Sales, Subscriptions Seeing A Decline For Maryland Lottery To Open FY25

The Maryland Lottery came up shy of reaching a new sales record in fiscal year 2024.

Not helping matters is the state also saw a big year-over-year drop to open FY25.

While Maryland isn’t among the states with online lotteries, it does offer an online subscription service.

However, those sales are trending down, as well.

Though iLottery has been discussed, it doesn’t appear to be an option on the horizon to help declining Maryland sales.

FY24 sales down over $32 million in Maryland

The Maryland Lottery reported its year-end sales last month. That figure was $2.73 billion, a drop of 1.2% from FY23’s $2.76 billion.

Numbers weren’t great across the board. Draw sales were actually down 1.8% at $985 million, compared to just over $1 billion in FY23.

Scratch sales were also slightly down from $1.063 billion to $1.061 billion. That drop is 0.2%, which is actually stronger than most states that have released FY24 data.

One area that Maryland did see improvement was in its Fast Play products. Sales were up 4.2% for the year, going from $79.1 million to $82.4 million.

Maryland Lottery July sales drop 13% YoY

The fiscal year 2025 sales started off on a bit of a whimper for the Maryland Lottery.

For the month, the state brought in $213.4 million in sales. That was down 13.1% from the $245.5 million it did in July 2023.

The reason for the big downturn was draw sales, primarily Mega Millions and Powerball.

Both multistate games were in the midst of large jackpot drawings last year, thus combined for nearly $47 million in sales in July 2023. Last month, the two produced just $14.7 million in sales for Maryland.

Maryland Lottery Director John Martin noted the slow start during Thursday’s monthly commission meeting:

“FY25 has gotten off to a bit of a rough start. We have some very tough year-over-year comparisons and they will continue to give us some challenge throughout the year. But, I am very optimistic that, we will need all 12 months, but we will make up that difference.”

On a positive note, scratch sales in the state were up year over year. Last month tallied $85.3 million in sales, an increase of 0.5% from the $84.8 million from last July.

Online subscriptions steadily decreasing

While Maryland doesn’t have iLottery or courier services, it does provide online subscriptions.

Players have the option to purchase tickets in advance for Multi-Match, Mega Millions, Powerball, or Cash4Life. Subscriptions last 13, 26, or 52 weeks.

Each month, the Maryland Lottery supplies subscription numbers for the public.

Opening FY24, the state had 1,117 new subscriptions for July 2023 and 6,925 active subscribers at the end of the month.

Total subscriptions peaked in September at 7,050, but have been on an overall decline since.

At the end of FY24, in June, total subscriptions were at 6,629 and new subscribers for the month were only 943.

That was followed in July by closing with 868 new subscribers for the month and 6,537 total subscriptions.

From July 2023 to July 2024, total subscriptions are down 5.6%. Monthly totals decreased 22.3%.

Here’s how the subscriptions have looked month-to-month since July of last year:

Photo by Mehaniq via Shutterstock
Graphic from the Maryland Lottery