The Mega Millions jackpot has passed the $1 billion mark. The grand prize for Friday night’s drawing will be about $1.02 billion, lottery officials said, although that is sure to grow as more and more tickets are bought as the drawing nears .
The cash option for this pot of gold would be $602.5 million.
No winning tickets were sold for Tuesday night’s drawing, which had an $830 million jackpot. It would have been the nation’s fourth-largest lottery prize of all time and the third-largest Mega Millions prize.
The winning numbers for Tuesday night’s draw were: 29, 63, 66, 7, 60 and a “Mega Ball” of 15.
“It takes a long time for this kind of jackpot to get this high, so we’re excited,” Mega Millions spokeswoman Maria Kilbane told CBS News.
In this case, 29 consecutive draws without a jackpot winner. No one has matched all six numbers in the game since April 15th.
The biggest lottery payday in history was a $1.58 Billion Powerball Jackpot won in 2016.
People’s craze to find out if there was a winner resulted in “unprecedented” traffic. the Mega Millions website, Kilbane said in a statement. Many attempts to reach the site resulted in error messages before it was determined that there was no grand prize winner.
Kilbane said traffic slowed once the results of Tuesday night’s drawing were released, but there were 62 million attempts to get to the site in a 24-hour period.
This year it has been seen three grand grand prizes: A $426 million pot in California in January, a $128 million ticket in New York in March and a $110 million prize in Minnesota in April, according to Mega Millions.
The odds of winning the jackpot are very small — approximately 1 in 302.5 million. You have better odds of a smaller win, such as winning $1 million for matching five regular numbers but losing the Mega Ball. But even that is one in 12.6 million.
To put that into perspective, your lifetime chance of dying in a car accident, something to keep in mind when driving to the mini-mart for a lottery ticket, is one in 101, according to the non-profit National Security Council.
How much is the payment after tax?
Meanwhile, even if you beat the odds somehow, you won’t get $830 million. First, this is the amount for winners who take the annuity option, paid over 30 annual payments. But winners usually go for cash, which for this drawing would pay an estimated $488 million.
“Some people like the idea of having something consistent over time,” but in recent years “almost everyone has chosen the cash option prize,” Kilbane said.
And then there are federal taxes, which he said would leave $351 million in gains. State taxes could also reduce this amount depending on where the winner lives. It’s still a fortune, but a smaller fortune.
This also doesn’t take into account the possibility of someone else matching the winning numbers, meaning you’d have to split even those smaller winnings in half or more, depending on the number of lucky players.
Mega Millions is played in 45 states as well as Washington, DC and the US Virgin Islands. The game is coordinated by state lotteries.
