WSER Lottery Statistics

Just ahead of the lottery this coming Saturday Western States publishes their final 2025 applicants and their ticket counts numbers.

Some highlights:

• There are a record number of entrants, just shy of 10,000: 9,993.
• This results in a record number of tickets in the lottery: 68,724.
• The number of single ticket holders has actually gone down over the previous year: 2025: 4,122 to 2024: 4,434.
• Every year there’s a pretty big drop off between folks having one ticket in the lottery vs. 2 tickets.

Of course, making all these numbers public welcomes the annual calls on social media to make the lottery fairer for the person “fix” the lottery in the favor of the person making the claim. Western States clearly loves this attention and hype around their event far out from the actual race. I do wonder if there will be a breaking point where the number of tickets in the lottery vs. the actual spots is just too great and folks will lose hope to ever getting the chance to run this race. Or will just become too expensive for folks to keep up with the annual qualifier chase?

For folks interested in the numbers in more detail, here there are for the last few years:

• 2025
• 2024
• 2023
• 2022