(Radio Iowa) – The leader of the Iowa Lottery says sales for the fiscal year through October are slightly ahead of budget projections. But Matt Strawn says they are still facing some headwinds. “The biggest impact on the year over year, sales continues to be the relative lack of big jackpots in the multi jurisdiction lotto games like Powerball and Mega Millions,” Strawn says. “The current fiscal year has not yet witnessed a billion dollars plus jackpot in either of those gains as we have seen in recent years.”

Rising jackpots create a snowball effect that pushes sales up, and that’s what’s lacking so far this fiscal year. “Thus, Mega Millions sales are down 52 percent and Powerball sales are down 63 percent when we’re comparing them through the end of October last year,” he says. Strawn told the State Lottery Board the data from November isn’t yet complete, but the sale of scratch tickets and other products have improved ahead of national industry sales averages.

“I do anticipate we’re going to continue to see some improved performance in scratch tickets in the second half of fiscal ’25. And a lot of that will be attributed to the recent installation of 150 new 40-bin self-service vending machines across statewide retailers. These are additional machines,” Strawn says. Scratch tickets make up around 67 percent of Lottery sales. Chief Revenue Officer John Roth says Iowa is seeing better sales than the national industry, which was down last year and is also down so far this year. “We are down on a sales basis by 11-point-one percent, but a year ago, we were up by eight-point-two percent. So as we look at our performance, we are still outpacing the industry from an overall perspective,” Roth says.

Roth says when things are narrowed down to recent weeks, the overall industry is starting to level out and the Iowa Lottery is still running slightly ahead of the national numbers.