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5 states without a lottery: Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada and Utah

Five states without a lottery remain in the U.S. — Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada and Utah — and constitutional bans or gambling laws explain most of them

Lottery tickets are on sale in 45 U.S. states. The five states without a lottery are Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada and Utah. As of this writing, they form the complete list. They share a gap on the map, not a single explanation. The reasons differ from state to state, and in one case they are not clearly documented.

The list used to be longer. Wyoming started a state lottery in 2014, and Mississippi launched its own in 2019. Those were the most recent states to join, and their entry narrowed the holdouts to the current five. Anyone working from an older list may still see one or both named.

Law accounts for most of the pattern. Alabama, Nevada and Utah each have a lottery ban written into the state constitution. Hawaii's barrier is a statute rather than a constitutional clause. State law there prohibits commercial gambling.

The difference matters for anyone hoping to change the rules. A constitutional ban cannot be lifted by ordinary legislation alone. Removing it takes an amendment to the state constitution, and that amendment has to be approved by voters. A lottery proposal in those three states therefore faces a public vote as well as a political debate. That extra step is one reason the roster of states with no lottery has changed slowly.

Alaska is the hardest case to explain. The state has no lottery, yet the record offers no single documented reason for its absence. Rather than guess at a cause, the Alaska entry below focuses on what the state does permit.

A missing lottery does not always........

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