PCH+: the biggest brand in the field, and the most complicated listing on it

PCH+ ("PCH+ - Real Prizes, Fun Games") is Publishers Clearing House's free mini-game app: arcade titles, a themed map of "Sweepstakes Worlds", and, per the store copy, up to 20,000 daily entries from Arcade Island, plus daily SuperPrize entries for VIP players. It carries 136,572 iOS ratings at 4.62 (136,566 on September 19, 2026; 136,512 on October 1, 2026) and about 151,000 Play ratings at 4.3 with a million-plus installs, the same Play install band as PCH Lotto and one band below Prizes by GAMEE, which shows 10 million-plus.

Correction, October 1, 2026: this sentence said PCH+ was the most-installed listing in our ranked field by an order of magnitude; Prizes by GAMEE, ranked on the same date, showed 10 million-plus Android installs, as our GAMEE review recorded, so that was wrong when published.

The operator today is PCH Digital, LLC, a new entity formed by ARB Interactive, Inc. of Miami, which bought PCH's assets out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy for $7.1 million in a sale that closed July 15, 2025. The Google Play listing still names the old debtor entity at the old Jericho, New York address; the App Store page says "© 2026 PCH Digital LLC". Both are true pieces of the same messy handover.

The app sells nothing: no in-app purchases on either store, confirmed. The rules carry the classic banner, no purchase or fee necessary, a purchase will not improve an individual's chance of winning, and the current $1M SuperPrize rules give the free mail-in method real weight: 1,850 entries per individually mailed envelope (entry details legibly printed; mechanically reproduced entries are void).

Update, September 25, 2026: that giveaway, GWY #23097, has closed. Its rules PDF (cdn.shopify.com, GWY23097-June-Sept.pdf, retrieved September 25, 2026) reads "ENTRY PERIOD: The period beginning on 6/3/26 and ending on 9/22/26" and "All entries must be postmarked by September 22, 2026". The successor is GWY M001, a Chevrolet Corvette or $65,000, and its official rules PDF (retrieved September 25, 2026) keeps the same route: "Each mail-in entry received will be equal to 1,850 entries.", postmarked by October 31, 2026 and received by November 4, 2026, at P.O. Box 358, Watertown, NY 13601. No score change.

But the same rules PDF lists the other doors into the same drawing: one entry per dollar of merchandise purchased, optional packages that include additional entries, and memberships that grant automatic monthly entries. pch.com currently sells Entry Boost packs named for the SuperPrize at $25 to $200, Quick Packs (formerly Quick Entries) of 500 to 20,000 regular entries, and memberships from $10 to $150 a month carrying 500 to 20,000 automatic entries. The rules then state that all entries, whether obtained through the free AMOE, purchase, membership, or optional packages, are treated equally in the drawing.

Legally, that structure works because every entry has equal per-entry odds and the free path can out-produce the paid one. Practically, it means the free app player is swimming in a pool that money also fills. That is the line between PCH+ and the apps above it in our ranking whose ecosystems sell nothing at all, and it is why an app with zero IAP still loses nine purity points.

Update, October 1, 2026: the Entry Boost collection page (pch.com/collections/entry-boost, retrieved October 1, 2026) lists no products while still reading “Get one entry for every $1 spent.”; the paid entry products on sale that day are Quick Entries packs (500 for $20 up to 20,000 for $300), memberships ($10 to $150 a month), Mystery Entry Boosts at $15 and $100 on the homepage, and one entry per dollar of merchandise under the current rules. The pooling is unchanged, and so is the score.

PCH filed for Chapter 11 in April 2025 with about $40 million in debts; ten unidentified prize winners, owed millions in aggregate, appear among the largest unsecured creditors, per Associated Press reporting of the filing. Per Associated Press reporting, ARB says it is not responsible for prizes won before July 15, 2025, with two still-promoted SuperPrizes excepted. That is a documented, recent case of the most famous name in sweepstakes not paying winners, and no ranking of prize credibility can look past it.

