Last updated 2026-08-14
TL;DR
A UIL booster club running a Texas raffle must qualify under the Charitable Raffle Enabling Act, hold no more than two raffles a year, and cap prizes at statutory limits. Texas issues no state raffle license; the club self-certifies eligibility and keeps its own records. Confirm current thresholds with the Texas Attorney General's office before printing a single ticket.
Can a UIL booster club legally hold a raffle in Texas?
Yes, but only if the club fits the legal definition of a qualified organization under the Texas Charitable Raffle Enabling Act, Texas Occupations Code Chapter 2002. That statute lets certain nonprofit groups, including "a nonprofit organization that has existed for at least the preceding three years and that is exempt from federal income tax" under specific IRS categories, or an organization that qualifies as a school-support type group, conduct raffles for charitable purposes [1]. A UIL booster club (band boosters, athletics boosters, choir boosters, etc.) generally qualifies as an "associated with a school" nonprofit if it meets the tax-exempt and existence requirements in the statute. Here's the part that trips people up: Texas does not issue a state raffle license. There's no application, no fee, no state number to display on your tickets. The organization itself has to determine it meets the legal definition and follow the rules on its own. That's less paperwork up front, but it also means nobody is checking your homework before the raffle happens. If you get it wrong, the exposure shows up later, sometimes as a criminal violation under the same chapter [1]. Worth saying plainly: a group that has existed less than three years, or one that hasn't secured 501(c)(3) or equivalent tax-exempt status, is not eligible to run a raffle under this law no matter how good the cause is. New booster clubs sometimes want to raffle a big prize their first season to jump-start funding. Legally, that's the wrong move in Texas until the three-year and tax-status boxes are checked.
How many raffles can a booster club hold per year?
Two. The Charitable Raffle Enabling Act limits each qualified organization to holding no more than two raffles in a calendar year, and only one raffle may be held per each specific set of prizes [1]. That means you can't run three separate ticket drives for three different prize packages in the same year and call it compliant; you get two raffle events, period. This catches multi-sport booster clubs off guard. If the football boosters, the softball boosters, and the band boosters are legally separate 501(c)(3) organizations (each with its own EIN and its own filings), each one gets its own two-raffle allowance. But if they're all operating as sub-groups under one umbrella nonprofit, the umbrella entity is the one bound by the two-raffle cap, not each sport. Before you plan a fall raffle and a spring raffle, confirm which entity actually holds the tax-exempt status. Groups sometimes assume they're separate because they have separate bank accounts, when legally they're one organization for purposes of this statute. Get that structural question answered with your board or the school district's business office before you print tickets for a third raffle in the same year.
What's the maximum prize value for a Texas booster club raffle?
| Organization eligibility | 3+ years existence, qualifying tax-exempt status [1] | New club raffles before 3-year mark |
|---|---|---|
| Raffle count | Max 2 raffles per calendar year, one per prize set [1] | Multiple sub-groups run raffles under one EIN |
| Prize value | Capped per statute, confirm current dollar figure [1] | Donated big-ticket item exceeds cap |
| Ticket sales | In-state, in-person sales only under Texas law | Selling tickets online to out-of-state buyers |
| Advertising | Restrictions on paid advertising of the raffle | Boosting a raffle post as a paid social ad |
Under Texas Occupations Code Section 2002.052, the retail value of prizes awarded through a raffle is capped, and the specific dollar limits and any adjustments have changed over time as the legislature amended the chapter [1]. Historically the cap on a single prize purchased with raffle proceeds sat at $50,000, with a separate, higher allowance (commonly cited around $250,000) for a prize that is real property or one raffle per year under specific conditions in the statute. Don't rely on a number you read on a fundraising blog from three years ago. Confirm the current prize-value caps directly with the statute text before setting your prize [1]. If a car dealership or a booster parent wants to donate a truck as the grand prize, get the appraised retail value in writing and check it against the current cap before you sell a single ticket. Overpromising a prize you can't legally award, or awarding one that busts the statutory cap, isn't a paperwork slip. It can trigger the criminal provisions built into Chapter 2002. A rough comparison of what trips up boosters most: | Rule area | What the statute generally requires | Where it goes wrong |
Who can legally sell raffle tickets for a school booster club?
