Mega Millions Odds Calculator

Use this page for the U.S. Mega Millions matrix in force since 31 October 2017: five white balls from 1–70 plus one Mega Ball from 1–25. It is not Powerball. A line is $2. Drawings are Tuesday and Friday only. Start with Tickets. That field is the number of distinct boards on a single drawing. A $20 slip with ten lines is Tickets = 10. A 10-draw advance with one board is still Tickets = 1 if you are pricing one Friday night; this engine does not multiply across weeks. Quick Pick versus self-pick does not matter. Identical duplicate boards should not be double-counted if you only hold one unique combination.

Ticket Price defaults to 2. Keep it at $2 for a vanilla line. Megaplier is an optional extra dollar in most participating lotteries and it does not multiply the jackpot. If you inflate Ticket Price to $3 to “include Megaplier,” Jackpot Odds will not change and Jackpot EV will look $1 worse per ticket. Only raise price if your retailer actually charges more than $2 for the base game or you are blending a subscription cost.

Jackpot is the advertised annuity you want to stress-test. Mega Millions’ record is $1.602 billion, won on 8 August 2023 by one ticket sold at a Publix in Neptune Beach, Florida (claimed later by Saltines Holdings, LLC, as a cash option of about $794 million). Earlier headlines of $1.337 billion or $1.348 billion are real wins—they are not the record. If you want cash-option EV, type the published cash value into Jackpot. The calculator does not haircut annuity quotes and does not split the prize among expected co-winners.

Main Matches runs from 0 to 5 and counts white-ball hits against the five/70 pool. Leave it at 5 for jackpot-class prize odds. Set it to 4 if you want the odds of the $10,000-class tier before the Mega Ball is considered. Bonus Matches is the Mega Ball: 0 or 1, from a 25-number drum. Jackpot requires Main Matches = 5 and Bonus Matches = 1. Second prize is Main Matches = 5 and Bonus Matches = 0. The cheap “just the Mega Ball” hit is Main Matches = 0 and Bonus Matches = 1.

Results: Jackpot Odds is 1 in C(70,5)×25 = 1 in 302,575,350. This Prize Odds is the hypergeometric probability of the match pattern you chose. Jackpot Chance is 1−(1−jackpotP)^tickets. This Prize Chance is the same transformation on the prize probability. Jackpot EV is tickets×(jackpot×jackpotP − price), ignoring Megaplier, lower rungs, tax, and sharing. Expected Jackpot Return is tickets×jackpot×jackpotP. A $1.602 billion headline on one $2 ticket prints a small positive jackpot-only EV; that is a modelling artefact, not a reason to mortgage the house. Sales at that size make sharing the dominant correction, which this page deliberately leaves out.

Mega Millions is the other American two-drum mega game, run by the Mega Millions Consortium with the Georgia Lottery as lead director. It is sold in 45 states plus D.C. and the U.S. Virgin Islands—the footprint overlaps Powerball but the operators are not MUSL. The current matrix, 5 from 70 plus a Mega Ball from 25, dates to 31 October 2017. That redesign made the jackpot harder (1 in 302,575,350) than Powerball’s 1 in 292 million and is the reason advertised annuities can linger in the ten-figure range. Price is $2. Draw nights are Tuesday and Friday, so the two big U.S. games never clash.

The record prize is $1.602 billion from the 8 August 2023 drawing, a single Florida ticket. The cash option was about $794 million. That run sat just above the previous Mega Millions peaks: $1.537 billion (South Carolina, 2018) and $1.348 billion (Maine, January 2023). The $1.337 billion Illinois win in 2022 is often misquoted as the record; it is not. Annuity payments are 30 graduated annual instalments. Tax treatment follows the claim state; Florida, like California, has no state income tax on the prize, which is part of why the 2023 winner’s after-tax cash was still enormous.

Megaplier (usually 2×–5×, occasionally 10× in promotions) does not apply to the jackpot. It can multiply the fixed lower prizes and, depending on jurisdiction, the Match-5 amount. This calculator prices jackpot probability and a single hypergeometric prize tier; it is not a Megaplier payout table. If your question is “should I add Megaplier,” answer it with the fixed prize table from your lottery, not with this EV line.

Structurally Mega Millions is the harder, slightly less frequent cousin of Powerball. Same $2, similar annuity marketing, similar cash-option haircut, similar sharing problem at once-in-a-decade headlines. It is a different product from Cash4Life ($1,000/day for life, 5/60 + Cash Ball 1/4) and from Lotto America ($1, 5/52 + Star Ball). Those games do not produce billion-dollar banners. Use this calculator when the ticket in your pocket is Mega Millions, the white pool is 70, and the gold Mega Ball is 1–25.

Because the 2017 matrix change is still recent in lottery years, older blog posts quoting 1 in 259 million or a 75-white / 15-Mega-Ball set are stale. This tool is frozen to the post-2017 rules the consortium actually draws. If Mega Millions ever changes drums again, the calculator defaults would have to move; until then, Tickets, Ticket Price, Jackpot, Main Matches and Bonus Matches are the whole interface, and 302,575,350 is the jackpot denominator.

Mega Millions after Halloween 2017 is not the old seventy-five-and-fifteen game, and it is not Powerball. The consortium, with Georgia as lead director, now draws five whites from seventy and one Mega Ball from twenty-five. A line is two dollars. Draw nights are Tuesday and Friday. The jackpot probability is one in 302,575,350. The working advertised prize here is two hundred million dollars, the same default lump used for Powerball so the two American mega games can be compared on identical headlines against different drums.

Work the product from the white drum first. C(70,5) = 70×69×68×67×66 / 120 = 12,103,014 distinct five-subsets. Matching all five is one over that integer. The Mega Ball contributes an independent one-from-twenty-five, so multiply by twenty-five: 12,103,014×25 = 302,575,350. The jackpot probability is therefore 1 / [C(70,5)×C(25,1)]. Older blogs quoting one in 258,890,850 are describing C(75,5)×15, the matrix retired on 31 October 2017. Mixing a 2016 headline with the current drums is a category error.

Partial prizes multiply two hypergeometrics. Exactly k whites among five drawn from seventy occur in C(5,k)×C(65,5−k) / C(70,5) ways, divided by the combination total. The Mega Ball is C(1,b)×C(24,1−b)/C(25,1) for b equal to zero or one. Five whites without the gold ball: (1/12,103,014)×(24/25) = 24/302,575,350, about one in 12,607,306. Four whites plus the Mega Ball: C(5,4)×C(65,1)/12,103,014 times 1/25 = 325/302,575,350, about one in 931,001. Those two cells are not interchangeable; the miss factor on a twenty-five pool is twenty-four, not Powerball’s twenty-five.

Several independent lines raise the at-least-once chance as 1−(1−p)^n with p = 1/302,575,350. Ordinary retail n keeps that indistinguishable from n times p. Expected jackpot dollars at two hundred million are 200,000,000/302,575,350 ≈ 0.66, so jackpot-only expectation at two dollars is about minus 1.34 per line. A Florida 1.602 billion annuity would print a small positive jackpot-only figure; the cash option near 794 million and the sharing at that sales volume both pull it back below the stake. Megaplier never multiplies the jackpot.

Assumptions: unordered combinations, independent drums, one unshared winner, no tax, no lower rungs. The 2017 redesign lengthened advertised rolls by making the top prize harder than Powerball’s 292 million while keeping the same two-dollar price. Use 5/70 plus 1/25 only. Anything citing a fifteen-face Mega Ball is archaeology.