Fresh off big news that iLottery is coming to the state, the Massachusetts Lottery reported that fiscal year 2024 set a new revenue record on Tuesday.
FY24 secured $6.165 billion in revenue, a 0.3% increase from FY23’s previous record of $6.148 billion.
Along with the record revenue, Massachusetts paid out a new best mark of $4.525 billion in prizes.
On top of that, it produced $1.157 billion in net profit for the state, the second-highest total in its 52-year history.
Overall, it’s been an exciting few days for the latest territory to join the states with online lotteries.
Over $6 billion in Massachusetts Lottery sales once again in FY24
While the Massachusetts Lottery didn’t supply specific total sales for FY24, that also should be approaching a record.
The state did report instant sales, draw sales, and Keno sales, which make up the vast majority of the total each year.
Instant tickets held up well against an average decline nationally. Massachusetts reported $4.013 billion in sales from its instants. That was down just 0.7% from last year’s $4.043 billion, which was a record.
Lottery draw games had a record year of sales, with $848.3 million, up 3.7% from FY23’s $817.9 million.
Keno also had a new high in sales from FY24. The monitor game did $1.252 billion in sales. That was up 2% from a year ago.
Just those three numbers alone combine for $6.113 billion.
Commission praises lawmakers for iLottery expansion
Monday was the day many in the Massachusetts Lottery had been waiting for.
Gov. Maura Healey signed the FY25 budget into law, which includes the authorization for an online lottery.
Executive Director of the Massachusetts Lottery, Mark William Bracken, gave thanks to the governor and state lawmakers during Tuesday’s monthly commission meeting:
“We’re very excited and thankful to the governor, and our friends in both the House and the Senate…for the passage of online lottery here in the Commonwealth.
“We are looking forward to digging into the online ecosystem and seeing what lies ahead of us. We’re already hard at work, figuring out what is step one.”
State Treasurer Deborah B. Goldberg, who is also chair of the lottery commission, commented on the government’s unified effort to make this happen:
“One thing that was really profoundly different is that both the governor and the lieutenant governor felt very strongly that in order for us to be competitive in the marketplace, and also saw from the data that other states had increased retail sales and not decreased retail sales, that we were missing an opportunity for revenue.”
Establishing a vendor key to online lottery launch
Current projections call for the Massachusetts online lottery to launch in 16 months, which would put that around late 2025.
Goldberg made it clear during the meeting that many members of the commission and the Massachusetts Lottery have a lot of work ahead to get iLottery off the ground:
“It’ll be a lot of work. I thank the team at the lottery for the tremendous amount of extra work you all will be doing in the next 16 months or so. It’s a pretty robust timeline. We recognize that the state very much needs the revenue, wants the revenue, and wants to get this up and running.”
Among the work is generating a contract with a vendor.
Bracken noted that the Massachusetts Lottery will be cutting off communications with vendors on the topic in order to create an even playing field for those looking to earn the online contract:
“There’s a handful of vendors out there. They have all been very helpful and participatory over the years in our lobbying efforts. We do business with a lot of them on other business lines, including printing tickets, and IT database systems, and a handful of other operations that we already have ongoing business relationships with. I would make the assumption that they’re all going to end up bidding on this contract. Because of that, we just wanted to start it right from the start, before the bill was even signed, knowing that the governor would be signing this into law, that there’d be no further conversations with them.”
When it comes to the timeline, Bracken also added that once a vendor is selected and a contract is agreed to, the iLottery launch will be much closer:
“Once we award the court contracts, we’re looking at somewhere around 6-8 months before we go live.”
Bracken also stated that he will provide regular updates on the process at future commission meetings, which take place monthly.
Photo by mnimage via Shutterstock
Graphic from the Massachusetts Lottery
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