Lotofácil da Independência: 14 editions and 656 tickets with 15 matches

The Lotofácil da Independência is the special Lotofácil draw held around Brazil's Independence Day, 7 September. Lotofácil draw 800, on 6 September 2012, took in R$ 122.8 million. Draw 799, a week earlier, had taken in R$ 16.5 million. In earlier Septembers, no Lotofácil draw had paid more than R$ 6.8 million in the 15-match tier; draw 800 paid R$ 43 million. That is where the holiday draw became the Lotofácil da Independência. From 2012 to 2025 there were 14 editions, and I gathered the official prize data for all of them.

Edition	Draw	Tickets with 15 matches	Prize per ticket	Ticket sales
2012	800	14	R$ 3,072,442	R$ 122.8 million
2013	952	66	R$ 1,107,491	R$ 184.0 million
2014	1102	43	R$ 1,821,022	R$ 212.4 million
2015	1255	51	R$ 1,757,074	R$ 259.1 million
2016	1408	10	R$ 8,227,507	R$ 209.6 million
2017	1557	15	R$ 5,905,591	R$ 245.8 million
2018	1708	33	R$ 2,778,858	R$ 272.9 million
2019	1861	33	R$ 3,014,771	R$ 288.9 million
2020	2030	50	R$ 2,499,998	R$ 373.0 million
2021	2320	57	R$ 2,791,890	R$ 517.4 million
2022	2610	79	R$ 2,248,149	R$ 617.9 million
2023	2900	65	R$ 2,955,553	R$ 657.7 million
2024	3190	86	R$ 2,354,726	R$ 730.1 million
2025	3480	54	R$ 4,293,825	R$ 781.2 million

Prizes are rounded to the real; the exact figures are on each draw's page, reachable from the Lotofácil page.

Many winners, modest prizes

The Independência has never gone without a 15-match winner. The minimum was 10 tickets, in 2016, and the maximum 86, in 2024. Added up, the 14 editions had 656 tickets with 15 matches.

That pulls the individual prize down. The median of the 14 editions is around R$ 2.8 million per ticket, and the largest in the series, R$ 8.2 million, came precisely in the year with the fewest winners. For comparison: in a regular Lotofácil draw, the prize per 15-match ticket has reached R$ 14.3 million, in July 2026. The Independência's total prize is far larger, but it reaches each winner much more divided.

How many winners there should have been

The prize data allows an interesting calculation. A single ticket has a 1 in 11.4 chance of matching exactly 11 numbers in Lotofácil, so the number of 11-match winners gives an estimate of how many single tickets the draw had. In 2025 there were 18,955,181 tickets with 11 matches, which points to something like 216 million single tickets. At 1 chance in 3,268,760 each, the expectation would be about 66 tickets with 15 matches. There were 54.

In some editions the gap is much larger:

Edition	Expected by the calculation	Actual
2013	44	66
2016	34	10
2024	75	86
2025	66	54

If every player picked numbers at random, the actual count would almost always land within a few units of the expectation. Ten winners when the calculation gave 34 is too far off to be luck alone. What explains it is that people do not pick at random: some combinations are played far more than others, and the number of winners depends on how many tickets held exactly the drawn combination. By the numbers, 2016's was among the rarely played ones, and 2013's among the heavily played. It is the same reason the 2018 Mega da Virada had 52 winners, covered in Mega da Virada: what 17 editions show. The calculation does not change anybody's chance, but it shows that the size of each winner's prize depends on everyone else's choices.

Why the Independência pays back more

In the one hundred regular draws analysed in another article, Lotofácil paid out 37.1% of what it took in. At the Independência the share is much higher: between 55.8% and 69.5% of the draw's own ticket sales, depending on the year. In 2025 it paid R$ 444.1 million on R$ 781.2 million in sales.

That is not the September draw being generous. Part of the prize of every regular draw goes into a reserve for the Independência, which Caixa publishes with each result: on 22 January 2025 it stood at R$ 49.4 million, and on 26 August, the last draw before the holiday, at R$ 143.3 million. The Independência pays out at once money that came from the rest of the year's draws. For 2025, Caixa estimated the top prize at R$ 220 million, and the 15-match tier paid R$ 231.9 million in total.

The fixed tiers kept up with time

Lotofácil's 11, 12 and 13-match tiers pay fixed amounts, and the Independência series shows them changing. Eleven matches paid R$ 2.50 in 2012, R$ 4.00 in 2015, R$ 5.00 in 2020, R$ 6.00 in 2023 and R$ 7.00 in 2025. Thirteen matches went from R$ 12.50 to R$ 35.00 over the same period. Since almost 19 million tickets match 11 in a recent edition, that tier alone paid R$ 132.7 million in 2025.

LotAssist does not sell or broker tickets. The Lotofácil da Independência is sold at lottery outlets and through Caixa's official channels.