Ohio Pick 5 Most Common Numbers, Position by Position

Over the last 300 Ohio Pick 5 draws, from May 1 to September 27, 2026, the most common digit in each position runs 4, 3, 7, 4 and 1, first slot to fifth. The single busiest cell on the board is digit 1 in the fifth position, drawn there 40 times, and the quietest is digit 8 in the second, 19 times.

That is the straight answer to which Pick 5 numbers come up most. It also comes with a twist: ask the same question without naming a position and you get a different answer altogether.

Which digit leads each position?

Pick 5 draws five digits, each from 0 to 9, into five fixed positions, twice a day. Across 300 draws every digit's fair share in any one position is 30 appearances. Here is where each position's busiest and quietest digit landed:

• First position: 4 leads on 35, 9 trails on 20
• Second position: 3 leads on 39, 8 trails on 19
• Third position: 7 leads on 39, 1 trails on 20
• Fourth position: 4 leads on 39, 6 trails on 20
• Fifth position: 1 leads on 40, 3 trails on 20

Is a 40 or a 19 unusual?

Not in 300 draws. A digit's count in one position typically wanders about five appearances either side of its share of 30, so leaders near 40 and trailers near 20 sit roughly two of those steps out. Spread fifty position-and-digit cells across the board and a handful landing that far out is the ordinary shape of a fair draw.

Why does the answer change when you add the positions together?

Pool all five positions and there are 1,500 digit slots shared by ten digits, a fair share of 150 each. The pooled leader is 2 on 163, then 1 on 161, and the pooled trailer is 9 on 124.

Now look at who those are. Digit 2 tops the pooled count without leading a single position: its five position counts run 34, 32, 31, 30 and 36, and none of them is first. Digit 4 leads two positions, the first and the fourth, and still pools to exactly 150, dead on its share, because it sits at just 24 in both the second and the third. Digit 3 leads the second position on 39 and trails the fifth on 20, and digit 1 leads the fifth on 40 while trailing the third on 20.

That is the whole case for reading Pick 5 one position at a time. A pooled tally averages five separate draws into one number, and the averaging can hand the top spot to a digit that never led anywhere.

Seven in ten Pick 5 draws repeat a digit. Is that strange?

This is the fact that surprises people most. Of the 10,319 Ohio Pick 5 draws on record here, going back to August 12, 2012, only 3,083 used five different digits. The other 70 percent repeated at least one. Over the last 300 draws it was 220 of 300, a little over 73 percent.

That is exactly what ten digits in five slots should do. There are 100,000 possible Pick 5 results, 00000 through 99999, and only 30,240 of them use five different digits, just over 30 percent. The draw record lines up with that arithmetic almost to the decimal:

• Five different digits: 3,083 draws, 29.9 percent, against 30.2 percent expected
• One pair: 5,264 draws, 51.0 percent, against 50.4 percent
• Two pairs: 1,099 draws, 10.7 percent, against 10.8 percent
• Three of one digit: 738 draws, 7.2 percent, against 7.2 percent
• Three of one digit plus a pair: 89 draws, 0.9 percent, against 0.9 percent
• Four of one digit: 46 draws, against about 46 expected
• One digit five times over: none yet, against about 1 expected

Common as a group, equal one by one

Two things are true at once. Repeats are common as a group because there are far more five-digit results with a repeat, 69,760 of them, than without one, 30,240. And no single result is favored: 12345 and 11223 are each one of the 100,000, exactly as likely as each other in any given draw.

As for a draw like 77777, it has never turned up in the 10,319 draws here, and that is no mystery either. With 10 such results out of 100,000, a record this long would expect about one, and a count of zero happens roughly a third of the time.

Read the positions yourself

The Ohio Pick 5 frequency page ranks every digit in every position from the published draws, the Pick 5 hot and cold page shows each position's busiest and quietest digit over the recent stretch, and the Ohio Pick 5 hub carries the latest winning numbers. For the same position-by-position read of the three-digit game, see Ohio Pick 3's most-drawn digits, and for hot and cold by position, Ohio Pick 5 hot and cold numbers.

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