Who Benefits From The Maryland Lottery?

Like many other states, Maryland has a lottery in place where residents can purchase tickets for various drawings and/or scratch and win games. Many have no real idea where the money they spend on lottery tickets goes. Here, we will look at who benefits from the Maryland lottery.

An unaudited breakdown of the revenue collected by the lottery in 2009 shows that the greatest share goes into the prize pool for the various games. All together, more than 60 cents of every dollar spent is given back out as prize money.

Operating any thing as large and complex as a state lottery costs money. Expenses of running the lottery took about 3 and half cents per dollar. In addition, retailers have to realized some benefit from selling the tickets. Otherwise, there would be no incentive for them to bother. A little over 7 cents of each dollar spent goes to the retailers for selling the tickets.

The rest of the money, about 29 cents per dollar, goes into the state's general fund. All citizens of Maryland benefit from this money. In total, over 493 million dollars were divided between government services and programs that included education, public safety (police and fire), public health, and much more. Proceeds from the Mega Millions game have been designated to go to the Stadium Authority, who collected 20 million dollars in 2009.