Lotto 6aus49 in Saarland

Saarland is the clear outlier in the statistics. €57 per capita, 1st place out of 16, well ahead of Schleswig-Holstein (€47). As a share of disposable income, Saarland also ranks 1st with 0.22 percent. While other states spend roughly 0.13 to 0.16 percent on average, Saarland spends a good half more. That is not random.

Saarland is also ahead on the luck side. With 4.0 million-euro wins per million residents, it had the highest big-win ratio of all states in 2024. Over several years, the finding remains stable: since 2018, Saarland has led the German statistics for Lotto prize sums per resident at €81.20, clearly ahead of Brandenburg (€63.80) and Hamburg (€54.10). If people in Saarland play a lot, they statistically also record many hits. That is not magic, just a consequence of higher stakes.

What makes Saarland so different is the history of its own lottery company. Saartoto was founded in 1951 on the initiative of the Landessportverband für das Saarland (LSVS). The state sports association still holds 42.86 percent of the shares today, while Saarland itself holds 57.14 percent. This ownership structure is unique in Germany: in no other state does the state sports association own shares in the lottery company. If you play Lotto in Saarland, the sports association is directly a co-shareholder.

This creates a second special feature. By law, one eighth of all stakes in Saarland, the so-called "Sportachtel", flows directly to the LSVS. It is the association's central source of income and the only grant that accounts for more than ten percent of its annual revenue. This makes Saarland the state where Lotto and sport are most tightly interwoven, historically and financially.

If you hand in a ticket in Saarland, you fund a specific Saarland infrastructure: the Hermann-Neuberger-Sportschule in Saarbrücken, the Saarland/Rhineland-Palatinate Olympic training centre, the Ronald McDonald House in Homburg, the Max Ophüls Film Festival, Musikfestspiele Saar or the Bexbach Mining Museum. Over the past five years, Saartoto has made around €219 million available for public tasks in Saarland. With around one million residents, that comes to just under €220 per resident over five years, directed at Saarland clubs, events and institutions.

That also helps explain why people in Saarland play more often than average. Lotto in Saarland is not just a game, but an established piece of local identity and infrastructure funding that has followed the same path for more than 70 years.