August 21, 2024 – With a month of summer left by the calendar, the Mega Millions® jackpot is just getting hot! For the third time this year, the big prize has topped $500 million. After no ticket matched all six numbers drawn Tuesday night – the white balls 5, 20, 26, 49 and 51, plus the gold Mega Ball 24, the jackpot for the next drawing on Friday, August 23, is an estimated $527 million ($261.9 million cash). If won at that level, it would be the 13th largest prize in the history of the game.
The jackpot has been growing since it was last won at $552 million in Illinois on June 4. In the 22 drawings in this jackpot run to date, there have been more than 13.8 million winning tickets across all non-jackpot prize tiers. These include 43 second-tier prizes of $1 million or more, won in 21 different jurisdictions from coast to coast: Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.
The August 20 drawing alone produced 945,350 winning tickets across all prize levels. Two tickets matched the five white balls to win the game’s second-tier prize. One, sold in Delaware, is worth $4 million because it included the optional Megaplier (available in most states with an extra $1 purchase), which was 4X Tuesday night. The other second-tier winning ticket was sold in Arizona and wins the standard $1 million prize.
Across the country, 23 tickets matched four white balls plus the Mega Ball to win the third-tier prize. Six of those are worth $40,000 each because they also included the optional Megaplier; the other 17 take home the standard $10,000 each.
Only two Mega Millions jackpots have been won so far this year, in marked contrast to 2023. By this time last year, the jackpot had already been hit eight times! To date in 2024, only two tickets have matched all six numbers – the June 4 win in Illinois, and one on March 26 in New Jersey for a whopping $1.128 billion prize.
Mega Millions is the only lottery game that has produced six jackpots greater than $1 billion. All were won in different states – South Carolina was the first in 2018, followed by Michigan in 2021, Illinois in 2022, Maine in early 2023, Florida last August and New Jersey in March. The Florida prize on August 8, 2023, is the game’s current record jackpot at $1.602 billion.
Tickets are sold in 45 states, Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Tickets are $2 each; in most jurisdictions, players can add the Megaplier for an additional $1 to multiply their non-jackpot prizes. Half of the proceeds from the sale of each Mega Millions ticket remains in the state where the ticket was sold, where the money supports designated good causes and retailer commissions.
Drawings are conducted at 11 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesdays and Fridays in Atlanta, Georgia. The overall odds of winning any Mega Millions prize are 1 in 24; the odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 302,575,350.
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