On the other side of the ledger: the new owner announced a Prize Protection Program in the fall of 2025 that it says places future prize money in FDIC-insured escrow accounts, and PCH's own winners feed, retrieved on our research date, lists 19 dated winners from April 9 to August 17, 2026 totaling about $1.43 million, including a $1,000,000 SuperPrize winner on May 31, 2026. Re-read on September 19, 2026, the feed carries 23 dated winners through September 14, 2026 totalling $1,453,840; the four additions are all $5,000 weekly winners, so the weekly cadence has run unbroken for more than fifteen weeks. Those are operator-published; we found no independent press naming a post-sale winner, and we score accordingly.

Update, September 25, 2026: one caveat on where that record is published. The winners-list URL printed in two of the three rules PDFs pch.com links today, the GWY M001 Corvette rules and the GWY W017 $5,000 weekly rules, is https://www.pch.com/winnerslist, which returned HTTP 404 on September 25, 2026; the official-rules page itself links the working https://www.pch.com/pages/our-winners (retrieved September 25, 2026, "Showing 727 of 727 winners"). The record is intact and the score does not move.

Update, October 1, 2026: the feed behind pch.com/pages/our-winners (pch.com/apps/winners, retrieved October 1, 2026, last modified September 29, 2026) now lists 730 winners, 26 of them dated, from April 9 to September 28, 2026, totalling $2,463,840. The three newest dated rows are $5,000 weekly winners on September 21 and September 28, 2026 and a $1,000,000 winner dated September 22, 2026 for GWY #23097, the Summer SuperPrize, which the PCH winners page also announces. Still operator-published; we found no independent report of that payment. The winners-list address printed in both rules PDFs linked today, pch.com/winnerslist, still returned HTTP 404 on October 1, 2026. No score change.

Both stores show the app last updated in late March 2026. From roughly April 2026 onward, the review feeds on both platforms turn into a wall of one-star reports that the app is "down for maintenance", continuously, for months. The rebuilt pch.com, which routes every entry path through the website, never mentions PCH+ at all. We could not enter a PCH giveaway through this app on our research date, and nothing public says when or whether that will change. That is why its entry-experience score is 2 of 15 and its status chip reads unavailable rather than ongoing.

Update, September 25, 2026: both store listings are unchanged at the March 26, 2026 build (Apple lookup API for id 1472050293, retrieved September 25, 2026: version 4.9.1236). The outage evidence re-verified on September 25, 2026 is from the App Store: the twelve most recent reviews in Apple's customer-reviews feed for id 1472050293, dated August 12 to September 20, 2026, all report maintenance or a non-working app (September 20, 2026: "They haven't fixed the app for months. It seems abandoned"). Play-side 2026 reviews were not retrieved. The status stays unavailable and the score does not change.

Update, October 1, 2026: Play-side reviews are now on the record. The newest Google Play review of PCH+ (com.pch.pchworld, retrieved October 1, 2026), dated September 30, 2026, reads “doesnt work at all.” The newest review in the App Store feed is still the September 20, 2026 one, and both store listings are unchanged at the March 26, 2026 build. Status stays unavailable; no score change.

PCH's own documents disagree about who can enter: the official-rules body says 18+, while the site footer, the FAQ, and the current per-giveaway rules PDFs say 21+. Treat 21+ as controlling until PCH cleans this up, and read the specific giveaway's rules.

Update, September 19, 2026: this has largely resolved in PCH's favour. The pch.com footer and all three giveaway rules PDFs it links today, for the Summer SuperPrize, the Corvette giveaway and the $5,000 weekly prize, give the age as eighteen. The FAQ is the one document still saying 21. We are withdrawing the instruction to treat 21+ as controlling and leaving the finding on the record.

Update, October 1, 2026: every PCH document we opened on that date gives the age as twenty-one. The official-rules page and its sitewide footer (pch.com/pages/official-rules, retrieved October 1, 2026) read “are twenty-one (21) years of age or older at the time of entry”, both age sentences in the FAQ (pch.com/pages/faq) now say 21, and so do the two giveaway rules PDFs the rules page now links, GWY #M001 (Chevrolet Corvette or $65,000) and the $5,000 weekly prize, GWY #W018. The address our sources list for the M001 rules still serves an earlier upload that says eighteen; the file the rules page links today says twenty-one. The PCH documents now agree with each other, at 21. U.S. legal residents physically in the U.S. with a valid residential street address. And the permanent warning that attaches to this brand more than any other: PCH never asks a winner to pay anything to collect a prize. Anyone who does is a scammer.