Every Billion-Dollar Lottery Jackpot, and How Often They Actually Happen

Five separate jackpot runs have crossed $1 billion in the two big American games: three in Powerball and two in Mega Millions. Those five runs produced 16 individual draws advertised at $1 billion or more, because once a jackpot passes the line it stays above it until somebody wins. Both numbers are correct — they just count different things, which is why you'll see them quoted interchangeably and get confused. The largest was Powerball's $1.80 billion on September 6, 2025.

Key takeaways

• 5 jackpot runs have crossed $1 billion — 3 in Powerball, 2 in Mega Millions — but 16 separate draws carried an advertised jackpot of $1 billion or more.
• The biggest Powerball jackpot ever recorded in this data is $1.80 billion (September 6, 2025); the biggest Mega Millions is $1.22 billion (December 27, 2024).
• Only 5 of those 16 billion-dollar draws were actually won. The other 11 rolled over.
• Powerball's current 5/69 + 1/26 matrix gives 1 in 292,201,338 odds per $2 ticket, which is exactly why jackpots now roll long enough to reach ten figures.
• Powerball has averaged 18.3 draws between jackpot wins across the 20 winning runs in the dataset; the longest ran 47 draws and ended December 24, 2025.
• A "$1.8 billion" headline is an annuity number. The cash value is far smaller, and tax cuts it again — the money that reaches a bank account is a fraction of the advertised figure.

Runs versus draws: why the answer is either 5 or 16

A lottery jackpot doesn't reset every draw. It rolls. When nobody matches all six numbers, the prize pool carries forward and grows, and the advertised figure keeps climbing until a ticket finally hits. That single continuous climb is what we'll call a run.

So when a Powerball jackpot crosses $1 billion on a Saturday and isn't won, the following Monday's draw is also a billion-dollar draw — and the Wednesday after that, and so on. One run can generate half a dozen billion-dollar headlines.

That's the entire source of the confusion. Ask "how many times has Powerball been over $1 billion" and you can honestly answer 3 (distinct runs) or 13 (individual Powerball draws advertised at $1B+). Neither is wrong. Across both games, it's 5 runs and 16 draws.

Here's how the 16 draws collapse into 5 runs:

Run	Game	Ran from	Ran to	Draws in run	Peak advertised	$1B+ draws	Won?
1	Powerball	2024-01-03	2024-04-06	41	$1.30 Billion	3	Yes
2	Mega Millions	2024-01-02	2024-03-26	25	$1.13 Billion	1	Yes
3	Mega Millions	2024-09-13	2024-12-27	31	$1.22 Billion	2	Yes
4	Powerball	2025-06-02	2025-09-06	42	$1.80 Billion	4	Yes
5	Powerball	2025-09-08	2025-12-24	47	$1.70 Billion	6	Yes

Every one of the five ended with a winner. Run 5 is the standout: 47 consecutive draws without a jackpot winner, from September 8 to December 24, 2025, producing six straight billion-dollar draws in December alone.

Every draw advertised at $1 billion or more

This is the full list, ordered by advertised jackpot. Amounts are the advertised annuity value — the headline number, not the cash payout.

