Arkansas Lottery Celebrates Record-Breaking Year

The Arkansas Scholarship Lottery’s (ASL) fiscal year ended June 30, and it is celebrating recording-breaking sales and revenue for the year. Sales reached $499,704,976, and revenue was $500,490,212.

According to a press release, ASL Director Bishop Woosley said the best part of having record-breaking sales and revenues is it means more money for scholarships. Proceeds to scholarships were just shy of $92 million – the third highest amount since 2012 when more than $97 million went to help fund the Academic Challenge Scholarship.

“Our mission is to maximize proceeds to scholarships in a responsible way,” Woosley said. “With outstanding sales and revenues, we are doing just that. We have provided more than $781 million for the Academic Challenge Scholarship program, which equates to more than 275,000 scholarships. And that number will exceed 300,000 next month when the Arkansas Department of Higher Education awards scholarships to Arkansas students for the 2018-2019 school year.”

Instant lottery ticket sales also set a new record of $407,604,791, and Arkansas draw game sales had the second highest sales ever at $92,103,185.

“In 2016 draw game sales were more than $95 million,” Woosley said. “That was the year that the Powerball jackpot went over $1 billion.”

The Lottery also paid out the highest amount of prizes ever to players this year – nearly $342 million, which is about $27 million more than the second highest amount paid to players in 2012. And retailer commissions of more than $28 million were record-breaking as well this year.

Woosley added that the Arkansas Scholarship Lottery staff’s hard work contributed to the record year.

“Our excellent sales staff worked extremely hard this year,” he said. “Our gaming division introduced several new recording-breaking instant tickets, and our marketing group introduced a new advertising theme which featured real winners. I think all those efforts influenced our sales. I’m proud of the entire staff.”

To read the entire financial report presented to the Arkansas Legislative Council Lottery Oversight Subcommittee, go online to http://MyArkansasLottery.com/reports and click on “June 2018 Monthly Disclosure Reports” under “LOC Reports.”