The best lottery prizes you can win that aren’t money

When we think of the lottery, what we’re really thinking about is money. Lots and lots of money.

But you can win more than a million-dollar jackpot in a lottery. In fact, sometimes you can win things that money can’t buy. Lotteries offer a world of prizes, from rare whiskeys to rare cars to unique experiences, proving that not every jackpot comes with a dollar sign attached.

These are all the best items and experiences you can win in a lottery that aren’t cash.

A tradition unlike any other

Scoring a ticket to the Super Bowl, World Series, or NBA Finals will cost you an easy four figures, and that’s just for the cheap seats. If you want to sit anywhere close to the action, you’ll probably have to pay the price of a brand new car.

However, there’s one major sporting event that is still affordable for almost everyone. Tickets for The Masters, the world's most famous golf tournament, cost only $160 for a round. That doesn’t include the price of concessions, though, which will set you back $1.50 for a sandwich and $6 for a beer.

In other words, a full day at the Masters will cost you less money than it costs to park at the Super Bowl.

The only catch is that tickets are almost impossible to get. Unlike most other sporting events, you can’t simply buy a pass to get into the Masters. Instead, you have to enter a lottery to win the right to buy a ticket, and your odds of winning that lottery are slightly better than Powerball, but slightly worse than getting into Harvard.

While the tournament doesn’t release official numbers, the best estimate is that about 22,000 tickets are available each day, which sounds like plenty until you remember that about two million people apply for tickets each year, and each winner can buy two tickets.

That puts your odds of winning at .55%, the same odds as flipping a coin and getting heads eight times in a row.

On the other hand, it's free to enter, so there’s no harm in taking a shot at making a hole in one.

Call your pappy

From wine to watches, people love to collect rare items. But there’s one item so rare that states have to run lotteries just to fairly allocate the supply. Whiskey.

Pappy Van Winkle is one of the most coveted whiskeys in America, but if you want a taste, it's not as simple as driving down to the local liquor store and picking up a bottle. That’s because it is one of the rarest spirits you can find.

The most expensive bottle of Pappy Van Winkle retails for about $500, but it can sell for many times that on the secondary market. The price is driven by its scarcity and quality. Buffalo Trace, the company that distills Pappy, ages the whiskey from ten to twenty-three years before releasing it, making it impossible to expand supply in high-demand years.

On top of its long aging process, the company releases only a few thousand bottles of its most in-demand, long-aged whiskey every year. These bottles are distributed worldwide, so some states may get only a few dozen annually.

To prevent Black Friday-like riots when new bottles are released, some state liquor boards, including Pennsylvania, Utah, Maryland, and Virginia, use lotteries to determine who has the right to buy the most in-demand liquors.

In 2026, Virginia was allocated only eight bottles of the 23-year-old Pappy, and more than 57,000 people entered the lottery to win one. That meant your odds of winning were at .0139% or about the same as rolling a six with a die five times in a row.

But if you do win, you’ll get to enjoy the world’s most exclusive cocktail.

The most magical place on earth

While it's challenging to win the Masters lottery, thousands will still walk away with tickets. And if you’re willing to pay enough money, you don’t actually have to win the Pappy Van Winkle lottery to get a bottle.

But some experiences are so rare that they can’t be bought at any price, and only a few people get to enjoy them. No matter how magical your day at Disney World is, you have to leave when the park closes at the end of the day.

Unless, that is, you are one of the luckiest Disney fans in the world, and you win the opportunity to stay in the Cinderella Castle Suite, a hidden hotel room located at the top of Cinderella’s castle at the center of Disney World’s Magic Kingdom.

The room is an elaborate one-bedroom suite that feels like you’ve stepped onto a set from a Disney movie. It’s full of antique furniture, stained glass, elaborate mosaic artwork, and the ceiling above the large bathtub is even designed to look like a star-filled night.

While there are many Disney hotels, this is the only room inside a Disney theme park.

If you’re a Disney fan, you’re probably salivating at the opportunity to stay here, but there’s just one problem. The room is not for rent at any price. The only way in is to win one of the periodic sweepstakes or contests held by charitable groups affiliated with Disney.

For 2027, the best way to win a night in the suite is through the Royal Dream Come True giveaway hosted by the charitable organization Give Kids the World.

