With no winner over the weekend, the Mega Millions jackpot is inching closer to half a billion dollars. Should someone match up tonight’s winning numbers, they will take home an estimated $475 million. Or, should you want the lump sum payment, you could take a $300 million check.
If it hits, tonight’s jackpot will be the seventh-largest in Mega Millions history. Here are the winning numbers:
Winning numbers: 25 – 37 – 46 – 48 – 68
Mega Ball: 25
Megaplier: 2X
If you’ve pooled with your friends or coworkers to buy a ton of tickets, don’t waste time manually checking them one by one. If you download the PA Lottery mobile app on your phone, you can quickly scan through those tickets in search of winners.
Powerball jackpot hit on Monday
For a minute, it looked like Powerball would keep climbing to a massive jackpot as well. However, someone hit all the numbers in Monday’s drawing, resetting the jackpot back to the base $40 million. Someone in North Carolina bought a winning ticket worth almost $345 million.
The jackpot is one of the 20 largest in Powerball history. It also marked the fifth time a North Carolina player has taken the jackpot.
New lotto odds mean more big lotto jackpots
If it seems like you are hearing about giant Mega Millions jackpots all the time, you aren’t wrong. In October 2017, the Mega Millions team decided to change up the odds.
It is slightly easier to win a small prize, as it goes from 1 in 75 odds to 1 in 70 odds. The big jackpot is now much tougher to hit though. Prior to the change, your chances of binking the jackpot were 1 in 258,890,850. That may sound like some long odds, but now your chances are a mere 1 in 302,575,350.
The other big change is the cost of the ticket. Instead of $1 per entry, ticket prices hiked up to $2, making it much easier to quickly rack up a big prize.
The changes resulted in the Mega Millions’ first billion-dollar jackpot last October. The big winner from South Carolina hit the jackpot for over $1.5 billion.
The changes produced four of the top 10 jackpots in Mega Millions history over the past two years. Whenever this latest jackpot hits, that number will jump to five.
