How Many Onam Bumper Tickets Are Sold, and Where Does the Money Go?

As of 19 September 2026, the Kerala State Lotteries Department has sold 76,85,650 of the roughly 90 lakh tickets it planned to print for the Thiruvonam Bumper BR-111, worth about Rs 384 crore in sales with a week still to go before the 26 September draw. That already puts this Onam Bumper ahead of last year's, which closed at just over 75 lakh tickets sold. Most of that Rs 500-a-ticket money never sits with the government at all: it is split between the prize pool, the agents and retailers who sell the ticket, and the tax collector, long before the state books anything as its own.

• BR-111 ticket sales, at a glance
• How many lottery tickets are sold in Kerala per day?
• Where does the Rs 500 you spend on a ticket actually go?
• What is the revenue generated from lottery in Kerala?
• So how much does the state actually keep?

BR-111 ticket sales, at a glance

The row below is this draw's own snapshot; the sale and revenue mechanics explained after it hold for any Kerala bumper, any year.

Detail	BR-111 figure
Tickets planned	About 90 lakh, across 10 series (TA to TL, skipping TF and TI)
Tickets sold (as of 19 September 2026)	76,85,650
Sales value so far	About Rs 384 crore
Ticket price	Rs 500
Draw date and time	26 September 2026, 2 pm, Thiruvananthapuram
2025 Onam Bumper, final sales	Just over 75 lakh tickets
2024 Onam Bumper, final sales	About 71.40 lakh tickets

How many lottery tickets are sold in Kerala per day?

The Onam Bumper is a two-month spike on top of a business that runs every single day of the year. As of December 2023, the Directorate of Kerala State Lotteries was printing more than 1.8 crore tickets a day across its daily and weekly draws, moved through a network of roughly 55,000 registered agents and about 1.5 lakh retailers and sub-agents statewide.

• Tickets printed daily (regular draws): over 1.8 crore, as of December 2023
• Registered agents: about 55,000
• Retailers and sub-agents: about 1.5 lakh
• Regular draw calendar: seven weekly lotteries, one monthly draw, and six bumper draws a year, of which the Thiruvonam Bumper is one

Against that daily volume, a single bumper draw selling in the tens of lakhs over two months is a large but not unusual event for the department to handle.

Where does the Rs 500 you spend on a ticket actually go?

Four places, roughly in this order. First, the prize pool: BR-111 alone carries 5,34,670 prizes worth a combined Rs 125.54 crore, from the Rs 30 crore first prize down to the Rs 500 lowest tier, as set out in our full odds breakdown. Second, the agents: they buy their ticket allocation from the department at a discount off the Rs 500 face value, and that gap is their retail margin, on top of a separate 10 to 12 percent commission they earn only on any winning ticket they personally sold. Third, GST: lottery tickets are taxed like any other actionable claim, at 28 percent for years until the GST Council raised the rate to 40 percent with effect from 22 September 2025, so this is the first Onam Bumper sold entirely under the higher rate. On a regular Rs 40 draw ticket, GST works out to about Rs 9 of the price under the old 28 percent rate, by one financial analysis; the same proportional bite applies at any ticket price, and it got noticeably bigger for all of them once the rate rose. What is left after prizes, agent margin and tax funds the department's own running costs, and only the remainder becomes state revenue.

Early in this season's sales window, on 8 September 2026, the department effectively published both halves of that comparison at once: it had sold 59 lakh tickets, worth Rs 295 crore at the printed Rs 500 face value, but banked only Rs 230.10 crore of that in the state account, a gap of roughly a fifth. That gap is the agents' purchase discount showing up before a single prize has even been drawn.

What is the revenue generated from lottery in Kerala?

Statewide, across every draw and not just the Onam Bumper, lottery sales have climbed every year this decade: Rs 11,892.88 crore in 2022-23, Rs 12,530.91 crore in 2023-24, and Rs 13,244.48 crore in 2024-25. Lottery income typically makes up somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of Kerala's non-tax revenue, a striking share for a single scheme, though non-tax revenue is itself a much smaller slice of the state's total budget than tax revenue is.

So how much does the state actually keep?

Depends who is asked, and the gap between the two answers is itself telling. One independent financial explainer estimated the government keeps around Rs 3,500 crore a year after prizes and commissions are paid out, roughly a quarter of turnover. Kerala's own finance minister, K N Balagopal, has told the press that the state's actual profit is far thinner, just 3 to 5 percent of total lottery revenue, because most of the money goes into prizes, commissions and advertisements, and has flagged that the move to 40 percent GST squeezes that already-thin margin further, with the department weighing whether to trim agent commissions or prize payouts rather than raise the Rs 500 ticket price and risk losing buyers.

Either way, the picture is the same. An Onam Bumper ticket is not really a transfer from buyer to government. It is mostly a transfer among buyers, since most of the Rs 384 crore collected so far will come back out as prizes, with a real cut going to the tens of thousands of agents and retailers who make a living selling it, a growing cut to the tax department, and a genuinely modest share left over for the state. For what a winning ticket actually pays out after tax, see our take-home tax breakdown; for how those odds are actually calculated, see our Onam Bumper odds explainer. Both sit alongside our full Onam Bumper guide in the Kochi guides section.