37 Things More Likely Than Winning the Powerball Jackpot

The odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are 1 in 292,201,338 — that's 0.00000034% per ticket. Almost everything else you can put a number on is more likely, including eight of the nine prize tiers on the very ticket you bought. Below are 37 of them, and every single figure is either taken straight from the official odds table or is arithmetic shown in full, so you can check the work yourself.

Key takeaways

• The Powerball jackpot is 1 in 292,201,338, which comes from 11,238,513 white-ball combinations multiplied by 26 Powerballs.
• Winning any Powerball prize is 1 in 24.87 — about 11.7 million times more likely than the jackpot.
• Flipping 28 heads in a row is 1 in 268,435,456, which is roughly 1.09 times more likely than hitting the jackpot.
• Matching all five white balls and missing only the Powerball is 1 in 11,688,053.52 — exactly 25 times more likely than the full jackpot.
• Reading out all 292,201,338 combinations at one per second takes over nine years; buying them all at $2 a line costs $584,402,676.

The one number everything here is measured against

Powerball has used a 5/69 + 1/26 matrix since October 2015, a stretch covering 1,389 draws through August 3, 2026. Under that matrix there are C(69,5) = 11,238,513 ways to pick five white balls from 69, and 26 possible red Powerballs. Multiply them: 11,238,513 × 26 = 292,201,338. One of those outcomes wins the jackpot.

That figure isn't an estimate or a survey result. It's a count, and it's the only kind of lottery number that's genuinely certain. If you want the long version of where it comes from, our full breakdown of what 1 in 292 million actually means walks through the combinatorics step by step.

Everything below is expressed as "X times more likely," which just means 292,201,338 divided by the item's odds denominator.

Things more likely on the ticket you already bought

Powerball has nine prize tiers. Eight of them are more likely than the jackpot, and the gaps are enormous.

#	Outcome	Odds (1 in)	Times more likely than the jackpot
1	Winning any Powerball prize	24.87	11,749,149×
2	Matching the Powerball alone ($4)	38.32	7,625,296×
3	Matching 1 white + Powerball ($4)	91.98	3,176,792×
4	Matching 3 whites ($7)	579.76	504,004×
5	Matching 2 whites + Powerball ($7)	701.33	416,639×
6	Matching 3 whites + Powerball ($100)	14,494.11	20,160×
7	Matching 4 whites ($100)	36,525.17	8,000×
8	Matching 4 whites + Powerball ($50,000)	913,129.18	320×
9	Matching 5 whites, no Powerball ($1,000,000)	11,688,053.52	25×

Item 9 is the one worth sitting with. Getting all five white balls right and missing a single red ball pays $1,000,000 — and it happens twenty-five times as often as the jackpot. The entire distance between a million dollars and hundreds of millions is that one red ball, drawn from a pool of 26.

Item 1 is the other one. That 1-in-24.87 overall figure is heavily weighted toward the $4 tiers: 16.0% of the money you put in comes back through non-jackpot prizes, worth $0.3199 per $2 ticket. So "winning something" is common; winning something that matters is not.

Things more likely in the other big game

Mega Millions runs a 5/70 + 1/24 matrix, giving 1 in 290,472,336 for its jackpot. Its white-ball pool has been 1–70 since October 2017 (914 draws through July 31, 2026), and the Mega Ball pool dropped from 25 to 24 in April 2025 (138 draws under the current pool).

10. Winning the Mega Millions jackpot instead — 1 in 290,472,336, about 1.006× more likely. Practically a tie, but it is technically the easier of the two.
11. Winning any Mega Millions prize — 1 in 23.07, roughly 12.7 million times more likely.
12. Matching the Mega Ball alone — 1 in 35.17, about 8.3 million times more likely.
13. Mega Millions 4 + Mega Ball ($10,000) — 1 in 893,761.03, about 327× more likely.
14. Mega Millions 5 + 0 ($1,000,000) — 1 in 12,629,232, about 23× more likely.

The two games are close enough at the top that choosing between them on jackpot odds is meaningless. What differs is price and payout structure, which is the subject of the expected value math on when a ticket is worth buying.

Things more likely with a coin, a die, or a deck of cards

Coins and dice

Coin flips are the cleanest comparison available, because the math is just powers of two: N flips have 2^N equally likely sequences, so any one specific sequence is 1 in 2^N.

15. Ten heads in a row — 2^10 = 1,024. About 285,353× more likely.
16. Twenty heads in a row — 2^20 = 1,048,576. About 279× more likely.
17. Twenty-seven heads in a row — 2^27 = 134,217,728. About 2.18× more likely.
18. Twenty-eight heads in a row — 2^28 = 268,435,456. About 1.09× more likely.
19. Ten sixes in a row on a fair die — 6^10 = 60,466,176. About 4.83× more likely.

