$1.1B Mega Millions Jackpot: When And Where To Buy Tickets In NY

NEW YORK — The odds of winning an estimated $1.1 billion Mega Millions jackpot are impressive, but so is the hope among ticket buyers in New York for Tuesday night’s drawing.

No jackpot winning tickets were sold for Friday night’s drawing. The winning numbers for the Jan. 6 drawing were 3, 20, 46, 59, 63 and the Mega Ball was 13. Drawings are held at 11 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesdays and Fridays.

To be included in Tuesday’s drawing, players in New York must purchase their tickets by 10:45 p.m. To find a retailer check the New York Lottery website's list of New York Lottery retailers.

To play for the Mega Millions jackpot, players choose five numbers from 1 to 70 and one number from 1 to 25 for the Mega Ball. To win the Mega Millions jackpot, a player must match the six numbers on the ticket to the drawn six-number combination (five numbers plus the Mega Ball).

Although jackpot winners can choose to be paid through an annuity, with annual checks over 29 years, nearly all take the cash payout. For Tuesday’s drawing, that’s an estimated $568.7 million.

Tuesday night’s jackpot is the third-largest in the history of the game. The game’s record prize of $1.537 billion was won in South Carolina on Oct. 23, 2018.

A player in Illinois claimed a $1.337 billion ticket in the July 29 drawing. The only other Mega Millions jackpot worth more than a billion dollars was claimed by a player in Michigan on Jan. 22, 2021.

Long streaks without a winner allow jackpots to grow larger week after week. The last time the Mega Millions jackpot was claimed was Oct. 14, when two winners in San Jose, California, and Fort Myers, Florida, shared in a $502 million jackpot.

Some of the other big Mega Millions jackpots include:

• $656 million, shared by three players in Illinois, Kansas and Maryland in March 2012
• $648 million, shared by two players in California and Georgia in December 2013
• $543 million, won by a California player in July 2018
• $536 million, won an Indiana player in July 2016
• $533 million, won by a player in New Jersey in March 2018
• $522 million, won by a player in California in June 2019

Although weeks without a winner cause the jackpot to grow, Tuesday’s is still a far cry from the record $2.04 billion Powerball jackpot won in California on Nov. 8. The player has yet to come forward to claim the prize.

The Powerball game also claims the second-largest lottery jackpot in U.S. history, but barely. A $1.59 billion prize in January 2016 was shared by three winners in California, Florida and Tennessee.

The odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot — about 1 in 302.6 million — don’t increase with a flurry of ticket sales. But they are better than the odds a meteor will hit your house, according to a report from Business Insider. And the odds of a perfect NCAA basketball bracket chosen by a coin flip are 9,223,372,036,854,775,808, or 1 in 9.2 quintillion.

Although no one claimed the jackpot in the Friday, Jan. 6, drawing, five players matched the five white balls to win the game’s $1 million second-tier prize. Two $1 million tickets were sold in New York, and one each was sold in Florida, Maryland and New Jersey.

On Dec. 30, New York had no first-place or second-place winners, but nine players won the $10,000 third prize.

Across the country, 115 tickets matched four white balls plus the Mega Ball to win the third-tier prize. Fifteen of those tickets are worth $30,000 each, because they included the optional Megaplier, available in New York with an extra $1 purchase, which was 3X on Friday night. The other 100 third-tier winning tickets are worth $10,000 each.

The last New Yorker to win it big in the Mega Millions jackpot was Herman Kahan of Brooklyn, who won $128 million on March 8, 2022.

Mega Millions is played in 45 states as well as Washington, D.C. and the U.S. Virgin Islands.