One hundred Lotofácil draws: where the money went

Between 8 May and 3 September 2026 the Lotofácil held a hundred draws, from 3680 to 3779. I added up the sales and the prizes of each one, tier by tier, from the official breakdowns. That is R$ 2,793,192,909.50 collected and R$ 1,035,690,918.09 paid out in prizes: 37.1% of what came in.

Where the prize money landed

Tier	Winning tickets	Total paid	Of sales	Of prizes paid
15 hits	219	R$ 250,027,601	8.95%	24.1%
14 hits	36,803	R$ 57,938,718	2.07%	5.6%
13 hits	1,188,877	R$ 41,610,695	1.49%	4.0%
12 hits	13,619,460	R$ 190,672,440	6.83%	18.4%
11 hits	70,777,352	R$ 495,441,464	17.74%	47.8%

The bottom line is the surprising one. Almost half of all the prize money the Lotofácil paid in this period left in R$ 7.00 instalments, spread across 70.7 million tickets with 11 hits. That is an average of 707,000 tickets per draw, each collecting less than the price of three bets.

The top tier, for all the attention it gets, took 24.1% of the money paid and 8.95% of sales. The two lowest fixed-value tiers together, 12 and 11 hits, took 66.2% of everything distributed.

The jackpot without the poster effect

Of the hundred draws, 70 had at least one ticket with all 15 numbers and 30 rolled over. Among the winning draws, the smallest individual prize was R$ 146,051.92 and the largest was R$ 14,264,457.07.

The median came to R$ 1,268,987.02, and that is the figure that describes what winning actually looks like. The fourteen-million prize happened once in a hundred draws; a million and change is the ordinary case. The 219 tickets with 15 hits, spread over 70 winning draws, work out to just over three per draw that paid the top tier.

The 63% that did not come back

The gap between sales and prizes is not profit sitting in a vault. Part of it accumulates towards special draws such as the Lotofácil da Independência, part goes to the mandatory transfers that Brazilian lottery law defines — social security, sport, public safety, among others — and part covers running the operation and the retail network. What matters to a bettor is the number at the top: at best, and over the long run, the game returns a little over a third of what it takes in.

That is not a flaw in the Lotofácil, it is how any lottery is designed. It is useful for comparing games against each other and for calibrating expectations, not for deciding whether to play at all. The comparison table puts the average return per unit wagered of each game side by side, worked out from real prize breakdowns, and each draw page shows the split for that specific draw.

If the takeaway is that the Lotofácil pays often, that reading is correct: 70 million tickets received something across a hundred draws. It is worth remembering the size of what most of them received.