North Carolina's Lottery Hit a Record $6.6 Billion. Education's Cut Fell to 16%.
Summary
North Carolina's lottery sold a record $6.6 billion in tickets in fiscal 2025, per the state's own audited financial statements — but the share reaching the fund the lottery is named for fell to 16%, down from 23% two years earlier, and the actual dollars transferred dropped slightly even as revenue jumped $1.2 billion. The same school year, the state's own count found 7,141 teaching positions unfilled statewide.
A record year, a shrinking cut
The lottery's own audited numbers, filed with the state every year in Note 12 of its financial statements, show total revenue climbing in every one of the last three fiscal years: $4.35 billion in FY2023, $5.39 billion in FY2024, $6.60 billion in FY2025. Over that same span, the share of that revenue that actually reached the state for education fell every year — from 23% to 20% to 16%. State Auditor Dave Boliek put it plainly in the audit's release: "Over the last three years, total revenues have increased by a total of over $3 billion, while contributions to public education have been flat."
View data as table
| FY2023 | 23% | $1.015B transferred |
|---|---|---|
| FY2024 | 20% | $1.092B transferred |
| FY2025 | 16% | $1.076B transferred |
"Flat" undersells it. The dollar figures show total revenue up $2.25 billion from FY2023 to FY2025 — a 51.7% jump — while the dollar amount transferred for education rose only $61 million over the same two years, just 6.0%. And in the record year itself, the direction reversed: total revenue grew by $1.21 billion from FY2024 to FY2025 (up 22.5%), while the dollars actually transferred for education fell by $16 million, from $1.092 billion to $1.076 billion.
View data as table
| FY2023 total revenue | $4,350,634,000 |
|---|---|
| FY2023 to education | $1,015,249,000 |
| FY2024 total revenue | $5,390,378,000 |
| FY2024 to education | $1,092,314,000 |
| FY2025 total revenue | $6,600,833,000 |
| FY2025 to education | $1,076,325,000 |
Where the $6.6 billion went
The gap isn't a mystery — it's arithmetic the lottery's own note discloses in full. Three-quarters of every dollar taken in is returned to players as prizes: $4.998 billion in FY2025, 76% of revenue. Retailer commissions, fixed by statute at 7% of "traditional" (non-digital) ticket sales, took $268.956 million, paid out across a network of 7,150 retailers statewide. Advertising and other operating costs — salaries, gaming-system vendor fees, marketing — took another $257.291 million. What's left after prizes, commissions, and overhead is what reaches the state: $1.076 billion, 16% of the total.
View data as table
| Prize expense | $4,998,261,000 | 76% |
|---|---|---|
| Retailer commissions | $268,956,000 | 4% |
| Advertising & other expenses | $257,291,000 | 4% |
| Transferred for education | $1,076,325,000 | 16% |
Retailers didn't share in the record year either: their $268.956 million in FY2025 commissions is less than the $284.178 million they earned in FY2024, even though total sales rose by more than $1.2 billion. The audit attributes this to the lottery's first full year of Digital Instant sales — tickets bought directly through the NCEL mobile app, which generated $2.6 billion in gross sales in FY2025 but, unlike in-store tickets, pay no retailer commission at all.
The other count
The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction runs its own annual count, submitted to the General Assembly under G.S. 115C-299.5: how many teaching positions the state's school districts couldn't fill. For the 2024-25 school year — the same twelve months as the lottery's record-setting fiscal 2025 — districts reported 93,868.34 total teaching positions statewide and 7,141.41 of them, 7.61%, still vacant on the 40th instructional day.
View data as table
| Teaching positions statewide | 93,868 | 2024-25 school year |
|---|---|---|
| Vacant at 40th instructional day | 7,141 | 7.61% of all positions |
DPI's own definition of "vacant" is broad: a position counts as vacant if it lacks an appropriately licensed teacher eligible for permanent employment, even if a long-term substitute, a rehired retiree, or a provisionally licensed teacher is covering the classroom day to day. The department's report is explicit that this measures unfilled permanent positions, not empty classrooms — so 7,141 is a count of staffing instability, not a count of children with no adult in the room.
The Education Lottery Fund does not pay classroom teacher salaries directly. By statute and by NCEL's own account of its purpose, the fund supports prekindergarten programs, school construction, and need-based college scholarships — not the general operating budgets that cover teacher pay. Nothing here shows the lottery's shrinking transfer caused the vacancy count, or that a larger transfer would have closed it. What the state's own two ledgers show, side by side, is a lottery generating record money in the same year the state's teaching workforce ran short by thousands of positions.
The takeaway
- The lottery's cut for education fell for a third straight year — from 23% of revenue in FY2023 to 16% in FY2025 — even as total revenue rose 51.7% over the same two years, per the lottery's own audited financial statements.
- In the record year itself, the dollar amount reversed. Total revenue grew $1.21 billion from FY2024 to FY2025; the dollars transferred for education fell $16 million.
- State law's own 38% guideline for the transfer — written in 2005, "to the extent practicable" — was met by less than half in FY2025.
- The same school year, the state counted 7,141 unfilled teaching positions statewide (7.61%), per NC DPI's own report to the General Assembly — not shown here as caused by the lottery figures, but as the same state's parallel account of its education system's staffing.
The Education Lottery Fund's statutory purposes are prekindergarten, school construction, and college scholarships, not general teacher pay — the vacancy figures above are presented as a separate, independently sourced measure of the state's education system in the same period, not as a causal claim. The FY2023 audited filing's own summary line prints its education share as "24%"; the figure used here (23%) is the result of that filing's own dollar amounts divided by its own total, which matches how two later, independent NCEL filings describe FY2023.
Sources
- NC Office of the State Auditor / North Carolina Education Lottery, audited financial statements, fiscal year 2025 (issued Dec. 2025) — Note 12 allocation table: total revenue, prize expense, commissions, and the transfer to the state, for FY2025 and FY2024. Downloaded directly and verified byte-for-byte against server Content-Length (1,519,473 bytes). files.nc.gov
- NC Office of the State Auditor / North Carolina Education Lottery, audited financial statements, fiscal year 2023 (issued Oct. 2023) — Note 12 allocation table for FY2023 and FY2022, source of the FY2023 dollar figures used in this piece. Downloaded and verified (947,256 bytes). files.nc.gov
- NC Office of the State Auditor, press release, NC Education Lottery Financial Statement Audit Released (Dec. 29, 2025) — State Auditor Dave Boliek's on-the-record statement on flat education contributions despite rising revenue, and the office's own 23%/20%/16% three-year framing. auditor.nc.gov
- North Carolina General Statute § 18C-162, Allocation of revenues — the lottery's own 2005 guideline that at least 38% of total annual revenue "shall be transferred," to the extent practicable, for education purposes. ncleg.net
- NC Department of Public Instruction, State of the Teaching Profession in North Carolina, report to the NC General Assembly under G.S. 115C-299.5, covering the 2024-25 school year — statewide teaching position and 40th-instructional-day vacancy counts, and the department's own definition of a "vacant" position. Downloaded and verified (873,784 bytes). webservices.ncleg.gov
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The North Carolina Education Lottery took in $6.6 billion in fiscal 2025, its highest total ever, according to the audited financial statements the North Carolina Office of the State Auditor released on December 29, 2025. State law's own guideline for the lottery — written into G.S. 18C-162(a)(2) when the lottery was created in 2005 — says at least 38% of total annual revenue "shall be transferred," to the extent practicable, to the fund the lottery exists to feed. In fiscal 2025, the actual figure was 16%.