Only members of the qualified organization, and the sale generally has to happen in person, inside Texas. The statute restricts who can conduct ticket sales and how those sales are advertised, and it does not authorize online ticket sales to the general public the way a raffle license state (like some others around the country) might [1]. If your booster club wants to sell tickets through a slick online payment link shared on Facebook to reach parents who moved out of state, that's a compliance risk under Texas law, not a convenience feature. Minors selling tickets is its own gray area worth thinking through carefully. Student volunteers (band kids handing out raffle tickets at a football game, for instance) are common in practice, but the legal responsibility for the sale rests with the organization and its adult officers, not the teenager holding the clipboard. Make sure whoever is running point, usually the treasurer or a designated raffle chair, understands they're the one accountable if a ticket sale violates the statute. Advertising is restricted too. Texas Occupations Code Chapter 2002 limits paid advertising of raffles, which matters if your club was planning to run a Facebook ad campaign to sell more tickets. Read the actual advertising restriction in the statute before spending booster funds boosting a raffle post [1].
Does a booster club raffle need IRS reporting?
Possibly, on two fronts: gambling/wagering reporting and your annual information return. Raffle tickets are a form of gambling income for winners, and the IRS treats raffle prizes as reportable gambling winnings in some circumstances. If a single prize's fair market value minus the ticket price is $600 or more, and is at least 300 times the wager, the organization generally has to issue Form W-2G to the winner and may have to withhold federal income tax. Consult the current IRS instructions for Form W-2G and confirm the thresholds with the IRS directly, since gambling withholding rules have specific mechanics that are easy to get wrong [2]. Separately, your raffle income and expenses flow into whatever annual return your club files with the IRS: the Form 990, Form 990-EZ, or Form 990-N e-Postcard, depending on your gross receipts. This is one of the most common gaps for booster clubs: they run the raffle fine but never connect it to their annual IRS filing, and then wonder why they got an auto-revocation notice two years later. Raffle proceeds also count toward your organization's gross receipts for purposes of picking which 990 variant you file. A club that normally qualifies for the simple 990-N e-Postcard because it stays under $50,000 in gross receipts can get bumped up to needing Form 990-EZ in a year with a big raffle. Track this before year-end, not after.
What is Form 990 and why does it matter for a booster club that runs a raffle?
Form 990 is the annual information return that tax-exempt organizations file with the IRS to report income, expenses, and activities. It's not an income tax return in the traditional sense (most 501(c)(3) organizations owe no federal income tax), but it's how the IRS and the public track what a nonprofit took in and spent [3]. There are several versions scaled to size: the Form 990-N e-Postcard for organizations with gross receipts normally $50,000 or less, Form 990-EZ for mid-size organizations, and the full Form 990 for larger ones [4]. For a booster club, this matters directly because of raffle income. A single well-run raffle can push annual gross receipts from $30,000 to $80,000 in one year, which means the treasurer needs to know before filing season which form applies. Guessing wrong, or worse, not filing at all, is what leads to automatic revocation of tax-exempt status after three consecutive years of missed filings, a rule under Internal Revenue Code Section 6033(j) [5]. If your club has ever lost track of its 990 filing history because of a raffle-fueled good year followed by treasurer turnover, you're not alone; this is one of the single most common reasons small booster clubs end up auto-revoked and have to go through IRS reinstatement.
What does a treasurer do in a booster club?
A booster club treasurer keeps the books, tracks every dollar in and out, reconciles the bank account monthly, and makes sure the club's tax and state filings happen on time. That's the short version. The fuller version includes things like maintaining a ledger of raffle ticket sales against tickets printed (so you can prove none went missing), keeping receipts for prize purchases, and preparing the numbers the board needs to approve a budget or a big fundraiser. What does a treasurer do day to day, specifically, around a raffle? Before the raffle: confirm the club's eligibility under the state raffle statute, set the prize value against the legal cap, and get board sign-off in writing. During the raffle: track cash and card payments separately, use pre-numbered tickets, and never let one person both sell tickets and count the cash unsupervised. After the raffle: reconcile total tickets sold against total cash collected, document who won and what the prize's fair market value was (for any potential W-2G reporting), and roll the net proceeds into the club's regular financial statements. What does a club treasurer do that a general board member doesn't? The treasurer is the one who signs off that the numbers tie out. If ticket count says 500 sold at $10 each but the deposit is $4,200 instead of $5,000, the treasurer is the person who has to find out why before the books close for the year.
What is a treasurer, exactly, in a volunteer organization?
A treasurer is the officer legally and practically responsible for an organization's money: recording it, safeguarding it, and reporting on it accurately to the board and, where required, to the IRS and state regulators. In a booster club, the treasurer role usually isn't a paid position, and the person holding it is often a parent volunteer with no formal accounting background. That's fine. Most booster treasurers learn on the job, but it means the role needs simple, repeatable systems rather than complicated ones nobody can maintain after a handoff. What do treasurers do that makes the difference between a club that survives an IRS or state audit cleanly and one that doesn't? Mostly it comes down to documentation habits: keeping receipts, using a dedicated bank account (never a personal one), reconciling monthly instead of once a year, and writing down the reasoning behind big financial decisions, like why the club picked a $500 grand prize instead of a $5,000 one. For a first-year booster treasurer facing a raffle for the first time, the honest answer to "what does a treasurer do" is: ask questions before the event, not after. Call the school district's business office, check with a prior treasurer if one is reachable, and read the actual statute rather than relying on what last year's flyer said the rules were.
