RELEASE DATE: 3/26/2025
UPDATED
Just two weeks shy of an exciting
game change, the Mega Millions® jackpot was won for the second time in 2025. For matching all six numbers drawn March 25 – the white balls 1, 5, 17, 39 and 62, plus the gold Mega Ball 8, a ticket sold in Illinois took the prize of $349 million ($161.4 million cash). The winning ticket was purchased at Casey’s General Store in Cortland. The jackpot had been rolling since it was last won in Arizona on January 17.
Note that the final jackpot amount was higher than the initial estimate; jackpots are always based on actual sales.
One of the founding members of Mega Millions in 2002, Illinois has produced 16 jackpot wins (in whole or shared) over the years. They include the game’s very first two jackpot winners in May 2002. Before Tuesday night’s win, the last jackpot won in Illinois was on June 4, 2024.
In this 19-drawing jackpot run, there were more than 8.8 million winning tickets across all prize tiers. These include 16 second-tier prizes of $1 million or more, won in California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Washington.
In the March 25 drawing alone, there were 619,889 winning tickets across all prize tiers, in addition to the jackpot-winning ticket. One ticket, sold in Florida, matched the five white balls to win the game’s $1 million second-tier prize. Across the country, 18 tickets matched four white balls plus the Mega Ball to win the game’s third-tier prize. Seven are worth $20,000 each because they included the optional Megaplier (available in most states with an extra $1 purchase), which was 2X Tuesday night. The other 11 third-tier winning tickets take home the standard $10,000 each.
See the complete Mega Millions jackpot history.
The jackpot for the next drawing on Friday, March 28, resets to its current starting value of $20 million ($9.2 million cash).
Mega Millions is the only lottery game that has produced seven jackpot wins exceeding $1 billion each – all in different states. South Carolina was the first in 2018, followed by Michigan in 2021, Illinois in 2022, Maine and Florida in 2023, New Jersey last March California in December. 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.
Mega Millions media contacts