How many lottery winners are there in a year?

I have been wanting to answer the questions in the title. I found that statistics on lottery winning is hard to come by. Even when the state lottery commissions are required by law to made the information public, they tend to bury the information and you have to do work to dig it up. I have strong indication that on an annual basis, winning tickets that pay out one million dollars or more only number in the hundreds. In contrast, there were 37,261 people killed in motor vehicle crashes in 2008 in the United States (see the report from the National Highway Traffic Satety Administration). So if you are passionate about winning various state lotteries, it makes sense to be passionate about not winning the negative lottery of fatality in a motor vehicle crash too.

As of November 2010, there were only 247 winning tickets paying one million dollars or more (see the previous post with this discussion). To get this information, I had to look up the winning tickets in each of the 58 California counties in the official site of CalLottery. So about 10 people are made millionaires by CalLottery each year (since its inception 25 years ago).

The state of Iowa is more forthcoming. The official site of the Iowa Lottery actually had a press release listing out the stats. The number of Iowa Lottery tickets that have won prizes of $1 million or more (through August 2010) is 110. Once again in the 25 years history of the Iowa Lottery, only 110 people were made millionaires, on average 4.4 per year. For the Iowa Lottery, the odds for winning $100,000 or more are better for sure (1089 winnings so far in 25 years) but the odds are still small.

The state lotteries are in the business of selling dreams. I suspect that they do not want to provide a picture reflecting the true odds of winning big. With all the state lottery commisions across the United States combined, I cannot see how the number of winning tickets ($1 million or more in each one) in one year can be in the thousands. If someone is forking over hard earned cash each week to play the lottery in the hope of winning big, it also makes sense to pay attention to traffic safety in the hope of not winning the negative lottery of death in a car crash.

Update (12/20/2017). A recent blog post answer the same question for Powerball. The winning of the Powerball jackpot occurs much less frequently than used to be. This is a cynical ploy to drive ticket sales. You can read it here. The blog post gives the link to the blog post in a companion blog that gives the graphics and analysis.