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The NumbersBeginner4 min read

Keno Payout Charts Explained: Real 2026 State Comparisons

A keno pay table maps your catches to dollars, and every venue writes its own. Real 2026 charts from three state lotteries show how the same catch can pay $50 in one state and $146 in a Vegas lounge.

A keno payout chart, also called a pay table, lists what every catch pays at your ticket size, per $1 wagered. One axis is your spots, how many numbers you picked. The other is your catches, how many the draw matched. The cell where they meet is your prize. That grid, combined with the fixed catch probabilities from the odds and probability table, is the entire game. There are no decisions after you buy a ticket.

What three habits make a chart easier to read?

Three habits make any chart easier to read. Prizes scale with the wager, so a $5 ticket pays five times the listed $1 prize, up to the game's cap. Low catches typically pay nothing at all — catching 3 of 10 pays $0 on every documented chart. And two catches "paying" $1 on a $1 ticket is a push, a refund, not a win; charts count it as a prize anyway.

Real 2026 numbers make the spread concrete:

Catch

Maryland

Ohio

Massachusetts

Solid 3-spot

$25

$27

$25

9 of 10

$4,000

$5,000

$10,000

10 of 10 (top prize)

$100,000

$100,000

$100,000

0 of 9 (nine-spot ticket)

$2

$2

—

All three agree on the $100,000 top prize for a solid 10-spot, but the rows underneath it diverge sharply. Nine-spot tickets add an odd wrinkle too — in Maryland and Ohio, catching zero of your nine numbers pays $2. It looks generous. It isn't: blanking all nine is a hard event to hit when 20 of 80 numbers come out, so the prize costs the lottery almost nothing while making a losing ticket feel like an event.

Why are top prizes marketing, not the real comparison?

The bigger lesson is that top prizes are marketing, not the real comparison point. Watch one single event — catching 7 of 10 — travel across America: $50 in Maryland, $50 in Ohio, $80 in Massachusetts, and 146x your bet on the best documented Las Vegas casino chart. Wizard of Odds' Spot Keno survey found seven real pick-10 paytables where every one pays the same 10,000x jackpot, yet overall return spans 86.43% to 94.95% because the middle rows — catches 6 through 8 — are priced completely differently. Players compare jackpots. The pricing actually happens two or three rows down.

Does format matter more than progressive jackpots?

That spread is also why format matters more than any single number choice or lucky pattern. Casino paytables generally beat lottery keno; state lottery monitor games design toward roughly 70% return, matching the math worked out in the house edge lesson. Real six-figure hits do happen — documented 2025 Las Vegas jackpots of $152,094.61 on a nine-spot and $121,200.50 on a ten-spot — but those were progressives, jackpots that grow with play until someone hits, not the flat chart amount. Even Massachusetts' $1,000,000 twelve-spot carries an aggregate liability cap.

The practical takeaway: never judge a chart by its jackpot alone. Read the whole column, especially catches 6 through 8 on a mid-size ticket, and check for caps in the fine print. That's the part of the chart a typical winning night actually pays from — no strategy about which numbers to pick changes any of these figures, since every number carries the same odds regardless of the chart underneath it.

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