Which scratch ticket has the best odds in BC? We worked it out

BCLC tells you the odds on every Scratch and Win game it sells. What it never tells you is the payout: the share of every dollar spent on a game that comes back to players as prizes. The Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation publishes that figure for each of its tickets. BCLC publishes it for none of them.

You can work it out anyway, because BCLC publishes something OLG doesn’t: the odds at every single prize level, game by game. Multiply each prize by its odds, do it across the catalogue (79 listings, 69 distinct games once the reprints are merged), and the payout on a British Columbia scratch ticket runs from 52.25% to 75.02%.

Which scratch ticket has the best odds in British Columbia?

Two different tickets, depending on which question you mean. The best odds of winning anything belong to A Gift for You, a $10 ticket BCLC lists at 1 in 1.00. The best value is the $100 Elite at 75.02%. Here’s the strongest payout at each price on the rack.

Every odds figure there is BCLC’s own, printed at the top of each game’s page. The payout is ours, and the next section shows the work.

Look at the $10 row. Cash Blowout has the worst odds of any game in the catalogue at 1 in 5.70, and it still gives back as much as any other $10 ticket. The two columns answer different questions, and a game can do well on one while doing badly on the other.

The game with the best odds is not a good deal

A Gift for You is a $10 ticket with seven games printed on it, and BCLC puts its overall approximate odds at 1 in 1.00 (opens in a new tab). Near enough every ticket wins. The payout is still 70%, because the prize you usually get is $5, at odds of 1 in 1.25. You hand over $10 and four times out of five you get half of it back.

It’s a gift ticket, built so nobody opens it and gets nothing. That design is why the best odds in the province sit on a ticket that gives back seven dollars in ten.

What BCLC publishes, and the number it leaves out

Every Scratch and Win game on PlayNow carries a Prizes and Odds table: one row per prize level, each with its own odds. The $50 Extreme lists fourteen rows, from $50 at 1 in 10.00 up to $5,000,000 at 1 in 962,500.

That’s enough to get the payout, and the arithmetic is the easy kind. A $100 prize at odds of 1 in 5.37 is worth $18.62 to the average ticket. Do that for every row, add them up, divide by the ticket price. The $50 Extreme comes to $37.48 on a $50 ticket, or 74.97%.

Only cash counts. Where a prize is a free ticket, its value is left out, and where a prize pays a free ticket plus a few dollars, only the dollars go in. That’s the same definition OLG prints on its own fact sheets, which is what makes the cross-check below a fair one.

Two checks on the method

The first is internal. Adding up the odds of every prize level should reproduce the overall odds BCLC prints at the top of the same table. Across those 69 games it does, to the second decimal, on 68 of them. The one exception is the $2 Diamond Dazzler, whose table lists two different prizes at identical odds and doesn’t reconcile, so it’s left out of everything above.

The second check is the useful one. 30X is a national game, printed in one run and sold through BCLC, WCLC and OLG alike. OLG’s fact sheet for 30X (opens in a new tab) gives overall odds of 1 in 3.54 and a prize payout of 72.64 per cent. Running BCLC’s prize table for the same ticket gives 1 in 3.54 and 72.99%. A third of a percentage point apart, which is about what rounding the odds to two decimals will do.

One province publishes the payout on that ticket. The other doesn’t, on the same ticket, from the same print run.

Does a more expensive ticket give you a better deal?

Better on the percentage, worse on the money, and the money is what you actually hand over. Every $1 and $2 game returns under 60%. The $30, $50 and $100 tickets all return over 72%. In between, the trend is steady: $3 games top out at 65%, $5 games at 68%, $10 and $20 games at 70%.

But the better rate is applied to a much bigger stake. Gold Rush returns 59.99%, so a $1 ticket costs you $0.40 on average. Elite returns 75.02%, so it costs you $24.98. Elite is the better-built ticket by a distance and it takes sixty times more off you per scratch.

The comparison that’s actually fair is equal money. Twenty $1 Gold Rush tickets cost you about $8.00 over time; one $20 Hit $1000 costs you $6.00. The expensive ticket wins that comparison. You’re still down six dollars.

How many of those wins are a free ticket?

On some games, most of them. A free ticket counts as a prize in BCLC’s odds, so it goes into the headline number alongside the cash. Some games also have a row that pays a free ticket and a few dollars together; those count as winning money in the middle column below.

Set for Life is the one to look at. BCLC’s table gives it a free $5 ticket at 1 in 5.28, and all of its cash prizes together at 1 in 12.87. Both numbers come off the same page. Only the combined one gets repeated.

A free ticket is worth roughly what the ticket costs, so it isn’t nothing. It just doesn’t leave the store as money, and if you scratch it and lose, that’s the end of it.

Are the top prizes still on the rack?

Sometimes not, and the ticket can’t tell you. BCLC’s odds are fixed when a game is printed, so a ticket still reads 1 in 3.54 whether its $3,000,000 prize went last spring or is still sitting in a shop in Kamloops. Every Prizes and Odds page carries the same line: at the time of purchase, some of the prizes offered may have already been claimed.

What BCLC does publish is a list of unclaimed Scratch and Win prizes (opens in a new tab), split between B.C.-only games and national ones, with the date it was last refreshed. The national half comes from the Interprovincial Lottery Corporation and only covers prizes of $1,000 and greater. Worth a look before you buy anything near the top of the price range. That is where the big prizes sit, and they are the first ones claimed.

Where the ticket money goes in B.C.

BCLC’s lottery operations took in $526 million of revenue in 2024/25 (opens in a new tab) and returned $280 million of net income to the province. B.C. is one of two jurisdictions in the country that doesn’t disclose what players spend on lottery tickets, which is why any national figure has to estimate the B.C. share rather than read it.

So what does Lodavo add?

Picking up a scratch ticket on a Friday is a perfectly good way to spend a few dollars. Nobody buys one expecting to come out ahead, and the tables above put a number on what it costs.

Lodavo is a free Canadian app that gives you tickets in a weekly cash draw based on what’s already sitting in your own savings or chequing account. Every $25 you have saved is a ticket, the top prize is $10,000, and at least $100 goes to somebody every week. Your money stays at your own bank throughout. You still get a Sunday with something to check, and it costs you nothing.

The short answer

A Gift for You has the best odds in B.C. at 1 in 1.00, and usually hands back $5 on a $10 ticket. Elite has the best payout at 75.02%, and costs $24.98 a scratch. The rest of the catalogue returns somewhere between half and three quarters of what goes into it, with the cheap tickets at the bottom of that range and the expensive ones at the top. BCLC publishes every number you need to work that out, one prize level at a time, and never adds them up for you.

Want a weekly draw you don’t have to buy into? 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 free tickets for saving.

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.