To enter the contest, all you have to do is donate money to Give Kids the World. You can give anywhere from $10 for 100 entries, up to $5000 for 2500 entries. You can technically enter the sweepstakes for free, but you’ll get only one entry, which isn’t great odds.

The entry window is open now through November 14, 2026.

Fast and the furious

There are many different types of rare cars. Some collectors covet classic cars like the 1965 Shelby GT Cobra, which never sells for less than seven figures.

Others take a more modern approach and go after so-called supercars, such as the Bugatti Centodieci, which goes from 0-60 in 2.4 seconds, can hit a top speed of 234 mph, and sells for $8 million.

Most people don’t think of Toyota when they think about rare and valuable cars, but that’s also because most people haven’t heard of the GR Yaris Sébastien Ogier 9x World Champion Edition.

For the uninitiated, Sébastien Ogier is one of the greatest rally car drivers in the world, and as the name of the car suggests, he’s won the world title nine times.

The GR Yaris is meant to celebrate his success, but it's not just named after him; Ogier also designed it. That makes the car coveted by rally car enthusiasts because it's as close as most people will get to a professional rally experience.

While the retail price of $53,000 means it's not quite as out of reach for most drivers as the Bugatti, it will actually be even harder to get your hands on one than the seven-figure supercar. 

Toyota built only 200 of the special edition GR Yaris: 100 stayed in Japan, and another 100 went to Europe. In Japan, at least, none will be for sale on a dealer lot. Instead, the only way to get one, as we’re sure you’ve figured out by now, is to enter a lottery.

If you’re interested in making every drive to the grocery store feel like a high-speed getaway after a bank robbery, you can enter the drawing for the right to buy the car on Toyota’s GR app.

Golden hour

When most people think of luxury watch brands, the first names that come to mind are probably Rolex, Cartier, or Patek Phillipe. The name that most people don’t consider is Swatch, a reliable mall watch brand with several versions that cost less than $100.

However, the brand’s Mission to the Moon 1969 watch is another matter entirely. Designed to honor the 1969 Apollo moon landing and the classic Omega Speedmaster, Swatch made only 1,969 versions of this watch, with each one individually numbered.

Adding to its value, each watch contains 11 grams of real 18K Omega moonshine gold, a special gold alloy designed by watchmaker Omega. For true moon mission enthusiasts, the watch also contains period-specific detailing, such as the 1969 Omega logo and a vertically brushed gold dial.

While this isn’t a classic boardroom Rolex, it’s still a unique collector's item that honors both an iconic time and the iconic Omega Speedmaster watch, and it was coveted by horologists (watch collectors).

The Mission to the Moon 1969 contains approximately $1,100 worth of 18K gold, but its retail price is just $570, so technically, you could make a profit just by buying one. But of course, that’s the real trick, because getting your hands on one of these timepieces takes more than walking into a store and laying down your credit card.

They’re only giving away these watches through a special lottery, but this time there’s a twist.

Because this watch is meant to honor the Apollo moon mission, before you can win the opportunity to buy one, you have to take a special test on Apollo 11 in two hours and fifteen minutes, which is the same amount of time that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin spent on the surface of the moon. Only people who pass the test are eligible to win the watch.

Dream home

If you’ve ever looked at the rents for New York City apartments, it probably feels like you have to win the lottery just to afford a place to live, and for some people, that’s literally true.

While New York is home to thousands of bankers, CEOs, and other high-net-worth individuals, it has ten times as many people who drive the buses, clean the floors, and make the food that allow the city to function in the first place.

For many blue-collar workers, a job in the city means either paying exorbitant rent for a tiny apartment in an undesirable neighborhood or commuting for hours each day from a more affordable city. That’s the problem that the New York Housing Lottery was designed to fix.

New York sets aside a certain number of its apartments for low- to middle-income people and charges them a discounted rate to live there.

For example, The Andrea is a high-end apartment building in New York’s very desirable Chelsea neighborhood. The market rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $6,750/month, which totals up to $81,000 for the year. However, for someone who won the housing lottery for that building, the rent would be only $1,622/month, or $19,464 per year.

To be clear, in order to qualify for the lottery, a person’s household income must be between $61,235 and $87,480, so this isn’t a way for already rich people to score a good deal on rent; it’s meant to help people who otherwise couldn’t afford to live someplace like The Andrea.

For some people, a dream home isn’t a ten-bedroom mansion; it’s just a good home they can actually afford to live in.