Are hospital home lotteries worth it? The Canadian math

A hospital home lottery ticket starts at $100, and the pitch is the same across the country: a dream home, a cancer centre or a children’s hospital, and a draw before Christmas. Both halves of that are real. The part the brochure leaves out is the arithmetic. On the Princess Margaret Home Lottery, the biggest in Canada, your chance at the house is about 1 in 398,500, and roughly 29 cents of each dollar the lottery takes in ends up with the hospital. Neither number makes it a scam. They’re just worth knowing before you decide whether a hospital home lottery is worth it for you.

Are hospital home lotteries worth it?

As a way to win a house, no, in the same way no lottery is. As a way to give to a hospital, a direct donation delivers more than twice as much to the cause and comes with a tax receipt. What a ticket does buy you is a real chance at a large prize, and roughly 29 cents on the dollar going somewhere good while you wait for the draw.

Here’s the whole Princess Margaret Home Lottery on one card. Every figure is from its own rules and regulations (opens in a new tab) page for the fall 2026 draw, licence RAF1564757.

What are your actual odds of winning the house?

About 1 in 398,500. That’s 395,000 tickets for sale plus 3,500 given away as prizes, and the grand prize is drawn from all of them. The 1 in 33 figure the lottery advertises is the chance of winning something, and the something is usually small.

The 1 in 33 depends on when you buy

Both numbers are honest and they measure different things. The 1 in 33 counts every prize in the draw, from the house down to a gift card. The house lands once.

It also depends on your order date, which is the part worth knowing. The rules set your draw count by when you buy: order before the first deadline and your ticket is eligible for all 15,661 draws, order after the last and it’s eligible for 12,155. Across 398,500 tickets that’s about 1 in 25 at the early end and about 1 in 33 at the late end. The figure on the advertising is the late one.

This is the same gap that shows up on scratch tickets in Ontario, where a 1 in 3.42 game still pays back only 70 cents on the dollar. A high chance of winning something isn’t the same as a high chance of coming out ahead.

Where the prize board sits against the ticket money

If all 395,000 tickets sold at the $100 face price, the lottery would take in $39.5 million against a $12.2 million prize board, so prizes are about 31% of the money. Almost nobody pays face price, though. At the ten pack rate of $70 a ticket the take drops to $27.7 million and the prize board rises to about 44%.

One thing to note about that range. Prizes are counted at retail value, not at what the lottery paid for them. A home valued at $6.3 million is worth $6.3 million to the winner, but the foundation may have acquired it for less, and the same goes for cars and vacations. So the real share of your money that comes back to players is somewhere under those percentages.

Where does the rest of your $100 go?

To prizes, advertising, printing, call centres and the licensing costs of running a lottery, and then whatever is left goes to the hospital. Ontario’s rules require that the net proceeds go to the approved charitable purpose, and the AGCO terms (opens in a new tab) let the Registrar limit expenses, but there’s no published minimum share that has to reach the charity.

So the number to look up is what the foundation actually reported.

Charity Intelligence (opens in a new tab) reports that in F2026 the Princess Margaret lottery raised $129.6 million and returned $37.1 million net of expenses, which works out to 29 cents on the dollar. The same analyst looked at 30 Canadian charities running lotteries back in 2013, covering $376 million of 2012 ticket revenue, and found an average of 27 cents against 72 for what those charities raised by other means. That older count is published by ViTreo (opens in a new tab). One analyst, two counts a decade apart, 27 cents and 29. That’s roughly what a charity lottery costs to run, and it hasn’t moved much.

None of that makes $37.1 million a bad outcome. It’s a lot of money for a cancer centre, and it comes from people who wouldn’t have written a cheque. It just means a ticket is mostly a purchase and only a little bit a gift.

Can you claim a hospital lottery ticket on your taxes?

No. The money does go to a registered charity, but the ticket still isn’t a donation. The CRA’s position is short: “the purchase of a lottery ticket is not a gift; therefore, you cannot issue a receipt for the cost of the ticket.” That’s on the agency’s own fundraising events page (opens in a new tab) for registered charities.

The reasoning is that you’re paying for a chance to win, not making a gift, so nothing about it counts as a donation in tax terms. The same rule covers raffle tickets sold separately at an event. If the receipt is what you’re after, give the $100 directly instead. The charity keeps closer to 72 cents of it and you get the credit.

What happens if the lottery doesn’t sell out?

The draw still happens, usually later, and the foundation can lose money. Princess Margaret’s own rules set two possible draw dates for the fall 2026 grand prize: December 1 if the lottery sells out by November 20, and December 15 if it does not. Your odds improve in that case, since fewer tickets are in the barrel, though you have no way of knowing in advance whether it will sell out.

The downside lands on the charity. ViTreo’s research lists Royal Columbian Hospital Foundation losing $3.3 million in 2011 after selling 44,000 of 120,000 tickets, along with losses at two Canadian Cancer Society divisions and a $2 million first-year loss at the Stollery Children’s Hospital Foundation. Some foundations have since dropped their lotteries altogether. A ticket in a slow-selling lottery is the one case where your purchase might genuinely leave the hospital worse off.

Not every lottery publishes its odds

Princess Margaret prints its ticket count, prize count and odds on the rules page. Others are thinner. The Calgary Hospital Home Lottery FAQ lists ticket prices, draw dates and its AGLC licence numbers, but no odds and no ticket count. B.C.’s Choices Lottery doesn’t sell single tickets. The cheapest option is three for $110, which makes a per ticket comparison harder than it looks. If you can’t find the ticket count, you can’t work out your odds on the grand prize.

A draw you enter without buying a ticket

If what you actually like about a home lottery is the draw date, there’s a version of that with no ticket price attached. Lodavo is a free Canadian app that gives you tickets in a weekly cash draw based on the money you keep in your own savings account. Every $25 of your balance earns a ticket, the top prize is $10,000, and at least $100 goes to a Lodavo user every single week.

Nothing gets spent to enter. Lodavo doesn’t hold your money, so your savings stay in your own account earning whatever interest your bank already pays, and you can check the winning numbers each week. If the $100 was going to come out of your savings anyway, this is the version where it stays there.

Worth a ticket, or worth a donation

A hospital home lottery is a fair trade if you know what the trade is. You’re buying a long shot at a large prize, with about 29 cents of the dollar doing some good on the way past. That’s a better deal than a scratch ticket and a worse one than writing a cheque, and which of those matters depends on whether you came for the chance or for the hospital. If you came for the chance, there are free draws worth entering too.

Ready to make saving more interesting? Download Lodavo free on the Apple App Store (opens in a new tab) or the 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.