#	Date	Game	Advertised	Winning numbers	Won?
1	2025-09-06	Powerball	$1.80 Billion	11-23-44-61-62 PB 17	Won
2	2025-12-24	Powerball	$1.70 Billion	04-25-31-52-59 PB 19	Won
3	2025-12-22	Powerball	$1.60 Billion	03-18-36-41-54 PB 07	Rolled
4	2025-12-20	Powerball	$1.50 Billion	04-05-28-52-69 PB 20	Rolled
5	2025-09-03	Powerball	$1.40 Billion	03-16-29-61-69 PB 22	Rolled
6	2024-04-06	Powerball	$1.30 Billion	22-27-44-52-69 PB 09	Won
7	2025-12-17	Powerball	$1.25 Billion	25-33-53-62-66 PB 17	Rolled
8	2024-12-27	Mega Millions	$1.22 Billion	03-07-37-49-55 MB 06	Won
9	2024-03-26	Mega Millions	$1.13 Billion	07-11-22-29-38 MB 04	Won
10	2025-09-01	Powerball	$1.10 Billion	08-23-25-40-53 PB 05	Rolled
11	2025-12-15	Powerball	$1.10 Billion	23-35-59-63-68 PB 02	Rolled
12	2024-04-03	Powerball	$1.09 Billion	11-38-41-62-65 PB 15	Rolled
13	2024-04-01	Powerball	$1.00 Billion	19-24-40-42-56 PB 23	Rolled
14	2025-08-30	Powerball	$1.00 Billion	03-18-22-27-33 PB 17	Rolled
15	2025-12-13	Powerball	$1.00 Billion	01-28-31-57-58 PB 16	Rolled
16	2024-12-24	Mega Millions	$1 Billion	11-14-38-45-46 MB 03	Rolled

Three things jump out.

Powerball dominates the list — 13 of 16. That's not because Powerball is "luckier." It's a structural consequence of the odds and the draw schedule, covered below.

Only five of the sixteen were won. The other eleven draws produced no jackpot winner, which is exactly what you'd expect: at roughly 1-in-292-million odds per ticket, even enormous sales volume leaves most draws unwon.

The dates cluster. Every billion-dollar draw in the table falls in one of five tight windows — spring 2024, December 2024, late summer 2025, and December 2025. Again, that's runs, not seasons.

The jackpots that came close

Four draws in the data landed just short of the line, and they're worth listing because they show how narrow the gap is between "biggest lottery jackpot ever" coverage and a jackpot nobody outside the lottery press remembers.

Date	Game	Advertised	Winning numbers	Won?
2025-11-14	Mega Millions	$980 Million	01-08-11-12-57 MB 07	Won
2024-03-22	Mega Millions	$977 Million	03-08-31-35-44 MB 16	Rolled
2024-03-30	Powerball	$935 Million	12-13-33-50-52 PB 23	Rolled
2025-12-10	Powerball	$930 Million	10-16-29-33-69 PB 22	Rolled

The November 14, 2025 Mega Millions draw is the interesting one. It ended a 40-draw roll — the longest Mega Millions run in the dataset — and still peaked at $980 million, stopping just under a billion. Long rolls make big jackpots, but they don't guarantee ten figures.

Why billion-dollar jackpots became routine

Before 2015, a billion-dollar jackpot didn't exist in either game. Now they arrive in clusters. The cause isn't a surge of ticket buyers or a change in luck — it's arithmetic that the games chose deliberately.

The odds were lengthened on purpose

Powerball moved to its current 5/69 + 1/26 matrix in October 2015, and has run 1,389 draws under it through August 3, 2026. Work out the combinations:

• Choosing 5 white balls from 69: C(69,5) = 11,238,513 combinations
• Multiply by 26 possible Powerballs: 11,238,513 × 26 = 292,201,338

So one $2 Powerball ticket has a 1-in-292,201,338 chance at the jackpot. Mega Millions is close behind. Its 5/70 white-ball pool has run 914 draws through July 31, 2026, and the Mega Ball pool changed from 25 to 24 in April 2025 — only 138 draws under the current 1/24 configuration. That gives C(70,5) × 24 = 12,103,014 × 24 = 290,472,336 combinations at $5 a ticket.

Longer odds mean fewer draws produce a winner. Fewer winners means longer rolls. Longer rolls mean bigger jackpots. The billion-dollar era is the designed output of that chain, and if you want the mechanics of how prize money actually accumulates between draws, the breakdown of how a jackpot grows from rollovers and ticket sales walks through the cash pool step by step.

The roll data confirms it

Across the dataset, Powerball's jackpot has been won 20 times in the 406 draws carrying advertised jackpot amounts; Mega Millions 13 times in its 270. That gives us 20 and 13 complete roll runs respectively.