Item 18 is the sharpest single comparison in this article. Flip a fair coin 28 straight times and get heads every time — that is still a better shot than one Powerball ticket. Push it to 29 flips (2^29 = 536,870,912) and the coin finally becomes the harder feat, which puts the jackpot squarely between 28 and 29 consecutive heads.

The die does the same job. Ten sixes in a row is nearly five times easier than the jackpot; eleven sixes (6^11 = 362,797,056) is harder.

Cards

A five-card deal from a standard deck has C(52,5) = 2,598,960 possible hands, and the counts for each hand type are fixed.

20. Four of a kind on a five-card deal — 624 of 2,598,960 hands, or 1 in 4,165. About 70,156× more likely.
21. A straight flush, royal included — 40 hands, or 1 in 64,974. About 4,497× more likely.
22. A royal flush on the deal — 4 hands, or 1 in 649,740. About 450× more likely.
23. Naming the top card of a shuffled deck three times running — 52³ = 140,608. About 2,078× more likely.
24. Being dealt one specific five-card hand you named in advance — 1 in 2,598,960. About 112× more likely.

Item 24 is the useful one. Call your exact five cards before the deal, down to the suits, and you'll pull it off roughly 112 times for every one jackpot. A royal flush — the hand people describe as a once-in-a-lifetime event — is 450 times more common than the thing millions of people buy a ticket for twice a week.

Things more likely if you're picking blind

Guessing a code or a person

25. Guessing a stranger's 4-digit PIN on the first try — 1 in 10,000. About 29,220× more likely.
26. Guessing a 6-digit code on the first try — 1 in 1,000,000. About 292× more likely.
27. Guessing an 8-digit code on the first try — 1 in 100,000,000. About 2.92× more likely.
28. Picking one specific person out of a crowd of 100,000,000 — 1 in 100,000,000. About 2.92× more likely.
29. Picking one specific person out of a crowd of 250,000,000 — 1 in 250,000,000. About 1.17× more likely.

Item 29 is worth restating, because it's the most honest way to picture the jackpot. To make "pick one specific person at random" as hard as buying one Powerball ticket, you'd need a crowd of 292,201,338 people — and you get exactly one guess.

Picking a moment in time

Time comparisons work because a span of time is just a count of equally sized slots.

#	Guess one specific…	Slots	Odds (1 in)	vs jackpot
30	Second in the next 9 years	9 × 365.25 × 86,400	284,018,400	1.03× more likely
31	Minute in the next 500 years	500 × 365.25 × 1,440	262,980,000	1.11× more likely
32	Hour in the next 33,000 years	33,000 × 365.25 × 24	289,278,000	1.01× more likely
33	Day in the next 800,000 years	800,000 × 365.25	292,200,000	1.000005× more likely

Item 33 is an almost perfect match. Picking one specific day out of the next 800,000 years gives odds of 1 in 292,200,000 — within 1,338 of the Powerball jackpot. That's the cleanest mental image on this list: one day, from now until eight hundred millennia from now, chosen blind.

If you want to see how those slot counts translate into dollars for a real jackpot, the Expected Value Calculator does the same arithmetic against an actual advertised prize.

Things more likely according to the draw record itself

These four come from the 1,389 draws under the current 5/69 + 1/26 matrix and the 406 draws with jackpot data. They describe what has already happened. They say nothing whatsoever about what the next draw will do — a random draw has no memory, and no pattern in past results changes anyone's odds.

34. A draw where all five white balls land at 31 or under — 21 of 1,389 draws, or 1.51%. Roughly 1 in 66.
35. A draw where all five white balls are odd — 2.88% of the 1,389 draws, or roughly 1 in 35.
36. A draw repeating at least one number from the previous draw — 32.0% of draws, or roughly 1 in 3.1.
37. Any given draw producing a jackpot winner at all — 20 wins across the 406 draws with jackpot data, or 4.93%. Roughly 1 in 20.

Item 37 is the one that reframes the whole exercise. Over that window a jackpot fell about once every 45 days, with a median rolling run of 15 draws and a longest run of 47 draws ending December 24, 2025. So jackpots do get won regularly — 20 of them, averaging $462,515,000 and topping out at $1,800,000,000. Somebody wins. The odds that it's your specific line are the 1 in 292,201,338. For how often the very biggest prizes come around, see our record of every billion-dollar jackpot.

What a "more likely than a lightning strike" comparison is really worth

You've seen lists that put a hard number on being struck by lightning, attacked by a shark, or hit by a meteorite. Those figures are widely repeated, but they vary a lot between sources, depend heavily on where you live and what you do, and are estimates rather than counts. We're not going to state one as a fact here, because we can't verify it.

What we can say is structural. Commonly cited lifetime hazard estimates of that kind generally sit somewhere in the range of one in tens of thousands to one in a few million. Take the far end of that range and assume a genuinely rare event at 1 in 1,000,000: the Powerball jackpot would still be about 292 times less likely. At 1 in 100,000, it's 2,922 times less likely. The comparison survives no matter which version of the hazard number you believe, which is exactly why it's a useful qualitative point and a bad place to invent precision.

