Lottery players will have another shot at the massive Mega Millions jackpot Friday night and a chance to break a stretch of more than three months without a big winner.
The estimated $1.25 billion prize is one of the biggest in U.S. lottery history, with the jackpot growing since someone last matched all six numbers and won on April 18. Since then, there have been 30 drawings without a jackpot winner.
The $1.25 billion jackpot would be for a sole winner choosing to be paid through an annuity, with annual payments over 30 years. However, lottery winners almost always opt for a lump-sum payment, which for the Friday drawing would be an estimated $625.3 million.
The Mega Millions jackpot drawing takes place Friday at 10 p.m. CDT. Here’s what else to know ahead of the drawing.
What are the chances of winning?
The odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot are 1 in 302,575,350. Your odds of winning are only slightly improved by buying more than one ticket. And the odds are so long that it’s certainly not worth spending money you’ll miss for more tickets, experts warn.
If buying one ticket gives you a 1 in 302,575,350 of winning the jackpot, spending $10 for five tickets improves your chances to only 5 in 303 million. The same is true is you spend $100. So you could spend a lot of money on tickets and still almost undoubtedly not hit the jackpot.
Lottery officials say the average player buys two or three tickets, meaning they’re putting money down on a dream with very little chance of a jackpot payoff. For every dollar players spend on the lottery, they will lose about 35 cents on average, according to an analysis of lottery data by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland.
Why are lottery jackpots so large these days?
That’s how the games have been designed. The credit for such big jackpots comes down to math — and more difficult odds.
In 2015, the Powerball lottery lengthened the odds of winning from 1 in 175.2 million to 1 in 292.2 million. Mega Millions followed two years later, stretching the odds of winning the top prize from 1 in 258.9 million to 1 in 302.6 million.
For lottery officials, the hope was that by making it harder to win jackpots, the prizes would roll over for weeks and create massive pots of money that would in turn generate higher sales.
The result is that the largest lottery jackpots in the U.S. have come since those changes were made.
How does this jackpot stack up to others?
The $1.25 billion prize up for grabs Friday is the sixth-largest lottery jackpot in U.S history, surpassing the recent $1.08 billion Powerball prize won in Los Angeles just two weeks ago.
It’s also the fourth largest Mega Millions jackpot, ranking just behind the $1.34 billion prize won a year ago after two people in Illinois bought a single winning ticket at a Speedway gas station and convenience store in Des Plaines, a northwest suburb. At the time, it was the third biggest jackpot in U.S. history.
The biggest U.S. jackpot ever was a Powerball prize won in California in November 2022, with a record payout worth a whopping $2.04 billion.
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Where is Mega Millions played?
Mega Millions is played in 45 states, as well as Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
How much money does the lottery make for states?
State-run lotteries brought in roughly $95 billion in revenue in 2021, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Of that, about $64 billion was paid out in prizes and another $3.4 billion was used to run the programs. A little under $27 billion in revenue was left for states to pad their budgets.
State lotteries spend more than a half-billion dollars a year on pervasive marketing campaigns designed to persuade people to play often, spend more and overlook the long odds of winning. For every $1 spent on advertising nationwide, lotteries have made about $128 in ticket sales, according to an analysis of lottery data by the Howard Center.