Sources

Every figure on this site is derived from data the state lotteries publish themselves. Nothing is scraped from other analysis sites, and nothing is estimated where an official number exists.

Draw games

Powerball and Mega Millions are published by every participating state, which means we can do something the scratcher data does not allow: check each draw against several independent official feeds before publishing it. No draw goes on the site on one source's word.

Where the sources disagreed

This is the part worth reading. Official feeds are not identical, and a site built on one of them cannot tell. Every discrepancy we found is listed below — 11 of them across 5,368 draws.

• Missing draws. New York's open-data feed — the most convenient free source, and the one many frequency sites are built on — is short 9 draws that other official sources carry, including 7 November 2022, the record $2.04 billion Powerball drawing. Nothing in that feed indicates the gap. We publish the union, so our counts are complete where a single-source table is quietly short.
• Contradictory draws. Two states occasionally publish different numbers for the same draw. Where that happens we defer to the feed closest to the drawing itself — the game operator's own data — rather than picking a favourite state.

If a game's sources disagree in a way no operator feed can settle, we do not publish that game at all until it is resolved. That rule is enforced by the build, not by anybody remembering to check.

How often we read them

Once a day per state, at staggered times, because states publish on their own schedules. If a read fails, the previous day's data stays in place and the affected pages say so instead of pretending to be current.

Corrections

If a number here disagrees with the official page, the official page is right and we want to know: contact us. Lotteries occasionally revise prize counts retroactively, which is one reason we keep every daily snapshot.