Mega Millions

Two things need saying before anything else, and the first is the important one.

You cannot buy a Mega Millions ticket in the United Kingdom. Tickets are not sold outside the United States. This page is a reference — how the game works, what it pays, how it stacks up against the games you can actually play — rather than a guide to playing it.

Mega Millions states plainly that it is not affiliated with, and does not endorse, any company claiming to sell its tickets internationally or online. UK searches for the game turn up courier and concierge outfits offering to buy on your behalf; none of them is the lottery, and I'm not linking to any of them. If you happen to be physically in the United States you can buy a ticket in person, and you don't need to be a US resident or citizen to claim a prize.

The second thing: in April 2025 the game was overhauled so thoroughly that almost every older description of it is now wrong. Two dates matter. On 5 April 2025 the new $5 tickets went on sale and the Megaplier was retired. On Tuesday 8 April 2025 the first drawing under the new prize structure took place.

How to play

You pick five main numbers from 1 to 70, and one Mega Ball from a separate set of 1 to 24. The two draws are independent, so the Mega Ball can repeat one of your main numbers.

A play costs $5.00, and that price includes the multiplier — there is no optional extra to buy. Drawings are held on Tuesdays and Fridays at 11:00pm Eastern Time from the WSB-TV studios in Atlanta, Georgia. The game is available in 47 US jurisdictions: 45 states, the District of Columbia and the US Virgin Islands.

Jackpot odds are 1 in 290,472,336, and you can check that yourself: there are C(70,5) = 12,103,014 ways to pick the five main numbers, times 24 Mega Balls. The odds page walks that formula through slowly.

What the April 2025 overhaul changed

This wasn't a tweak. Price, ball pool, multiplier, starting jackpot and minimum prize all moved at once.

Shrinking the Mega Ball pool from 25 to 24 is a single ball, and it shortens the jackpot odds by about twelve million combinations. That's the leverage a second pool has — the same effect the Lucky Stars have in EuroMillions, running in the opposite direction.

The starting jackpot after a win rose from $20 million to $50 million annuity. What a rollover adds per drawing isn't something I've been able to verify, so I'm not printing a figure for it.

The multiplier is on every ticket

This is the part people who knew the old game get wrong. There is no Megaplier to buy any more. Instead, a multiplier is randomly assigned to every ticket at the moment of purchase — it isn't drawn centrally on the night, and two tickets bought side by side can carry different ones. It applies to all non-jackpot prizes.

The multiplier is one of 2X, 3X, 4X, 5X or 10X, at these rates: 2X on 1 in 2.13 tickets, 3X on 1 in 3.2, 4X on 1 in 8, 5X on 1 in 16, and 10X on 1 in 32.

Because the minimum is 2X, the 2X column is the effective floor. There is no unmultiplied base prize hiding underneath it — the worst outcome is the one shown in the 2X column, and roughly half of all tickets land there.

The jackpot is the exception. It is not multiplied, whatever your ticket says.

Prize tiers and odds

Look at the bottom-left cell: $10. That's the minimum prize, and it's the honest headline of the whole redesign. Any winning ticket wins at least $10 — twice the $5 stake, on a game where the cheapest win used to return exactly what you'd paid.

That said, the arithmetic is what it is. The ticket costs two and a half times what it used to, and the commonest win — the Mega Ball on its own, at 1 in 35 — pays $10 at the floor. Better prizes, fewer of them per pound spent. Whether that's an improvement depends entirely on what you wanted from the game.

Annuity or cash?

The advertised jackpot is the annuity. Take it and you get an initial annual payment followed by 29 further annual payments, each 5% larger than the one before — 30 in total. The alternative is the cash option: a one-time lump sum, sized from the actual sales behind that drawing, and always a good deal smaller than the headline. The gap between the two is a function of what a pot of money today can be made to pay out over three decades, so it moves with interest rates rather than sitting at a fixed ratio.

What the odds actually mean

1 in 290,472,336 stops being a number you can feel somewhere around the third comma. Some perspective instead: Mega Millions is roughly twice as long as EuroMillions, and about 36 times longer than Thunderball. It sits a whisker shorter than Powerball, which runs at 1 in 292,201,338 — a difference of under two million combinations in nearly 300 million, which is to say no practical difference at all.

Powerball draws three times a week to Mega Millions' two, so a single line played in every drawing works out at around 1.9 million years for Powerball. Mega Millions, with a third fewer chances a year, is longer still.

The overall figure improved from 1 in 24 to 1 in 23 in 2025, which sounds better than it is: it means a shade more than 4% of tickets win something, and most of those somethings are the two bottom tiers.

None of it responds to how you choose. Every one of those 290 million combinations is equally likely on every draw, and no pattern, system or generator alters that by any amount at all. The one thing number choice can influence is how many people you'd share a jackpot with, since birthday-range lines get duplicated more heavily than others — the case for a random pick, made properly in do lucky numbers work?.

Prices, prize structures and draw arrangements change — this game was rebuilt once already. Confirm the current details with megamillions.com before acting on anything here. Lucky Dip is not affiliated with Mega Millions or any lottery operator.

Elsewhere on the site

• Powerball →
• How lottery odds are calculated →
• Do lucky numbers work? →
• Responsible gambling →

Lotteries are entertainment, and they're for over-18s only. If playing has stopped being fun, the responsible gambling page lists free, confidential UK support.