Super Bowl Squares Payout: What Every Board Size Pays

A full 100-square board pays out exactly what it collected, which is 100 times the price of one square, divided across the four scoring periods of the game. The standard shape gives 20 percent of the prize pool to each of the first three quarters and 40 percent to the last prize, and the table below runs that for every price a Super Bowl board realistically uses, so you can find your own row instead of scaling somebody else's example.

Every row here adds up to the full amount collected, which is the usual setup for a party or office board: the money handed out at the end of the night equals the money collected at the start. Plenty of boards do hold something back on purpose — a fundraiser taking a cut for the cause, a host covering food or the cost of printing — and that is fine as long as it is announced before squares go out and the prizes are sized off what is left. What goes wrong is sizing the prizes as a percentage of whatever happens to get collected, since that leaves the people who did turn up absorbing the squares nobody bought.

Write the actual dollar figures on the board rather than the percentages. A player looking at “$200 a quarter and $400 at the end” knows instantly what their square is worth, while a player looking at “20 percent per quarter” has to work it out and will get it wrong at least once.

According to our data, the prices real Super Bowl and NFL boards use most often are $1, $2, $5 and $10 a square, and the right one for your board comes out of who is in the room rather than out of a rule. A dollar a square fills almost immediately and pulls in the half of the party that barely follows football, which is exactly the point at a Super Bowl gathering where the game is the excuse rather than the event.

Higher prices raise more and make the last prize genuinely worth staying for, though they ask more of every person you invite. That is the trade you are actually making, and it runs in both directions: a higher price per square is harder to sell but pays out far more once the board fills, while a lower price sells out quickly and caps what the night can ever produce. A board that never fills raises nothing at all, no matter how good the prizes looked on paper.

Group size settles it more often than anything else. A bigger room spreads the same 100 squares across more people, so each person only needs a few squares to help fill the board and there is more total budget in the room to support a higher price. A smaller group needs everyone to claim several squares each to fill that same grid, which is a solid reason to keep the price low so nobody is quietly priced out of taking six.

If the board is raising money for something, work backwards from the cause instead of forwards from the price. On the common arrangement where half of what comes in goes to the cause and half funds the prizes, the price on a 100-square board is your goal divided by 50, so a $1,000 goal means $20 a square. Our walkthrough of running a Super Bowl squares fundraiser covers how to present that split to the people buying in.

A smaller board collects less and therefore pays less, but each square wins far more often, which is the part that rarely gets explained. The four standard sizes are 100 squares, 25 squares, 10 squares and 4 squares, and the table below runs all four at $10 a square on the same 20/20/20/40 split so you can see both halves of that trade at once.

That last column is where the smaller formats confuse people, so it is worth spelling out rather than assuming it lands. On a 25-square board the digits get grouped two to a lane, so a single square covers four of the hundred possible last-digit combinations instead of one, and a 4-square board groups five digits per lane so each square covers twenty-five of them. The 10-square board isn't a grid at all: it is a strip of ten boxes numbered 0 through 9, and the winner is whoever holds the last digit of both teams' scores added together, so a quarter ending 14 to 7 sums to 21 and pays the box marked 1.

None of that makes a smaller board a worse deal, and it is the honest answer to a group of ten people wondering whether a 100-square grid is worth it. Fewer squares mean smaller prizes and far better odds on each one, so everybody in a small room stays involved instead of watching four of sixty squares do all the winning. Our breakdown of every squares grid size goes through how each format is laid out, and our squares odds data shows how often each digit pairing has actually come up across five seasons of real NFL scores, because the combinations a square covers are not all equally likely to land.

Weighting the last prize at around 40 percent of the prize pool and splitting the rest evenly across the first three quarters is what most Super Bowl boards land on, and it is what we would recommend for a party crowd. It keeps a room watching a game that stopped being competitive in the third quarter, without turning the earlier quarters into something nobody bothers checking.

All three rows come to the same $1,000, and all three are equally fair, because every square had an identical chance of anything before the digits were randomized. The choice is about the kind of night you want rather than about which structure is more correct. Money concentrated at the end means more excitement and fewer winners, while a flatter split spreads the same prize pool across more people and sends more of the group home with something.

