALC	One year from the draw	Most never expire. Some carry a fixed date

Sports betting is a separate case. Atlantic Lottery (opens in a new tab) gives you 744 days from the date you bought the ticket, which is a little over two years. WCLC (opens in a new tab) measures Sport Select from the day the last selected game was played, so for a parlay running across three weeks, the year starts later than the day you placed the bet.

Where does the 52 weeks figure come from?

Not from any rulebook. The phrase turns up on a lot of sites that answer this question, and it appears in none of the official rules. OLG’s Rules Respecting Lottery Games (opens in a new tab) set the deadline at 12 months and never use the words 52 weeks. Its customer FAQ says customers have exactly one year (opens in a new tab) from the draw date. BCLC, WCLC and ALC all say one year too.

Fifty-two weeks is 364 days, so as a piece of arithmetic it’s a day or two short. That part is harmless, because a reader who believes it claims early. The damage is what the tidy number implies. A single figure quoted for the whole country reads like a single rule for every ticket, and that’s the assumption that leaves a scratch ticket in a drawer until it’s too late.

Scratch tickets don’t follow the one year rule

Instant games have no draw date, so there’s nothing for a one year clock to count from. Every corporation handles them separately, and they don’t handle them the same way. OLG and WCLC both point you to the date printed on the back of the ticket. BCLC’s FAQ adds that the one year timeframe doesn’t include instants (opens in a new tab).

Quebec publishes a deadline for every game

Loto-Québec runs the most transparent version of this. It maintains a payout deadlines (opens in a new tab) table listing every scratch game by name and game number with a fixed calendar date beside it, some of them years out. Games whose deadline has already passed are removed from the table, which makes the list itself the answer: if your game isn’t on it, the prize can no longer be claimed.

Quebec also has a wrinkle the other provinces don’t. Its rule is one year from the draw or the period specified on the ticket, whichever is shorter, so a Quebec ticket can carry a deadline that undercuts the one year default rather than extending it.

In Atlantic Canada, most scratch prizes never expire

Atlantic Lottery is the genuine outlier. Most Scratch’N Win prizes have no expiry period at all, and only some carry a fixed date. ALC still tells you to check the expiry date at the time of purchase (opens in a new tab), because it won’t honour a prize on a ticket that has one and has passed it. But an old scratch ticket found in a kitchen drawer in Moncton is in a very different position from the same ticket found in Toronto.

What happens to the money if nobody claims it?

It doesn’t vanish, and where it lands depends on whether the game was national or provincial. Prizes from Lotto Max, Lotto 6/49 and Daily Grand are handled by the Interprovincial Lottery Corporation and returned to players through later bonus draws and promotions. Provincial games are where they part ways.

Three of the five corporations send it to government. Ontario returns unclaimed prizes from Ontario-only games to the province as part of OLG’s proceeds, toward priorities like health care and education. British Columbia counts prizes from BCLC-only games in its net income and passes them to the provincial government. WCLC (opens in a new tab) does the same across the West, returning unclaimed prizes on regional games to its member provinces and territories as revenue.

The other two send it back to players. Quebec and Atlantic Canada both return expired prize money to the pool for later draws.

The sums can be large. Nobody came forward for the $70 million Lotto Max jackpot from the draw on June 28, 2022, and a year later OLG declared it unclaimed (opens in a new tab). Because Lotto Max is a national game, the money went back into the pool for future bonus draws.

You found an old ticket. Now what?

Check the draw date on the face of it and count forward a year. If you’re inside that window, any retailer can validate it, and what happens next depends on the amount: small prizes come straight out of the till, larger ones go through the corporation itself. Our guide on what to do if you win the lottery in Canada covers the thresholds, the ID you need and the anonymity rules.

If it’s a scratch ticket, ignore the year entirely and read the back. And if the ticket has expired, there’s no appeal and no partial payment. Almost 2,700 people contacted OLG about that $70 million ticket, and its investigators reviewed every one of those claims without paying a single one.

While you’re going through drawers, it’s worth knowing that expired lottery tickets are not the only money Canadians leave behind. Uncashed cheques, dormant bank balances and forgotten deposits sit in government and bank registries that anyone can search for free, which we walk through in how to find unclaimed money in Canada.

A draw you don’t have to remember

Every deadline on this page exists because a lottery prize lives on a piece of paper that you have to keep, check and hand back in. That’s the part Lodavo doesn’t have.

Lodavo is a free prize-linked savings app. Every $25 in your savings account earns you a ticket in a weekly cash draw, so the more you save the more chances you get, and you could win up to $10,000. Your money never leaves your own account.

You still pick numbers, and you can check them whenever you like. What you don’t have to do is remember: if you’re selected we notify you within two business days, and you then have 72 hours to answer a skill-testing question. That question is a Canadian contest-law requirement for promotional draws, which is why it turns up here and not at the provincial lotteries above.

It’s a reason to look forward to saving, and it costs nothing to enter.

Check the date, then check the drawer

The rule for draw games is genuinely simple: one year from the draw, everywhere. It’s the scratch ticket that needs a second look, and it’s the one most likely to be sitting somewhere you’ve forgotten about. Read the back before you assume the year applies.

Ready to make saving exciting? Download Lodavo free on the Apple App Store (opens in a new tab) or Google Play Store (opens in a new tab) and start earning tickets for the weekly draw.

Terms and conditions apply. No purchase necessary (alternate method of entry available). Skill-testing question required. Open to legal residents of Canada who are the age of majority. Odds depend on the number of eligible entries received. Full rules and odds at our contest rules.