Metric	Powerball	Mega Millions
Complete roll runs in data	20	13
Shortest run (draws)	1	2
Longest run (draws)	47	40
Average draws between wins	18.3	20.7
Median draws between wins	15	20
Share of runs under 10 draws	15%	31%
Average days between wins	45	71
Longest run ended	2025-12-24	2025-11-14
Average winning jackpot	$462,515,000	$545,384,615
Smallest winning jackpot	$20,000,000	$60,000,000
Largest winning jackpot	$1,800,000,000	$1,220,000,000

An average of 18.3 Powerball draws between wins, at 45 average days between wins, works out to a draw roughly every two and a half days. Mega Millions' 20.7 draws across 71 average days is closer to one every three and a half. Powerball simply gets more chances to roll per calendar month — which is a large part of why it holds 13 of the 16 billion-dollar draws while Mega Millions holds 3.

Note also the spread. Powerball's shortest run was a single draw and its longest was 47. The median of 15 sits well below the 18.3 average, which is the signature of a distribution with a long right tail: most runs end reasonably quickly, and a handful sprint away into billion-dollar territory. You can sort through the individual runs and jackpot peaks yourself in the Jackpot History Explorer.

What a $1.8 billion jackpot actually pays

The number on the sign is the annuity — the total of 30 graduated payments made over 29 years. Almost nobody takes it. The alternative is the cash value, which is the amount actually sitting in the prize pool at the moment of the draw, and it is substantially smaller than the advertised annuity because the annuity figure includes decades of projected investment growth the lottery hasn't earned yet.

Then tax lands on top. Federal withholding comes off immediately, the top federal bracket collects more at filing, and most states take a further cut on top of that.

The working rule of thumb is that a headline billion becomes something closer to a third of that once you've chosen cash and settled the tax bill. For the September 6, 2025 Powerball jackpot, that's the difference between the $1.80 billion in the news coverage and a materially smaller number in an account. If you want the actual mechanics rather than a rule of thumb, the comparison of taking the lump sum versus the annuity runs the two options side by side, and the guide to what you take home after lottery taxes works through the withholding and bracket math.

There's a second reduction people forget: splitting. A jackpot is divided among all tickets matching all six numbers. That's the one place where how you pick genuinely matters — not for whether you win, but for how many people you'd win alongside. Popular selections (calendar dates, 1-2-3-4-5, patterns off the play slip) get chosen by thousands of players at once, so a win on those numbers is far more likely to be shared.

The biggest jackpot each year

Records don't arrive on a schedule. Here's the largest advertised jackpot each game reached per year in the dataset, through August 3, 2026 for Powerball and July 31, 2026 for Mega Millions.

Year	Powerball peak	Date	Won?	Mega Millions peak	Date	Won?
2024	$1.30 Billion	2024-04-06	Won	$1.22 Billion	2024-12-27	Won
2025	$1.80 Billion	2025-09-06	Won	$980 Million	2025-11-14	Won
2026	$748 Million	2026-08-03	Rolled	$800 Million	2026-07-28	Won

2025 was the peak year for Powerball by a wide margin — $1.80 billion in September and $1.70 billion in December, the two largest jackpots in the whole dataset, inside four months. Neither game has reached $1 billion in 2026 through the data window, with Powerball's high at $748 million and Mega Millions' at $800 million. Billion-dollar jackpots are clustered, not constant.

Do the winning numbers tell you anything?

No. This deserves saying plainly because a list of 16 billion-dollar draws with their winning numbers is exactly the kind of table people mine for patterns.

Look at the table again. Number 17 appears as the Powerball three separate times (2025-09-06, 2025-12-17, 2025-08-30). The white ball 52 shows up three times, 69 twice, 61 twice. That's what randomness looks like across 16 draws of 6 numbers — 96 numbers total, drawn from pools of 69 and 26. Repeats are the expected outcome, not a signal.

