South Korea Lottery

What there is

South Korea's lottery is a state-run affair with a single operator at the top: Donghaeng Lottery Co., Ltd., which runs and manages every kind of lottery in the country, online, printed and electronic⁵. The lottery sits alongside casinos, horse racing, cycle racing, motorboat racing, sports betting tickets and bullfighting as one of the few forms of legal gambling in the country, a short list you can read about on our page on gambling in South Korea.

Within the lottery family there are four product types: online lottery (the big weekly draw games), printed instant lottery (scratch cards), printed and electronic combined draw lottery, and electronic lottery in both draw and instant form⁴. In practice, that means you can walk into almost any convenience store in the country and buy a Lotto ticket, a Pension Lottery ticket or a Speetto scratch card, and you can also play several games from a computer at home.

The games themselves are simple and cheap. Lotto 6/45, the national favorite, asks you to pick 6 numbers out of 45 and costs KRW 1,000 a game¹. Pension Lottery 720+ costs the same and pays its top prize as a monthly pension rather than a lump sum. Speetto scratch cards start at KRW 500. The biggest prize ever paid on Lotto was KRW 40.7 billion, in round 19 on April 12, 2003⁶.

Where to play

Lotto 6/45 is sold at Lotto terminals across the country, which means convenience stores and dedicated lottery shops, and also through the official Donghaeng Lottery website¹. Printed games like Speetto are in-store only, at printed lottery sales outlets nationwide³. Pension Lottery 720+ is sold both at its retailers nationwide and on the Donghaeng Lottery homepage².

Finding a shop is getting easier. A retailer map service on Naver Map and Kakao Map shows standardized retailer information, including location, the products each shop handles and its business hours. At first the service covers shops selling Lotto, with shops selling only printed lotteries such as instant or Pension Lottery to be added later⁷.

Online buying works differently from the shop counter. You register as a member on the Donghaeng Lottery site and top up a deposit balance, then buy from that balance⁶. There are tight online limits: Lotto bought over the internet is capped at one purchase a week per person, up to KRW 5,000, and mobile purchases of Lotto are restricted on weekends, though PC purchases run up to the internet sales limit⁸. Retail purchases have their own cap: KRW 100,000 per person per purchase at one sales point⁶.

One thing to know before you reach the counter: lottery tickets in Korea are cash only. Card payment is prohibited by law, so shops take cash, and for printed games also winning tickets and real-time bank transfer⁶.

How it works

Each game has its own rhythm, but the pattern is the same: buy a ticket, wait for the draw (or scratch immediately, for instant games), then claim any prize by the deadline printed on the ticket.

Draws are televised. Lotto 6/45 results are announced in a broadcast on MBC around Saturday 20:45, and Pension Lottery 720+ is drawn every Thursday around 19:05, with the time occasionally shifting with the broadcaster's schedule⁴. Results are also published on the official website, www.dhlottery.co.kr, and Pension Lottery results can be checked on the Donghaeng mobile app, by phone on ARS line 1566-5520, or by scanning the QR code on the front of the ticket².

Claiming depends on the size of the win. For printed games like Speetto, prizes of KRW 50,000 or less are paid at the sales outlet, prizes over KRW 50,000 up to KRW 100,000,000 are paid at NH Nonghyup Bank branches nationwide, and anything over KRW 100,000,000 is confirmed at Donghaeng Lottery and then paid at a designated NH Nonghyup Bank branch³. Prizes over KRW 2,000,000 require you to complete a claim form and present a real-name ID such as a resident registration card³.

For Lotto, fourth and fifth prizes are paid at the retailer, second and third prizes at an NH Nonghyup Bank branch with the ticket and ID, and the first prize only at the NH Nonghyup Bank head office⁶. If you bought online, winnings of KRW 2,000,000 or less are paid automatically into your deposit account the day after the draw, around 06:00 on Sunday⁹. Larger online wins are transferred to your Nonghyup Bank account rather than handed over in cash¹⁰.

Tax comes off the top. A 22 percent withholding applies to lottery winnings, so the figure you see deducted is what lands in your account¹¹. Annuity prizes from Pension Lottery, paid monthly, follow the same 22 percent rate¹.

Games and products

The Korean lottery family breaks down into a handful of distinct games, each with its own page in our guide.

Lotto 6/45 is the game most people mean when they say "Korean lottery." Pick 6 numbers from 45 for KRW 1,000; the first prize is 75 percent of the prize pool (excluding fourth and fifth prizes), and if nobody wins it, the prize carries over to the next draw for up to two consecutive weeks¹. Odds of the jackpot are 1 in 8,145,060¹. The ticket price was KRW 2,000 before August 2004, when it dropped to KRW 1,000; the average first prize fell with it, from 5.4 billion won to around 2.4 billion won, and recent December jackpots have run around 2 billion won¹¹.