How do I keep raffle cash-handling controls tight enough to survive an audit?
Use pre-numbered tickets, a two-person count at the end of the event, and a same-day or next-business-day bank deposit. Those three habits alone catch most of the errors and nearly all of the theft risk that shows up in small nonprofit raffles. Assign one volunteer to sell and collect, a different volunteer to count, and have the treasurer or a board member independently verify the total before it's deposited. Write down ticket numbers issued to each seller before the event starts, and reconcile unsold tickets returned against tickets sold and cash collected. If a seller had 100 tickets at $5 each, returned 20 unsold, that seller should have collected exactly $400. Discrepancies get flagged and documented immediately, not shrugged off as "probably a counting error" three weeks later when nobody remembers the details. Keep a simple raffle file: the board approval minutes authorizing the raffle, the prize description and its fair market value, ticket inventory records, the deposit slip, and (if applicable) any W-2G forms issued to winners. This file is exactly what a new treasurer, an auditor, or the state charity office would want to see if anyone ever asks questions about the raffle a year or two later. A State-Personalized Treasurer Kit built around your specific state's raffle statute can save a volunteer treasurer from reinventing this documentation from scratch every fundraiser.
What happens if a booster club runs an illegal or noncompliant raffle?
The consequences range from having to unwind the raffle (refunding ticket buyers) to actual criminal exposure under Texas Occupations Code Chapter 2002, which contains specific offense provisions for organizations and individuals who violate the Act's terms [1]. This isn't scare-mongering; it's written into the statute itself. More commonly, the practical fallout is smaller but still painful: a school district cracking down on booster fundraising after a raffle goes sideways, a bank freezing an account pending review, or a new treasurer inheriting a mess with no documentation of whether the prior raffle was even legal in the first place. None of that requires bad intent. It usually comes from nobody on the board reading the actual statute before the raffle happened. If your club already ran a raffle and isn't sure it was compliant, the fix isn't panic, it's documentation. Pull together whatever records exist (ticket counts, deposit records, prize value), compare them against the current statute, and if something looks off, talk to the school district's legal counsel or a licensed attorney before running another one.
How does a raffle interact with UIL fundraising rules specifically?
UIL (University Interscholastic League) itself doesn't regulate charitable raffles directly; that's state law under the Texas Occupations Code. But UIL member schools and their booster clubs operate under district-level policies about fundraising activities that involve students, use of school name and logos, and on-campus solicitation, and those local policies sit on top of, not instead of, the state raffle statute. A UIL band booster club raffle still has to satisfy Chapter 2002 requirements regardless of what the school's own fundraising policy says about approval processes. Practically, that means two layers of permission for most booster raffles: your school district's fundraising approval process (often requiring a form submitted to the campus principal or district business office before any fundraiser, raffle included) and the state's legal eligibility requirements for holding the raffle at all. Skipping the district approval step is a policy violation even if the raffle itself is legally compliant under state law, and it can get a booster club's fundraising privileges suspended independent of anything a state regulator would ever see. Before a raffle goes on the calendar, check both boxes: get the district-level fundraiser approval in writing, and confirm the raffle itself meets Chapter 2002's organization, prize-value, and frequency requirements. Treat them as two separate checklists, because they are.
What is Form 990-N and does a small booster club raffle trigger it?
Form 990-N, also called the e-Postcard, is the simplest annual IRS filing available to tax-exempt organizations, available to those with gross receipts normally $50,000 or less per year [4]. It's a short online form: legal name, EIN, tax year, address, and confirmation that gross receipts are still under the threshold. No detailed financials required. A single successful raffle can knock a small booster club out of 990-N eligibility for that year if it pushes gross receipts over $50,000. The IRS clarifies that the $50,000 threshold is based on an average over the most recent three years for organizations in their early years, or the actual figure for established ones, so one big raffle year doesn't automatically disqualify you forever, but it might mean filing Form 990-EZ instead of the e-Postcard for that specific tax year [4]. Get this wrong and you're more than filing the wrong form, you risk an incomplete filing that the IRS treats as a non-filing, which counts toward the three-strikes rule for automatic revocation under Internal Revenue Code Section 6033(j) [5]. If your club had a breakout fundraising year because of a raffle, that's exactly the year to double-check which 990 form applies rather than defaulting to whatever you filed last year.
