Mega Millions Jackpot Survives, Reaches New Heights

June 4 marked the last time a fortunate player won the jackpot from Mega Millions. At the time, a lucky lottery player in Illinois won the $552 million grand prize. Since then, the jackpot has been growing and most recently surpassed the mind-blowing $500 million.

After nobody won the Mega Millions grand prize on Tuesday, the jackpot is now estimated at $527 million for the upcoming draw on Friday, August 23, 2024. As always, the grand prize has a cash option and if a player hits the jackpot on Friday and selects that option, they would be in for a sum of nearly $262 million.

The odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot is 1 in 302.6 million. In case a player is lucky enough to beat those odds and win the grand prize on the upcoming draw, they would be collecting the 13th largest prize from the popular lottery game.

Latest Draw Produces Nearly 1 Million Winning Tickets

Tuesday’s drawing saw a total of 945,350 winning tickets within the different prize tiers. Still, as noted, nobody won the grand prize by matching the winning white balls 5, 20, 26, 49 and 51, along with the gold Mega Ball 24.

On the bright side, two lucky winners won $1 million or more by matching five numbers from the August 20 drawing. One fortunate Delaware player who matched the numbers won $4 million thanks to the Mega Millions’ Megaplier option which was 4x on Tuesday. On the other hand, a ticket in Arizona also matched five winning numbers to win a second-tier prize of $1 million.

A total of 23 lucky players matched four white balls along with the Gold Mega ball to secure a third-tier prize. While six fortunate players pocketed a $40,000 Megaplier prize each, another 17 took home the standard third-tier prize of $10,000 each.

There Are Only Two Jackpot Wins for 2024 So Far

So far, in 2024, there have been only two Mega Millions jackpot wins. Besides the win from this June, a fortunate player from New Jersey won the mind-blowing $1.13 billion jackpot from the drawing on March 26.

In contrast to 2024, throughout last year, a total of eight jackpots have been won by fortunate players.

Currently, Mega Millions is the only game in the US that has awarded six jackpots of more than $1 billion. Each of those jackpots was won in a different state with winners claiming prizes in Florida, New Jersey, Illinois, Maine, Michigan and South Carolina.

The largest Mega Millions jackpot was won on August 8 last year, a whopping $1.60 billion that went to a player in Florida.