Luckiest places for lottery winners ranked in Canada

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Published October 19, 2023 at 10:09 am

lottery luck places canada
Photo: dylan nolte

Lottery players take note: Ontario isn’t the luckiest place to live.

A new report studied lottery winnings in Canada’s provinces and territories to find out which place had the highest average winnings in the last year.

The study analyzed lottery winnings of $10,000 or more over the last 12 months in Canada’s three national draws: Lotto Max, Lotto 6/49, and Daily Grand, according to a press release from the report’s author Datslots, an online casino ranking website.

The amounts were totalled and divided per 1,000 residents to reveal Canada’s luckiest lottery region.

And it turns out Nunavut is the luckiest lottery region in Canada, averaging winnings of $172,473 per 1,000 residents.

But the results were likely skewed by a resident’s huge Daily Grand jackpot win of $7 million back in October 2022.

Alberta placed second in the study with winnings of $67,566 per 1,000 people. Over the last 12 months, residents won a total of $310,892,575 with a huge $70 million Lotto Max jackpot going to one individual in Calgary in October 2022.

Manitoba was named as the country’s third luckiest lottery region with average winnings of $53,959 per 1,000 residents.

Over the last 12 months, the largest jackpot win in the region was found in Winnipeg, where a local picked up a huge Lotto Max prize of $60 million in March 2023.

The report combined all the Atlantic Provinces and put them in fourth place with averaging lottery winnings of $45,688 per 1,000 residents.

People in New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island won a total of $116,652,647.

The largest jackpot was $64 million in the Lotto 6/49 player in April 2023. Unfortunately, the winner has yet to come forward for the jackpot, according to news reports. The winning ticket was purchased in Gloucester County, New Brunswick.

Despite having the largest sum of total lottery winnings in the past year, Ontario placed fifth in the study.

ontario lottery

Over the last 12 months, Ontario residents have won $646,485,815, more than double the sum of any other region. In November 2022, two Ontario residents won the jackpot prize of $60 million each in Lotto Max.

But the province’s large population puts them behind other regions.

Ontario’s average winnings were $42,357 per 1,000 people putting the province in fifth.

British Columbia, Quebec, and the Yukon took sixth, seventh, and eighth place in the study, averaging winnings of $38,547, $24,276, and $22,746 per 1,000 people, respectively.

And Saskatchewan ranked as the unluckiest Canadian province in the study, averaging winnings of $17,360 per 1,000 residents. The biggest lottery win in the province over the last 12 months was $5 million, claimed by an individual in Saskatoon playing Lotto 6/49 in May 2023.

Northwest Territories was the unluckiest of all the provinces and territories, accumulating the lowest winnings of any region at $521,581.

A Yellowknife resident claimed the most significant win, securing a Lotto 6/49 prize of $250,000 in July 2023.

The region ranked at the bottom of the study as the unluckiest place to play the lottery in the entire country, with average winnings of $11,438 per 1,000 people.

For more information on Datslots, see their website here.

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