The word billion has been used of late when talking about many-times-rolled-over jackpots for Powerball and Mega Millions in the last year or so.
This week, the word is ... billions ... as in the combined nearly $2 billion in top prizes up for grabs over the next two nights.
Tonight (Monday), the Powerball top prize is an estimated $800 million, or a paltry $384.8 million if the winner chooses the up-front cash value. The last time the Powerball jackpot was won was on Jan. 1, 2024 when a ticket in bought Michigan won another inflated prize of $842.4 million. Since then, there have been 35 consecutive drawings without a jackpot winner, and tonight's drawing is for the sixth highest Powerball jackpot in the game's history.
Five balls from a matrix from 1-69 will be selected, along with a separate red ball from 1-26. To win the top prize, players must match all five white balls and the red Powerball. Winners receive $1 million for matching the white balls without the Powerball, with smaller payouts for matching the Powerball with a couple other white balls. The overall odds of winning a prize are 1 in 24.9. The odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 292.2 million.
The Mega Millions jackpot has also seen three months of rollovers (it was last won on Dec. 8 by two tickets in California) and is estimated at $1.1 billion, for the fifth-biggest Mega Millions jackpot — when the drawing for that is on Tuesday. It has the same time of smaller winnings; a Mega Millions release from the weekend said there were a total of 2,564,114 winning tickets across all prize tiers in the March 22 drawing.
Like Powerball, to play Mega Millions you pick from white balls numbered 1-70 and a gold Megaball from 1-25. The odds of winning Megamillions are about 1-in-302 — which explains why they've both rolled over roughly 35 times each.
Tickets are $2 a piece, with optional multipliers, for each of the multi-state games. Good luck players! Powerball is drawn Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays; Mega Millions is drawn Tuesdays and Fridays, all at 11 p.m.