Frequently asked questions
What does a treasurer do in a booster club?
A booster club treasurer tracks all income and expenses, reconciles the bank account, prepares financial reports for the board, and handles the club's IRS filings and any required state raffle or charity paperwork. For raffles specifically, the treasurer verifies legal eligibility, tracks ticket sales against cash collected, and documents prize values for tax reporting.
What is a treasurer?
A treasurer is the officer responsible for an organization's money: recording transactions, safeguarding funds, and reporting accurately to the board and to regulators like the IRS and state charity offices. In volunteer groups like booster clubs, the treasurer is usually an unpaid parent volunteer, not a professional accountant.
What do treasurers do differently from other board members?
Treasurers own the numbers: they're the person who signs off that ticket counts match deposits, that the bank reconciliation is clean, and that filings like the 990 go out on time. Other board members set policy and approve budgets; the treasurer executes and verifies the financial detail behind those decisions.
What is Form 990?
Form 990 is the annual information return tax-exempt organizations file with the IRS to report income, expenses, and activities. It comes in several sizes based on gross receipts: the 990-N e-Postcard for the smallest organizations, Form 990-EZ for mid-size ones, and the full Form 990 for larger nonprofits.
What does a treasurer of a club do when the club runs a raffle?
Before the raffle, the treasurer confirms the club legally qualifies to hold one and that the prize value stays under the state's legal cap. During and after, the treasurer tracks ticket sales against cash collected, documents the winner and prize value, and folds the net proceeds into the club's books and IRS reporting.
Is a state raffle license required in Texas for a booster club raffle?
No. Texas does not issue a state raffle license or permit. Instead, the Charitable Raffle Enabling Act (Texas Occupations Code Chapter 2002) sets eligibility rules that a nonprofit organization self-certifies against; the organization must confirm on its own that it meets the requirements before holding a raffle.
How many raffles can a Texas booster club hold per year?
A qualified organization under Texas Occupations Code Chapter 2002 can hold no more than two raffles per calendar year, with only one raffle allowed per specific set of prizes. Confirm this limit and any updates directly with the statute.
What is the maximum raffle prize value allowed for a booster club in Texas?
Texas Occupations Code Section 2002.052 sets prize value caps that have changed over time; historically a common figure cited is $50,000 for most prizes, with higher limits for real property under specific conditions. Confirm the exact current dollar cap with the statute text before setting a prize.
Do raffle winnings get reported to the IRS?
Sometimes. If a prize's value minus the ticket cost is $600 or more and is at least 300 times the wager, the organization generally must issue Form W-2G to the winner and may need to withhold federal tax. Confirm current thresholds and withholding rules directly with the IRS before your raffle.
Can a booster club sell raffle tickets online?
Under Texas law, raffle ticket sales are generally restricted to in-person, in-state sales by members of the qualifying organization, and there is no broad state authorization for online ticket sales to the public. Check the current statute before setting up any online payment link for tickets.
What happens if a booster club's raffle doesn't meet the legal requirements?
Consequences range from having to refund ticket sales to criminal liability under Texas Occupations Code Chapter 2002, which contains specific offense provisions tied to the Act. School districts may also suspend a booster club's fundraising privileges independent of any state enforcement action.
Does a booster club need a separate IRS filing just because it ran a raffle?
Not a separate filing, but the raffle income counts toward the club's gross receipts for the year, which determines whether it can still file the simple Form 990-N or needs to step up to Form 990-EZ. A big raffle year is exactly when to double-check which form applies.
Who is legally responsible if raffle money goes missing?
The treasurer and the board bear the practical and legal responsibility for safeguarding raffle proceeds, since they're the officers accountable for the organization's finances. Strong controls, pre-numbered tickets, two-person counts, same-day deposits, are how you prevent this question from ever needing an answer.
Sources
- Texas Statutes, Occupations Code Chapter 2002 (Charitable Raffle Enabling Act): Eligibility requirements, two-raffle-per-year limit, prize value caps, and offense provisions for charitable raffles in Texas
- Texas Attorney General, Charitable Trusts and Nonprofit Organizations: State oversight role for charitable organizations and nonprofit compliance in Texas
- IRS, Instructions for Forms W-2G and 5754: Reporting and withholding thresholds for raffle and gambling winnings
- IRS, About Form 990: Form 990 is the annual information return tax-exempt organizations file to report income, expenses, and activities
- IRS, Annual Electronic Filing Requirement for Small Exempt Organizations (Form 990-N): Form 990-N eligibility threshold of gross receipts normally $50,000 or less
- IRS, Automatic Revocation of Exemption: Organizations that fail to file required 990 returns for three consecutive years automatically lose tax-exempt status under IRC Section 6033(j)