The full name of the NC Lottery is in fact the North Carolina Education Lottery (NCEL). This lottery was established after the North Carolina State Lottery Act was signed into law in August 2005. All the net proceeds of the North Carolina Education Lottery go to education expenses like reducing the size of classes in early grades, school construction, and scholarships.
NCEL games include Carolina Pick 3, Carolina Pick 4, Carolina Cash 5, Powerball, and Mega Millions as well as raffles, instant scratch-offs, and special promotions. NC Lottery winning numbers may be viewed on nc-educationlottery.org since this is the NCEL official Web site, which went live on March 30, 2006, the same day that NCEL retail sales began. Another way to view the latest nc lottery winning numbers is through the North Carolina Education Lottery winning numbers RSS feed for Web syndication.
The first winner of one hundred thousand dollars from NC Lottery winning numbers arrived at the NCEL headquarters the day after retail sales began. Not until several months later, on October 29, 2006, two days after sales of the Cash 5 game began, was the first jackpot won, though someone in North Carolina did win a million dollars playing Powerball in the interim.
Carolina Cash 5 is played by selecting five numbers from 1 to 39. If you match two, three, four, or all five of the NC Lottery winning numbers drawn daily for this game, in any order, then you win. The prizes for matching three, four, or five numbers are pari-mutuel and shared equally among the winners per prize level.
In the Carolina Pick 3 game (sales of which were also started in October 2006, about three weeks earlier than sales of Cash 5), players pick three numbers from 0 to 9. They have four play types for matching their numbers to the official NC Lottery winning numbers drawn every day for this game, in daytime and evening.
Pick 4 was not added to the NCEL games until April 2009. It is similar to the Pick 3 game because players pick four numbers from 0 to 9 and Pick 4 has the same four play types as Pick 3. The combination 2-2-2-2 in the afternoon of March 16, 2011, was the first time that the NC Lottery winning numbers drawn for Pick 4 were all the same, and it resulted in a payout of 645 thousand dollars. Many of those who play Pick 4 and Pick 3 enjoy using duplicate number combinations, but a winning quadruple or triple combination is a rare occurrence.
