RELEASE DATE: 12/18/2024
The temperatures may be cooling off as winter arrives, but the Mega Millions® jackpot is heating up and the excitement is building! The jackpot rolls again after no ticket matched all six numbers drawn Tuesday night – the white balls 56, 66, 67, 68 and 69, plus the gold Mega Ball 18. The estimated prize for the next drawing on Friday, December 20, is a whopping $825 million ($382.2 million cash). If won at that level, it would be the largest prize ever won in December and the seventh largest in Mega Millions history!
Thirteen Mega Millions jackpots have been won during December since the game began in 2002. Three were won in the days after Christmas, while the other 10 were won before Christmas. There has never been a jackpot win on Christmas Day, although over the years drawings have been conducted on Christmas six times – in 2007, 2009, 2012, 2015, 2018 and 2020.
While the jackpot has been rolling since it was last won at $810 million in Texas on September 10, there have been almost 19.4 million winning tickets sold in the 28 drawings since then. These include 51 second-tier prizes of $1 million or more, won in 21 different jurisdictions from coast to coast: California, Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin.
In the December 17 drawing alone, there were a total of 1,602,721 winning tickets across all non-jackpot prize levels. Five tickets matched the five white balls for the game’s second-tier prize. One, sold in North Carolina, is worth $4 million because it included the optional Megaplier (available in most states with an extra $1 purchase), which was 4X Tuesday night. The other four second-tier prizes were won in California (2), Louisiana and Oklahoma.
Around the country, 55 tickets matched four white balls plus the Mega Ball to win the third-tier prize. Seventeen of those are worth $40,000 each because they also included the optional Megaplier; the other 38 take home the standard $10,000 each.
Note: Prize amounts in California will vary, as they are calculated on a pari-mutuel basis.
The Mega Millions jackpot has been won only three times this year, so far the fewest won in any single year since the game began. Before the Texas win on September 10, the jackpot had been won on just two earlier occasions this year. The biggest lottery prize ever awarded to an online player was a $552 million jackpot taken in Illinois on June 4. And on March 26, a $1.128 billion prize was won in New Jersey. No one has yet come forward to claim that jackpot; the ticket will expire if not claimed by March 26, 2025, and the unpaid prize will revert back to each participating Mega Millions jurisdiction.
Mega Millions is the only lottery game that has produced six jackpots greater than $1 billion. All were won in different states – South Carolina was the first in 2018, followed by Michigan in 2021, Illinois in 2022, Maine in early 2023, Florida last August and New Jersey in March. The Florida prize on August 8, 2023, is the game’s current record jackpot at $1.602 billion.
Tickets are sold in 45 states, Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Tickets are $2 each; in most jurisdictions, players can add the Megaplier for an additional $1 to multiply their non-jackpot prizes. Half of the proceeds from the sale of each Mega Millions ticket remains in the state where the ticket was sold, where the money supports designated good causes and retailer commissions.
Drawings are conducted at 11 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesdays and Fridays in Atlanta, Georgia. The overall odds of winning any Mega Millions prize are 1 in 24; the odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 302,575,350.
The top Mega Millions jackpots:
| Amount |
Date |
Winning Tickets |
| $1.602 billion |
8/8/2023 |
1-FL |
| $1.537 billion |
10/23/2018 |
1-SC |
| $1.348 billion |
1/13/2023 |
1-ME |
| $1.337 billion |
7/29/2022 |
1-IL |
| $1.128 billion |
3/26/2024 |
1-NJ |
| $1.050 billion |
1/22/2021 |
1-MI |
| $825 million (est) |
12/20/2024 |
? |
| $810 million |
9/10/2024 |
1-TX |
| $656 million |
3/30/2012 |
3-IL, KS, MD |
| $648 million |
12/17/2013 |
2-CA, GA |
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