How to Play Cash4Life: A Complete Beginner Guide (Retired 2026)

What Cash4Life was

Cash4Life was a daily lottery game with an unusual prize at the top: not a jackpot almost nobody wins, but $1,000 a day, for life. It ran from June 2014 until February 2026, cost $2 a play and was drawn every night. For a certain kind of player — someone who would rather have a steady income than a one-in-292-million shot at a fortune — it was the most understandable game on the menu.

This guide keeps the rules, prize tiers and odds exactly as they were, because plenty of people still hold old tickets, and because the history answers the question everyone asks: was Cash4Life actually easier to win?

One thing up front: the game is not coming back. New Jersey's announcement in January 2026 confirmed that the final drawing would be held on 21 February 2026, and a replacement game launched the next day.

How the game worked: five numbers plus a Cash Ball

A Cash4Life play was five different numbers from 1 to 60, plus one Cash Ball from 1 to 4. You could pick them yourself or let the terminal choose (Quick Pick), and the five main numbers did not need to come out in any particular order — only the Cash Ball had to match exactly.

The arithmetic behind the headline odds is worth seeing once. There are 5,461,512 ways to choose five numbers from 60, and four possible Cash Balls, so a single play had 21,846,048 equally likely outcomes. That is where the 1 in 21,846,048 came from — not a marketing number, just C(60,5) × 4.

Multi-draw tickets covered up to 28 consecutive drawings. During the wind-down the maximum shrank week by week: 21 draws from 26 January 2026, then 14, then 7, and one at a time in the final week.

What a ticket cost

A play cost $2, the same as a Powerball line and less than the $5 Mega Millions ticket. That bought one entry in the nightly draw and access to all nine prize tiers.

There was one optional extra: DOUBLER, an additional $1 per play that doubled every non-"for life" prize — $2,500 became $5,000, and the smallest $2 prize became $4. The two "for life" prizes were not doubled.

When and where the draws happened

Drawings were held every night at approximately 9:00 pm Eastern, which made Cash4Life one of the few multi-state games with a daily result. Cut-off times were set by each state lottery, and results appeared on the participating lotteries' sites after the draw.

Nine states offered the game, with the New Jersey Lottery as the lead. That is a small footprint next to Powerball's 48 lotteries — one reason the prize pool, and so the top prize, stayed modest.

The nine prize tiers

Cash4Life paid nine ways, and the structure is worth reading in full, because the lower tiers were unusually generous for a $2 ticket.

Two details stand out. The overall chance of winning something was about 1 in 8, several times better than the national jackpot games. And the smallest prize — $2 for matching only the Cash Ball — was exactly the price of a ticket.

The 'for life' part: annuity, cash option and the 20-year guarantee

The top two prizes were annuities. $1,000 a day is $365,000 a year, and $1,000 a week is $52,000 a year; both were paid annually for the winner's lifetime, with a guaranteed minimum of 20 annual payments. That guarantee is what put a floor under the prize: $7.3 million for the top tier, $1.04 million for the second.

A winner could take a lump sum instead: $7,000,000 for the top prize or $1,000,000 for the second. The choice was irrevocable and had to be made within the deadline set by the state where the ticket was bought — 60 days in Virginia, for example. If several tickets shared the top prize, the lump sum was split between them.

If a winner died before the 20-year guarantee ran out, the remaining payments went to the beneficiary named with the lottery, or to the winner's estate if no form had been filed.

What happened to the game

The New Jersey Lottery announced on 21 January 2026 that Cash4Life would be retired. The last drawing was 21 February 2026; Millionaire for Life, its replacement, was first drawn on 22 February 2026.

The new game is a different proposition: $5 a play, a top prize of $1 million a year for life with an $18 million cash option, nine ways to win, nightly drawings and 32 participating jurisdictions. Its overall odds are about 1 in 8.47.

If you still hold a Cash4Life ticket

Old tickets are not automatically worthless: prizes from the final drawings remain claimable until each state's deadline, and those deadlines vary — Virginia, for instance, gave players 180 days from the drawing date, while other states allow up to a year.

Three practical rules. Claim with the lottery that sold the ticket, because a Cash4Life ticket cannot be redeemed in another state. Check the deadline printed on the ticket or on that lottery's site. And if you hold a multi-draw ticket covering draws after 21 February 2026, ask the lottery how the wind-down applied to the remaining draws. Annuities already won are unaffected: the state keeps paying them, 20-year guarantee included.

Was Cash4Life a better bet than Powerball?

In one narrow sense, yes. The top prize was far more likely — 1 in 21,846,048 against 1 in 292,201,338 in Powerball and 1 in 290,472,336 in Mega Millions — and winning anything at all was about three times more likely.

But probability is not value. A 1-in-21.8-million chance at $1,000 a day is not "better" than a 1-in-292-million chance at a nine-figure jackpot in any absolute sense: the expected payout per ticket was small in both cases, and the house kept its share either way. Cash4Life's appeal was the shape of the prize — a daily income, guaranteed for 20 years, from a $2 ticket drawn every night.

The honest summary

Cash4Life was the most understandable game in the lottery aisle: a modest prize with a real chance, a $2 ticket, a draw every night, and a guarantee that made "for life" concrete. It ended on 21 February 2026 and was replaced by a bigger, more expensive, harder-to-win game.

If you are here because you hold an old ticket, check the deadline in the state that sold it. If you liked the format, the Cash4Life statistics page keeps the full history — 2,949 drawings from June 2014 to February 2026 — and the Powerball and Mega Millions guides cover the games that are still running.