How many Powerball entries are sold
Each Thursday at 8:30pm AEST (9:30pm AEDT), many Australians excitedly watch the Powerball draw. With Jackpots in the millions, guessing the right combination could be truely life changing.
Not all draws are made equal however. The Jackpot kicks off at $5M ($3M until November 2025) and rolls over if not claimed. The more this happens, the bigger the Jackpot gets and the more tickets are sold. Just how many you ask? Let's find out!
Let's preface by stating that the amount of tickets or entries sold is not published. We know the odds and how many winners each division has however, and can use this to get a pretty accurate idea. For example, let's look at the result for draw 1341 from Thursday, 27 January 2022.
| Match | Prize | Odds | Winners |
|---|---|---|---|
| 7 Numbers + Powerball | $20,000,000 | 1 in 134,490,400 | 0 |
| 7 Numbers | $392,680.55 | 1 in 7,078,443 | 1 |
| 6 Numbers + Powerball | $5,453.90 | 1 in 686,176 | 44 |
| 6 Numbers | $559.35 | 1 in 36,115 | 780 |
| 5 Numbers + Powerball | $169.20 | 1 in 16,943 | 1,934 |
| 4 Numbers + Powerball | $74.70 | 1 in 1,173 | 28,326 |
| 5 Numbers | $43.40 | 1 in 892 | 38,214 |
| 3 Numbers + Powerball | $18.40 | 1 in 188 | 177,708 |
| 2 Numbers + Powerball | $11.10 | 1 in 66 | 516,309 |
To estimate the amount of entries sold, we multiply the odds of the lowest division with the winners (66 and 516,309), which gives us 34,076,394 estimated tickets sold!
Why the lowest division? It's the prize won most often, by hundreds of thousands of players every draw. With that many winners, luck evens out: a few more or fewer winners barely moves the count, while the rarer prizes, won by a handful of players, would be all over the place.
How much the Powerball Jackpot size affects tickets sold
To keep things relevant, we'll only use Powerball draws from 2018 and onwards. We get the following table by running the calculation explained above over all these draws and averaging them by Jackpot size.
| Jackpot | Average entries sold | Spent at today's price | Sample size |
|---|---|---|---|
| $3M | 16.82M | $26.5M | 43 |
| $4M | 20.85M | $32.8M | 30 |
| $5M | 20.54M | $32.4M | 17 |
| $8M | 23.2M | $36.5M | 55 |
| $10M | 27.59M | $43.5M | 24 |
| $12M | 27.69M | $43.6M | 43 |
| $20M | 37.69M | $59.4M | 79 |
| $21M | 39.62M | $62.4M | 3 |
| $30M | 43.21M | $68.1M | 35 |
| $40M | 53.23M | $83.8M | 35 |
| $50M | 66.61M | $104.9M | 19 |
| $60M | 76.0M | $119.7M | 21 |
| $80M | 103.91M | $163.7M | 13 |
| $100M | 150.73M | $237.4M | 12 |
| $108M | 171.75M | $270.5M | 1 |
| $110M | 155.74M | $245.3M | 1 |
| $127M | 248.54M | $391.5M | 1 |
| $150M | 210.76M | $332.0M | 3 |
| $160M | 296.21M | $466.5M | 1 |
| $200M | 303.88M | $478.6M | 1 |
The sample size simply means how often there was a given Jackpot size. The price of a game went up a few times since 2018, so the money spent is what those entries would cost today, at $1.58 a game ($6.30 for 4 games).
We can see that the amount of tickets sold pretty consistently increases with the Jackpot size. The $3M starting Jackpots of the draws before November 2025 average 16.82M entries sold. By the time the jackpot reaches $20M, over twice as many tickets are purchased with an average of 37.69M tickets sold. Once the Jackpot reaches $80M, more than 100M entries are purchased.
One interesting thing to note is that once the Jackpot crosses $100M, the odds of winning the first division (1 in 134,490,400) are lower than the amount of entries purchased. We can conclude that it is somewhat unlikely for the Jackpot to keep growing after hitting that threshold, and explains why it happens so rarely.
The largest Jackpot in the history of the Australian Powerball also holds the record for the most entries sold. Draw 1446 on Thursday, 1 February 2024 had a $200M Jackpot, and sold an estimated 303.88M entries. That's $479M worth of games at today's price!
Wondering how big the next draw will be? Check the current Powerball Jackpot, or find out how the Powerball compares with Oz Lotto, Saturday Lotto and Weekday Windfall in which Australian lottery has the best odds. And with all those entries, is a game ever worth its price? We found out in is an Australian Powerball ticket ever worth it?