Pension Lottery 720+ is the annuity game. A ticket costs KRW 1,000 and asks you to choose a group (1 to 5, or all groups) plus a 6-digit number². The first prize, KRW 7,000,000 a month for 20 years, has odds of 1 in 5,000,000, with two winning tickets per draw, one sold at a shop and one online². The second prize pays KRW 1,000,000 a month for 10 years, and a bonus prize of the same amount goes to 10 tickets per draw². Smaller prizes run down to KRW 1,000 for matching the last digit, and the overall odds of winning something are 1 in 10². If the winner dies, the remaining payments go to a designated beneficiary¹.

Speetto Instant Lottery is the scratch-card family, sold in three versions³.

The Speetto 2000 top prize rises to KRW 2,000,000,000 if you buy a full set, and the Speetto 500 jackpot odds are 1 in 4,000,000. You scratch with a coin and know instantly. Overall odds of any prize are about 1 in 3.2 on Speetto 500 and 1 in 2.8 on Speetto 2000³.

Donghaeng Lottery is the umbrella: the company that runs every Korean lottery, and the place where big prizes get confirmed before the bank pays out. Its customer center handles questions on retail outlets, purchase limits, draw broadcasts, deposits, prize collection and prize tax¹³.

Electronic lottery games in South Korea are the internet-only draw games sold on the Donghaeng site, including Powerball, Speed Kino, Triple Luck, Treasure Hunter and Catch Me¹⁴. Powerball runs its sales daily from 06:00 to 24:00⁸.

Powerball in South Korea deserves a note of caution in its own right: the name is widely used by illegal online gambling sites, so the only legitimate version is the one on the official Donghaeng Lottery site. Internet gambling generally is illegal in South Korea, and the legal lottery products are the ones described on this page¹⁵.

Speed Kino is one of the quick electronic draw games, sold on the Donghaeng Lottery homepage like the other internet games¹⁴.

Who can take part

The lottery is the most open form of gambling in Korea. Unlike the country's casinos, which are reserved for foreign passport-holders except at Kangwon Land, the lottery has no nationality rule: citizens, foreign residents and visitors all buy at the same counters and play the same games online.

The one firm rule is age. You must be 19 or older to buy lottery tickets, counted from January 1 of the year you turn 19, and minors under the Youth Protection Act may not buy at all⁴. The same age line applies to every product, from Lotto to Speetto to the electronic games³. There is no practical risk for a foreign visitor beyond the ordinary: buy from a licensed shop or the official site, keep your ticket, and claim within the deadline.

Practical tips

A few things worth knowing before your first purchase:

• Bring cash. Cards are not accepted for lottery at retail, so carry Korean won. A KRW 100,000 note buys the maximum one person can take from a single shop in one visit⁶.
• Keep the physical ticket. For printed games, the prize goes to whoever holds the ticket, even if you checked the QR code on your phone first. If you lose a winning ticket before the deadline, whoever finds it can claim the prize⁷.
• Mind the deadline. Every printed ticket shows a payment deadline on the front. Unclaimed winnings go to the lottery fund and are used for public projects, so a found-later ticket is worth nothing³.
• Protect the ticket. If the game data or barcode is contaminated or damaged beyond recognition, or half or more of the ticket is damaged, no prize is paid. If at least half the original shape survives and the terminal can still read the sales information, you may still get your win³.
• Register tickets in the Payco app if you want a safety net. The unclaimed-winnings automatic payout service pays out, on the deadline day itself, any registered prize you have not yet claimed. Small prizes arrive as Payco points you can convert to cash; prizes over KRW 2,000,000 go straight to a registered account in your own name after identity verification. Registration, notification and payout cost nothing⁷.
• Know the online limits before you plan a big session. Internet Lotto is capped at KRW 5,000 per person per week, and the site's combined daily limit across products is KRW 150,000. On Pension Lottery draw day, buying stops at 5 PM and does not resume until 10 PM².
• Check results more than one way. The Thursday and Saturday MBC broadcasts are the traditional way, but the website, the mobile app and the ARS line 1566-5520 all work, and the QR code on the front of a Pension Lottery ticket confirms a win on the spot².
• Do not expect a refund. Validly issued tickets are not refunded, and tickets whose sales period has ended cannot be exchanged or refunded at all¹².