Lottery revenues total $51.3M in April; first LOTTO jackpot winner announced

Arkansas Scholarship Lottery tickets are shown in this file photo.
Arkansas Scholarship Lottery tickets are shown in this file photo.


The Arkansas Scholarship Lottery’s total revenues and the amount raised for college scholarships dipped slightly compared to a year ago, the lottery reported this week.

The lottery also announced this week the first-ever jackpot winner of its LOTTO draw game that started in September. The winner is a  Sebastian County woman who chose to remain anonymous and claimed her $2.338 million prize Monday at the lottery’s Claim Center in Little Rock.

Act 889 of 2021 allows winners of more than $500,000 to remain anonymous if they choose, and a total of 13 winners have chosen to remain anonymous since Act 889 was implemented, said Scott Hardin, a spokesman for the state Department of Finance and Administration.

The Sebastian County woman is the 96th person who has won a lottery prize worth $1 million or more in Arkansas since 2009, the lottery said in a news release.

The lottery started selling tickets Sept. 28, 2009, and has helped finance Arkansas Academic Challenge Scholarships for more than 30,000 college students during 11 of the past 12 fiscal years.

In April, the lottery’s revenues slipped from $51.8 million a year ago to $51.3 million, and the amount raised for college scholarships dipped from $8 million a year ago to $7.9 million, the lottery reported this week in its monthly report to Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the Legislative Council’s lottery oversight subcommittee.

For the month of April, the lottery’s scratch-off ticket revenues dropped from $43.6 million a year ago to $41.7 million, but the lottery’s draw-game revenues increased from $8.1 million a year ago to $9.5 million

Mike Smith, the lottery’s gaming director, said Thursday in a written statement, “We had an excellent instant ticket revenue month in April [2022] and a very solid month in April [2023].

“We were able to finish ahead of our budgeted instant revenue of $41 million,” he said in a written statement. Scratch-off tickets also are called instant tickets.

The lottery’s draw games include Powerball, Mega Millions, Fast Play, LOTTO Lucky for Life, Natural State Jackpot, Cash 3 and Cash 4.

In April, the lottery’s Fast Play revenues totaled $2.3 million — up from $1.5 million in the same month a year ago — and the lottery’s Powerball revenues totaled $1.7 million, a decline from $2.9 million in the same month a year ago, according to the lottery’s reports.

The lottery’s Mega Millions revenues in April reached $1.3 million — up from $947,545 in the same month a year ago — and the lottery’s LOTTO games totaled $1.1 million.


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