Where the money goes

ROW 82-7 · DUG · AT DOCUMENTED SIZE, STATE FRAME TOUCHING THIS GROUND

The distribution is a statute's arithmetic, and it touches this ground through two payrolls: the Hoosier Lottery's FY2025 annual report records a transfer of $340.6 million to the State of Indiana in the fiscal year ended June 30, 2025, against $1.06 billion paid in prizes. The standing disbursement the General Assembly has fixed takes the first slices off the top every year: $30 million to local police and firefighters' pensions and $30 million to the Teachers' Retirement Fund, with the balance to the Lottery Surplus Fund. The cumulative account since 1989, from the Lottery's own giving-back record: $8.1 billion transferred in total — $6.1 billion to the Surplus Fund, $880 million to police and firefighters' pensions, $1.0 billion to the Teachers' Retirement Fund. The Surplus Fund is the heir of the older Build Indiana Fund pattern: the 2016 legislative explainer of that scheme sent roughly 80 percent of excess revenue to Build Indiana, over 90 percent of it onward to the Motor Vehicle Excise Tax Replacement Account — the mechanism by which lottery money has, since the game's first promises, held down the excise tax on every car registered from a Granger driveway — with the residue supporting state technology projects including school and library connectivity.

At this ground's scale the touch is real but unitemized, and it is printed at that strength. The two named pension streams flow to funds whose members work here: the Teachers' Retirement Fund covers the Penn-Harris-Madison teachers in the CDP's five public schools, and the police-and-fire pension stream covers, among the county's departments, the firefighters of the Clay Fire Territory who serve the CDP. The Lottery publishes no distribution by census-designated place and no county share of the pension streams in the record reached; any dollar figure assigned to Granger itself would be an invention, and none is printed. What can be said whole is the direction of flow: money staked at Granger's counters returns to Granger as pension funding for its teachers and firefighters and as a statewide offset to its motorists' excise tax — the documented size of the return is the state's, $340.6 million in FY2025, and the city's place in it is membership, not a line item.

Sources:

1. Hoosier Lottery, Annual Report, Fiscal Year 2025 — the $340.6 million transfer; $1.06 billion in prizes; the $30 million / $30 million pension disbursements.
2. Hoosier Lottery, "Giving Back to Indiana" (read November 2026) — the since-1989 cumulative split ($8.1 billion; $6.1 billion Surplus Fund; $880 million police/fire pensions; $1.0 billion Teachers' Retirement Fund); the Surplus Fund's motor-vehicle excise-tax offset of up to 50 percent.
3. Indiana House Republicans, "Where does the lottery money go?" (2016) — the Build Indiana Fund pattern (the pension funds' ~10 percent shares; ~80 percent to Build Indiana; over 90 percent of that to excise-tax replacement; technology projects including school and library internet).