One naming point matters more than it should. Plenty of hosts call the second prize the halftime prize and plenty call it the second quarter prize, and since they are the same moment in the game, the only thing to do is write the exact wording down once where everyone claiming a square can read it. Our full breakdown of football squares payouts works through the alternative formats in detail, including paying on every score change and paying per minute of game clock, both of which replace the quarter prizes rather than joining them.

A reverse score prize costs whatever slice of the existing prize pool you assign to it, because it is funded out of the same money rather than from anywhere new. The rule pays a second square at each scoring period, the one holding the same two digits the other way round, so a quarter ending 17 to 10 pays the square of 7 against 0 and also pays the square of 0 against 7.

Deciding the slice in advance is the whole job. A common approach on a $1,000 board is to give the forward square 70 percent of each period's prize and the reverse square the remaining 30 percent, which turns a $200 quarter into $140 forward and $60 reverse, and turns the $400 last prize into $280 and $120. The board still pays out exactly $1,000, and it now produces eight winners instead of four, which is why the rule earns its place on a big casual Super Bowl board where most of the room has never held a square before.

Two details are worth settling at the same time. When both teams end a period on the same last digit, the forward and reverse squares are the same square, so one person simply collects both slices of that prize. And when the same square wins twice across the night, let it win twice and pay it twice, since that square had exactly the same chance as the other ninety-nine and any alternative means explaining a second rule to a room that stopped listening after the first one. Our Super Bowl squares rules reference covers which extra prize rules run alongside the quarter prizes and which ones replace them entirely.

Two situations change a Super Bowl squares payout after the prizes are already advertised, and they change different things. Overtime changes which square collects the last prize, while an unsold square changes whether a prize lands on a real person at all, and both need a sentence written down before the digits get randomized.

Overtime has already decided this twice. Super Bowl LI finished regulation tied at 28 apiece, which is a square of 8 against 8, and New England went on to win it 34 to 28, moving the last prize to a completely different square. Super Bowl LVIII did the same thing seven years later, ending regulation level at 19 and finishing 25 to 22 for Kansas City after an overtime touchdown. Paying the last prize on the true final score is what we recommend, because it is the score everyone remembers, though paying on the end of regulation is perfectly valid as long as you said so first.

An unsold square is the more common problem, and the cleanest answer is to not have one. The host, or a few willing players between them, buys the remaining squares at the price everyone else paid, which means every prize you advertised reaches a real person and the rest of this becomes academic. When filling the board genuinely isn't possible, the best fallback is rolling an unclaimed prize into the next scoring period so the later prizes grow and nobody has to do any arithmetic on the night.

That leaves the case of the last prize itself landing on an empty square, since there is no later period to roll into. Resolve it either by splitting that money across the squares that were actually claimed and played, or by drawing a random square on the grid and paying whoever holds it, and name which of the two you are using in advance. A predetermined next-square-up rule works too, moving the money by a set step such as adding 7 to each winning digit and wrapping past 9 back to 0, and so does spreading the unclaimed money across the other prizes that do have real winners. What never works is quietly shrinking the prize pool to match a half-sold board. Our football squares rules reference ranks all four unsold-square options in full.

Five figures and two sentences cover a Super Bowl squares payout completely, and all of them belong somewhere every player can see before anybody claims anything. Write the price per square, write the actual dollar amount each of the four prizes pays, say whether a reverse score prize is being paid and what slice it takes, say whether the last prize pays on the final score or the end of regulation, and say what happens to a prize that lands on a square nobody bought. None of those have to be settled the way this page recommends, only settled early and shared with everyone buying in.

The reason to do it early is that every argument a squares board produces comes from a decision made after the fact rather than from the decision itself. Nobody minds a flat split or a weighted one, and nobody minds either overtime ruling, because none of them knew which digits they were getting when they claimed a square. What people mind is a prize amount that moved once the winner was known. Sign-ups can run right up to kickoff and a little past it if they need to, since the real cutoff is having every payment collected before the digits get randomized rather than a date on a calendar.

Running the board online is what makes those rules travel with it rather than living on a sheet of paper in one person's kitchen. Play Squares puts the prize figures on the same screen as the grid, tracks payments as they come in, and follows the score live so players can see who is currently on track to take the next prize while the quarter is still being played, rather than messaging the host to ask whether their square is still alive. Our Super Bowl squares page covers the rest of the setup, and our explainer on how Super Bowl squares work is the one to send anyone who has never held a square before.