Which Atlantic Lottery scratch ticket has the best odds?

Atlantic Lottery runs the lottery in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador, and it prints the odds on every Scratch’N Win ticket it sells. Each game’s page carries a line like “Overall chance of winning a prize: 1 in 3.73”. What it doesn’t have is a list. The catalogue sorts by newest, name or top prize and filters by price, never by odds, so comparing two tickets means opening two pages.

We opened all 74 on October 8, 2026. On an ordinary ticket, the odds run from 1 in 2.91 to 1 in 5.70. Atlantic Lottery’s own prize list answers a second question as well: 28 of the games on it have no top prize left.

Which Atlantic Lottery scratch ticket has the best odds?

The best odds belong to ELITE, a $100 ticket at 1 in 2.91. At the prices most people pay, the best is the $5 Super Crossword at 1 in 3.55, and the best $2 ticket is Celebrate & Share at 1 in 3.80. Five gift packs are listed at 1 in 1, because every pack holds a winner, so they’re left out below.

Every figure is Atlantic Lottery’s own, read off its game pages on October 8, 2026. Games rotate, so look up whatever is actually in front of you.

The cheapest tickets have the worst odds. Both $1 games sit at 1 in 4.60, and five of the seven $2 games sit between 1 in 4.47 and 1 in 4.54. Across the 69 ordinary tickets, the middle one is 1 in 3.81.

Paying more helps, but not by much, and not reliably. A $3 Bingo at 1 in 3.67 beats eight of the fifteen $10 games. The worst odds on the whole rack are on a $10 ticket: Cash Blowout, at 1 in 5.70, whose biggest prize is $100.

Where the odds are

Open the Scratch’N Win page (opens in a new tab), click Learn More under any game, and the odds sit just below the list of prizes. 10X BLITZ (opens in a new tab) is a fair example. All 74 games carry the line.

What the 1 in 1 on a gift pack means

Gift Pack and A Gift for You, both $10, and the $25 Holiday Pack are listed at 1 in 1 because every pack wins something. That isn’t the same as getting your money back. Gift Pack’s prizes start at $2, A Gift for You’s at $5 and Holiday Pack’s at $3, all below what the pack costs.

What Atlantic Lottery doesn’t publish

The payout: the share of every dollar spent on a game that comes back as prizes. It’s the number that tells you what a ticket costs you on average, and Atlantic Lottery doesn’t publish it for any game. It does have it. Its audited financial statements (opens in a new tab) say instant ticket prizes are recorded “as a percentage of ticket sales in line with the theoretical prize payout for that game.”

On our British Columbia page we worked out the payout BCLC doesn’t print, from the odds it publishes at each prize level. Atlantic Lottery gives one overall figure per game and a list of the prizes on offer, with no counts, so the same sum can’t be done here.

The one Atlantic ticket with a known payout

30X, the $30 ticket, is a national game. It’s printed in one run of 4,840,500 tickets and split between the country’s five lottery corporations, with 360,000 going to Atlantic Lottery, according to OLG’s fact sheet for the game (opens in a new tab). The odds match, 1 in 3.54 in both places, and OLG publishes the payout: 72.64%. On average, a $30 ticket pays back about $21.79, and the lottery keeps $8.21.

Treat that as the high end rather than the norm. In Ontario and B.C., where the payout can be seen, it climbs with price and the cheapest tickets give back the least.

Is the top prize still there?

On 28 of the 72 games on Atlantic Lottery’s top prizes remaining (opens in a new tab) list, no. One of them, MEGA 360, is no longer in Atlantic Lottery’s catalogue, so the tables below cover the other 71. The list gives each game’s top prize, how many were printed, and how many are still unclaimed. Three small games aren’t on it at all: Explosion, Cash Blowout and A Gift for You, whose top prizes are $500 or $100.

Top prizes are scarce to begin with. More than half the games on the list were printed with three or fewer, for all four provinces together. A $5 ticket advertising $50,000 most often has two.

Half the $5 games on the list have no top prize left.

The 27 games with no top prize left

Read off Atlantic Lottery’s own list on October 8, 2026. The counts change as prizes are claimed, so check the list yourself rather than trusting this table next month.

Some go fast. Extra Lucky Lines launched on July 1, 2026 with two $125,000 top prizes, and both had been claimed by October 8. Blackjack’s two $50,000 prizes were gone in about four months.

Does the game come off the shelf?

Usually not. Atlantic Lottery explains it on the same page: “ALC pulls games when the top prizes have been claimed for games that feature significant or unique top prizes that represent a significant percentage of the total prize pool such as Set for Life. For other games where the top prizes make up only a small portion of total prize pool, ALC does not pull those games.”

So the $5 ticket with $50,000 on the front can stay on sale after both of its $50,000 prizes are gone. The smaller prizes are still in it, and most winning tickets were never going to be the top prize. But the top prize is what the ticket advertises, and Atlantic Lottery leaves it to you to check.

The list doesn’t say which games are still in stores, either. The two older Set for Life printings are on it with nothing left at the top, and Set for Life is the example Atlantic Lottery gives of a game it pulls, which suggests some of the games on the list are no longer sold. The list loads on a phone, so the simplest check is to open it at the counter.

Is it the same ticket in all four Atlantic provinces?

Yes. Atlantic Lottery is owned by the four provincial governments (opens in a new tab), as it has been since 1976, and it runs one Scratch’N Win catalogue for all four. A game number means the same game at the same odds in Moncton, Halifax, Charlottetown or St. John’s.

One ticket is limited by store rather than province: HIT $1,000, a $20 game sold only at Costco. National games like 30X are shared with the rest of the country, so their top prize counts cover every province, not just the Atlantic ones.

A weekly draw where you’re never out the $5

Two $5 tickets a week comes to $520 a year, and on the one Atlantic game with a published payout, about 27 cents of every dollar stays with the lottery.

Lodavo is a free Canadian app with a cash draw every week. You earn tickets for the money in your own savings or chequing account, one for every $25, and you could win up to $10,000. At least $100 goes to a user every week. Your savings stay in your bank, so playing costs you nothing, and you still have a number to check every week.

Before you scratch

ELITE pays a prize most often, at 1 in 2.91 on a $100 ticket, and Super Crossword is the best of the $5 games at 1 in 3.55. Those odds count any prize at all, though, and the figure that would tell you what a ticket costs you is published for one Atlantic game out of 74. What you can check before you pay is the top prize. On 28 of the games on Atlantic Lottery’s list, someone has already won it.

Want a weekly draw where the ticket is free? Download Lodavo on the Apple App Store (opens in a new tab) or Google Play Store (opens in a new tab) and start earning tickets for what you save.

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.