So, should you make the trip?
Wherever you live, the numbers say the machine is more likely to be working than not, but your chances vary dramatically based on where you call home.
However, nationally the machine is only down roughly 10.4% of the time. Even in the least McLucky towns you're (slightly) more likely than not to walk away with ice cream. So it all comes down to whether you're up for the risk.
Currently not sportsbook is taking action on your McFlurry, so you all you risk is your time and gas money. If your tastes run more to sports betting than delicious soft serve, you can check out this DraftKings promo code.
Methodology: How we cooked up these McOdds
We pulled historical snapshots of publicly reported soft-serve machine status from a community tracker, reading one representative reading per day from October 2020 through July 2026- about 1,839 daily snapshots and 7.86 million individual location checks.
For each city we counted how often a machine was reported down versus working, then smoothed small-sample towns toward the national rate so a single unlucky week wouldn't crown a "worst city." Cities needed at least 5 tracked locations and 30 sampled days to qualify. The implied probability is then converted to American moneyline, the same way a sportsbook would price it.
If you want to see how those percentages translate into the plus-money and minus-money figures scattered through this piece, run them through our betting odds calculator and watch implied probability turn into a moneyline in real time.
The headline national figure, a machine down roughly 10.4% of the time, is the raw share across every check in the dataset, so it reflects real observed downtime, not a per-city average.
These odds are for entertainment purposes only and reflect historical reported availability, not live status or bookmaker prices.