That's the difference between a combinatorial odds figure and an actuarial one. 1 in 292,201,338 is a count of outcomes in a closed system. A lightning statistic is a model of the world. Only one of them is exact, and it's the lottery one — a theme that runs through our tests of 15 common lottery myths against 4,346 real draws.

Two demonstrations of the actual scale

The nine-year read-out. Say every combination takes one second to read aloud. 292,201,338 seconds ÷ 86,400 seconds per day = 3,381.96 days. Divide by 365.25 and you get 9.26 years — nine years and about 95 days of continuous, round-the-clock reading, no sleep, no breaks, to get through the list once. Your ticket is one line somewhere in that recitation.

The $584 million buyout. At $2 a line, covering every combination costs 292,201,338 × $2 = $584,402,676. That does win the jackpot with certainty, and it's also a plan that loses money against most advertised prizes once you account for annuity-versus-cash, taxes, and the very real chance of splitting the top prize with another winner. The average winning jackpot over the 406 draws with jackpot data was $462,515,000 — below the cost of the buyout before a dollar of tax.

What any of this should change about how you play

Nothing on this list improves anyone's odds, and nothing can. Every combination of five whites and one red is equally likely on every draw, forever. Hot numbers, cold numbers, due numbers, sum ranges, birthday avoidance — none of it moves the 1 in 292,201,338.

Two things are genuinely under your control, and neither is about winning:

• How much you'd keep. Picking numbers most people avoid doesn't make you more likely to win, but it does make it less likely you'd split a jackpot if you did. Only 44.9% of the 69-ball pool falls in the 1–31 birthday range, and just 1.51% of the 1,389 current-matrix draws came in entirely under 31 — so lines using the upper two-thirds of the pool are structurally less crowded.
• How much you pay. A $2 Powerball ticket returns $0.3199 in non-jackpot expected value, a gap of $1.6801 per ticket before you count the jackpot. Knowing that number is the whole point of treating tickets as entertainment spending with a fixed budget rather than an investment.

If you want to see what a specific draw is actually worth at a given jackpot size, run the numbers through the Expected Value Calculator before you buy rather than after.

Frequently asked questions

What are the exact odds of winning the Powerball jackpot?

The odds are 1 in 292,201,338 per ticket, or about 0.00000034%. The figure comes from the current 5/69 + 1/26 matrix: there are 11,238,513 ways to choose five white balls from 69, and 26 possible red Powerballs, and 11,238,513 × 26 = 292,201,338. That matrix has been in use since October 2015, covering 1,389 draws through August 3, 2026. It's a count of possible outcomes, not an estimate.

Is flipping 28 heads in a row really more likely than winning Powerball?

Yes, slightly. A specific sequence of 28 coin flips has odds of 1 in 2^28, which equals 1 in 268,435,456. Divide 292,201,338 by 268,435,456 and you get about 1.09, so 28 straight heads is roughly 9% more likely than a jackpot. Add one more flip and it flips the other way: 2^29 is 536,870,912, making 29 straight heads harder than the jackpot.

Which is easier to win, Powerball or Mega Millions?

Mega Millions is marginally easier at the top: 1 in 290,472,336 versus 1 in 292,201,338, about 1.006 times better. That difference is meaningless in practice. The real differences are elsewhere — Powerball costs $2 with a 1 in 24.87 chance of any prize, while Mega Millions costs $5 with 1 in 23.07 overall and a higher effective non-jackpot expected value of $1.1156 per ticket.

Can picking different numbers improve my chances?

No. Every combination has identical odds of 1 in 292,201,338 on every draw, and no selection method changes that. Past frequency data describes draws that already happened and has zero predictive power on a random draw. What number choice can affect is how many people you'd share a prize with — only 44.9% of the 69-ball pool sits in the 1–31 birthday range, so avoiding that range reduces the odds of splitting.

How much would it cost to buy every Powerball combination?

At $2 per line, covering all 292,201,338 combinations costs $584,402,676. Even setting aside the logistics of printing that many tickets, it's rarely profitable: the average winning jackpot across the 406 draws with jackpot data was $462,515,000 — less than the purchase price — and advertised jackpots are annuity values reduced further by cash-option discounting, taxes, and the chance of splitting the prize with another winner.

If the odds are that bad, why does someone win so often?

Because hundreds of millions of lines are in play each draw, not one. Across the 406 Powerball draws with jackpot data, 20 produced a jackpot winner — about 4.93% of draws, or one roughly every 45 days. Rolling runs averaged 18.3 draws with a median of 15, and the longest ran 47 draws before ending December 24, 2025. Someone winning is common; your specific ticket winning is 1 in 292,201,338.