Every Powerball draw under the current matrix is an independent event with 292,201,338 equally likely outcomes. The 1,389 draws since October 2015 do not tilt the 1,390th by any amount. Frequency data describes what happened; it has no predictive power over a future draw. No number, system, wheel, or strategy changes your odds of winning a jackpot. Nothing does.

What history is good for is calibration — how long rolls typically last, how large jackpots realistically get, and how rarely the big ones are won.

What the record means for actually playing

If strategy can't move your odds, the useful questions become different ones: what does a ticket cost, what's it worth, and what would you keep?

Ticket price differs. Powerball is $2 per line; Mega Millions is $5. At near-identical jackpot odds — 1 in 292,201,338 versus 1 in 290,472,336 — that price gap matters a great deal to the value of a play, and it's the core of the head-to-head comparison of Powerball and Mega Millions.

Jackpot size changes the math, but not the odds. A larger prize improves the expected value of a ticket without improving your chance of winning it by one part in a billion. The two are completely separate. If you want the arithmetic on when a jackpot is large enough for a ticket's expected value to look defensible, the expected value analysis of when a lottery ticket is worth buying does the work — including why the answer is still "almost never" once tax and splitting are priced in.

Long rolls aren't due. A jackpot that's rolled 40 times isn't more likely to hit on draw 41 than it was on draw 2. Powerball's 47-draw run ending December 24, 2025 was not "overdue" at draw 46. Each draw resets to the same 1-in-292,201,338.

Treat the money as entertainment spending, decide the amount before the jackpot gets big, and don't increase it because a headline did. The record above shows that 11 of 16 billion-dollar draws produced no jackpot winner at all — the enormous ones fail more often than they land.

If you'd like to explore the full set of runs, peaks, and winning draws behind this article, the jackpot history data is browsable by game and date range.

Frequently asked questions

How many times has Powerball been over $1 billion?

Three separate Powerball jackpot runs have climbed past $1 billion, ending on April 6, 2024, September 6, 2025, and December 24, 2025. Because a jackpot stays above the line until somebody wins it, those three runs generated 13 individual Powerball draws advertised at $1 billion or more. Both figures are correct — 3 counts distinct jackpot runs, 13 counts individual draws.

What is the biggest lottery jackpot ever?

The largest advertised jackpot in this dataset is Powerball's $1.80 billion on September 6, 2025, won on the numbers 11-23-44-61-62 with Powerball 17. The second largest is also Powerball: $1.70 billion on December 24, 2025. The biggest Mega Millions jackpot is $1.22 billion, won on December 27, 2024. All three were claimed.

Why does Powerball have more billion-dollar jackpots than Mega Millions?

Powerball holds 13 of the 16 billion-dollar draws largely because it draws more often. Its 20 jackpot runs averaged 18.3 draws and 45 days between wins, working out to a draw roughly every two and a half days; Mega Millions averaged 20.7 draws across 71 days, closer to one every three and a half. More draws per month means more rollovers per month, so jackpots climb faster between wins.

How long do lottery jackpots usually roll before someone wins?

Across the 20 completed Powerball runs in the data, the average was 18.3 draws with a median of 15 — and 15% of runs ended in under 10 draws. Mega Millions averaged 20.7 draws with a median of 20, and 31% of its runs ended in under 10. The longest run recorded was 47 Powerball draws, ending December 24, 2025.

How much of a $1.8 billion jackpot do you actually keep?

Considerably less than the headline. The advertised figure is a 30-year annuity; the cash option pays the smaller amount actually held in the prize pool. Federal withholding, the top federal bracket, and most state taxes then apply to that cash value. As a rough guide, roughly a third of the advertised number survives the trip — and less if more than one ticket matches all six numbers and the prize splits.

Are certain numbers more likely to win a billion-dollar jackpot?

No. Every draw is independent, and under Powerball's current 5/69 + 1/26 matrix all 292,201,338 combinations are equally likely on every single draw. The 1,389 draws since October 2015 tell you nothing about the next one. Number choice can affect how many people you'd split a prize with — unpopular combinations are less likely to be shared — but it cannot change your odds of winning.