Powerball

If Powerball has started appearing where it never used to, you aren't imagining it. As of 21 July 2026 the game is sold to players in the United Kingdom through The UK National Lottery, under an agreement with the US Multi-State Lottery Association. Sales opened that Tuesday and the first UK-eligible drawing was the following night, Wednesday 22 July 2026. Forty-nine lotteries now pool their money into the same jackpot.

Which means this page is describing something five days old. Treat everything below as a snapshot: the American mechanics are well established and stable, but the UK end of the arrangement is brand new, and the details on that side may well shift in the coming weeks.

What actually changed in July 2026

Powerball itself didn't change. What changed is who can buy a ticket. Before this month the game was a purely American affair; now the UK's operator sells into it, and the money from those tickets joins the same pooled jackpot as the American ones. The number of participating lotteries stands at 49.

Before that, the last structural change of any size was on 23 August 2021, when Monday drawings were added — taking the game from two nights a week to three — and the Double Play add-on was introduced. The five-year gap tells you something: this is a game that is left alone for long stretches.

How to play

You choose five main numbers from 1 to 69, and one red Powerball from a separate set of 1 to 26. The two draws are independent, so the Powerball can duplicate one of your main numbers without anything being wrong.

In the UK a line costs £4, bought through The National Lottery online, in the app or in store. Sales close at 11.55pm the night before each draw — noticeably earlier than the same-evening cutoffs you'll be used to on Lotto and EuroMillions, and an easy way to miss a draw if you assume it works the same way.

Powerball in the United States has two optional add-ons, Power Play and Double Play, which cost extra and change what you can win. Whether either is offered to UK players isn't something I've been able to confirm, so check the game's page on national-lottery.co.uk before assuming they're available here.

£4 here, $2 there

Worth knowing before you play: a Powerball line costs £4 in the UK and $2 in the United States. That's more than double before you convert anything, and around two and a half times once you do.

Both tickets buy a chance at the same pooled jackpot, at the same odds of 1 in 292,201,338. On the headline prize, a UK player is paying appreciably more than an American for an identical shot.

I'd stop short of calling that poor value, because two things that would settle it aren't published. The UK runs its own lower-tier prize structure — the jackpot is pooled, the smaller prizes are not — and Allwyn hasn't put those amounts anywhere I can find. It's also possible the £4 bundles something the $2 doesn't; EuroMillions does exactly that, with 76p of its £2.50 buying a UK Millionaire Maker entry rather than the draw itself. Either could explain part of the gap.

What can be said plainly is that the gap exists, that it's substantial, and that the jackpot odds are identical on both sides of it. If the UK lower-tier prizes turn out to be proportionally larger, the comparison softens. Until the operator publishes them, nobody outside can tell you either way.

Drawings are held on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday at 10:59pm Eastern Time, from the Florida Lottery's draw studio in Tallahassee. For anyone watching from Britain that's the early hours of the following morning — I'm deliberately not printing a UK clock time, because the two countries change their clocks on different dates and the offset isn't constant through the year. Sales close somewhere between one and two hours before the draw, and the exact cut-off varies by jurisdiction.

Prize tiers and odds

Read this before the table. The figures below are the US prize structure, published by powerball.com. The US and UK pool funds for the jackpot only — not for the lower tiers. UK players have their own separate lower-tier prize structure with its own payouts, and those amounts are not published on powerball.com. Do not assume that matching 4 numbers plus the Powerball on a UK ticket pays $50,000, because that is an American figure for an American ticket. Check what The UK National Lottery pays before you play.

With that said, here is the American table. The odds column applies to any ticket anywhere, because the odds come from the format rather than the payouts.

The jackpot figure is easy to check yourself. There are C(69,5) = 11,238,513 ways to choose the five main numbers, and 26 possible Powerballs, so 11,238,513 × 26 = 292,201,338. The odds page works that formula through from scratch if you want it slowly.

Notice how much of the 1-in-24.87 overall figure is carried by the bottom two tiers. Matching the red ball alone, at 1 in 38, wins $4 in America — twice a $2 stake. A great many Powerball "wins" are that.

Power Play, and its two catches

For an extra dollar, Power Play multiplies every non-jackpot prize by a multiplier drawn on the night: 2X, 3X, 4X, 5X or 10X. There are two exceptions, and both matter.

First, the 10X multiplier is only in play when the advertised jackpot annuity is $150 million or less. Once the jackpot climbs past that, 10X is withdrawn from the pool.

Second, the Match 5 prize is capped. It does not multiply. Whatever multiplier is drawn, $1,000,000 becomes a flat $2,000,000 with Power Play — no more, even on a 10X night.

When 10X is available, the multiplier is drawn from 43 balls: 10X on 1 of 43, 5X on 2, 4X on 3, 3X on 13, and 2X on the remaining 24. So the modest 2X outcome accounts for well over half of them.

Annuity or cash?

The advertised jackpot is the annuity figure. Take it and you receive 30 payments over 29 years — one immediately, then 29 annual payments, each 5% larger than the last. The cash option is a single lump sum: the amount that would need to sit in the prize pool on the day of the drawing to fund that annuity.

The gap between the two headlines is startling the first time you see it. As one dated illustration, the figures advertised for the Monday 27 July 2026 drawing were $633 million annuity against $277.3 million cash — the lump sum being roughly 44% of the headline. That ratio is not a fixed rule. It moves with interest rates, because the whole calculation is about what a pot of money today can be made to pay out over three decades.

One more thing not to expect: a guaranteed starting jackpot. The old rule of a $20 million start and a $2 million minimum rollover was officially eliminated on 3 April 2020. The advertised jackpot and every roll increase are now set by game sales and prevailing interest rates, and announced before each drawing. In practice the reset has often landed somewhere around $20 million, but that's an observation about what tends to happen, not a promise anyone has made.

What the odds actually mean

1 in 292,201,338 is past the point where a number means anything, so here it is as time instead. Play one line in every drawing — three a week, 156 lines a year — and you'd expect the jackpot roughly once every 1.9 million years. Not a lifetime. Not a hundred lifetimes. Longer than our species has existed.

Put another way: Powerball is about twice as long as EuroMillions and around 36 times longer than Thunderball. That's the trade being offered — vastly worse odds in exchange for a headline number no European game reaches.

And nothing about how you choose your five numbers changes any of it. Every one of those 292 million combinations is exactly as likely as every other, on every draw, and no pattern, system or generator moves that by a hair. The only thing number choice can affect is who you share with if you win, since lines full of birthday-range numbers get duplicated more often. That's covered honestly in do lucky numbers work?.

Prices, add-ons, draw times and prize structures change, and the UK arrangement is days old. Confirm the current details with powerball.com and, for anything to do with playing from Britain, with The UK National Lottery, before you spend anything. Lucky Dip is not affiliated with either.

Elsewhere on the site

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

Powerball is entertainment, and it's for over-18s only. If playing has stopped being fun, the responsible gambling page lists free, confidential UK support.