How much do Spaniards spend on the lottery

The biggest lottery event in Spain is slowly approaching. We are talking about the Christmas lottery that is El Gordo de Navidad. More and more Spaniards are lining up to buy tickets as people fill out lottery administrations and join the lines to buy their tickets. In Madrid, for example, at Doña Manolita’s tent, the queue reaches several kilometres! And that’s just a couple of weeks before the start of the draw.

It is impossible to find a single Spaniard who has never bought a lottery ticket. Even the Spanish citizens themselves laugh that there aren’t any. Sometimes this leads to stories that sound like anecdotes. For example, in the village of Sodeto, all the villagers were once winners except one man. He simply didn’t buy a lottery ticket.

So how much do Spaniards spend on the lottery?

According to predictions by the National Lottery and Betting Society, Spaniards are likely to spend around €66.6 this year. This is one euro more than citizens spent last year. A simple calculation reveals that each person will buy around three tenths of it. However, the figures from the Consumer and User Organisations are slightly different. According to their statistics citizens are ready to spend on average 61 euros.

Anyway, for now the data are only preliminary projections. More specific figures will be known when the campaign comes to an end. In 2021 there were 172 series of tickets in circulation. There were 100,000 tickets in each series. The total draw amounted to 3.44 billion euros. According to the legislation, around 70% will go to the prize fund. Jesús Huertas, president of the lottery, said that the level of sales, which was recorded last summer, was at the level of the 2019 peak. The statistics say that this is a pretty good performance. That said, the Lottery president notes that there was a slight dip in activity in October. Analysts cannot yet ascertain what was the reason for this “slump”.

The Lottery President also revealed some rough statistics about how much the residents of certain cities are prepared to pay for the tickets during the press conference.

To get a sense of how serious the figures are for Spain it is worth comparing them with monthly wages or average earnings. For example, statistics show that if tax payments are taken into account, the average salary for the year in Spain is 21 thousand euros. At the same time, each Spaniard spends approximately 3.8% of their annual income on the Christmas lottery.