It’s a long holiday season, and the Mega Million jackpot is keeping pace with all the traditional celebrations.

According to the lottery, after no ticket matched all six numbers drawn on Christmas Eve, the big prize swells to an estimated $1.15 billion ($516.1 million cash) for the next drawing on Friday. If won at that level, it would be the fifth largest jackpot in the game’s history.

“We know that many people will likely receive tickets to Friday’s drawing as holiday gifts, and what a gift that would turn out to be if you ended up with a ticket worth a $1.15 billion jackpot,” said Joshua Johnston, lead director for the Mega Millions Consortium. “I can’t think of a better way to celebrate the holidays – whether Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, the Winter Solstice, or any other way people choose to celebrate the season – than by helping fulfill the dreams that come with a prize like this and prizes that will be won at all levels of the game.”

And there certainly have been a lot of prizes! In the December 24 drawing alone, there were a total of 4,292,338 winning tickets across all non-jackpot prize levels. Four tickets matched the five white balls for the game’s second-tier prize; they were sold in California, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Wyoming.

Around the country, 106 tickets matched four white balls plus the Mega Ball to win the third-tier prize. Thirteen of those are worth $30,000 each because they included the optional Megaplier (available in most states with an extra $1 purchase), which was 3X Tuesday night; the other 93 take home the standard $10,000 each.

In the 30 drawings since the jackpot was last won at $810 million in Texas on September 10, there have been more than 25.7 million winning tickets across all prize tiers. These include 60 second-tier prizes of $1 million or more, won in 25 different jurisdictions from coast to coast: Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

With only two more drawings this year, Mega Millions is on track to complete a second consecutive year with a very unusual jackpot roll pattern – indicative of the truly random nature of the game. The jackpot has been won only three times so far in 2024, the fewest wins in any single year since the game began in 2002. Yet just last year, there were 10 jackpots won, the most in a single year since a major matrix change in 2013.

Before the Texas win on September 10, a $552 million jackpot was taken in Illinois on June 4; that is currently the largest lottery prize ever awarded to an online player. And on March 26, a $1.128 billion prize was won in New Jersey.

Mega Millions is the only lottery game that has now produced seven jackpots greater than $1 billion. The six won to date were all were awarded in different states – South Carolina was the first in 2018, followed by Michigan in 2021, Illinois in 2022, Maine and Florida in 2023 and New Jersey last 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.

The top Mega Millions jackpots:

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Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash