About the New Hampshire Lottery

The New Hampshire lottery is the oldest legal lottery in the United States and proud of it. The lottery dates all the way back to 1964, when NH sweepstakes tickets went on sale on March 12. You could say that New Hampshire set the trend, as several other states have since followed suit with their own lotteries.

As you might expect, since the creation of the NH lottery there have been some considerable changes. Rather than single sweepstakes tickets, players can now buy a wide range of NH lottery tickets with nine different games available in the Granite State. As a result, plenty of people tune in to find out NH lottery numbers, with the lottery even having its own online channel.

Of the games available in the state, the four main single state games don't offer huge jackpots, but are certainly well worth playing, with Pick 3 and Pick 4 options. However, it's all about the multi-state games available to New Hampshire Lottery players. As well as NH Powerball and Mega Millions, there are also three Tri-State lotteries. These come in the form of Megabucks, Hot Lotto and Weekly Grand with all three regularly handing out multi-million dollar NH jackpots.

An example of these jackpots came on August 4, 2010 when Frank Sullivan of Gilman VT won a $12.5 million Tri-State Megabucks Plus jackpot. Sullivan bought the ticket at the Top of the Hill store in Dalton, NH, but soon told reporters that he wasn't even the first lottery winner in his family. Back in 1995, his cousin won an $8 million Megabucks jackpot while another cousin was part of a group that had winning numbers worth $500,000. Not bad for just one New Hampshire family!

The Tri-State Lottery offers players in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont the chance to win larger jackpots than they would normally be able to in single state games. It was the first multi-state lottery of its kind with the first lottery results being drawn on September 14, 1985.

If you aren't lucky enough to have NH lottery winning numbers, then don't fear as the NH lottery offers an innovative service where players can still win with non-winning tickets. It's called NH Lottery Replay and was the first scheme of its kind in the US. It works by players entering their non-winning tickets to earn points and win prizes such as gift vouchers, holidays and even motorbikes. So far more than 600,000 instant prizes have been won, so it's no surprise that the scheme has become incredibly popular with NH Lottery players.

As the first legal US lottery, the New Hampshire Lottery set the standard and showed others the way by providing a large share of their revenue to the state's education system. In 2009, the NH Lottery had given more than $1.3 billion to education and will hopefully continue to do so for many more years.