Has the Powerball Jackpot Ever Been Shared?

By Ryan · Published 7 November 2026

When the Powerball Jackpot climbs past a billion dollars, there's one thought every ticket holder has: what if someone else picks the same numbers? With hundreds of millions of tickets sold for the biggest draws, it's not as far-fetched as it sounds.

So has it ever happened? It has, and to some of the biggest Jackpots of all. We went through every Powerball Jackpot won since 11 February 2012 to find out how often it's shared, and whether the winners of the biggest Jackpots got lucky. Let's find out!

1. The biggest shared Jackpots
2. How often is the Jackpot shared?
3. What the odds say
4. The billion-dollar winners got lucky
5. Can you avoid sharing?
6. Every shared Jackpot

The biggest shared Jackpots

The biggest Jackpot ever shared is the $1.79B draw of 6 September 2025, at the time the second-largest Powerball Jackpot ever. Two tickets matched all six numbers, sold in Missouri and Texas. Half a Jackpot that size is still about $895M each, before choosing between the annuity and the cash option!

Before that, the record was the famous $1.59B draw of 13 January 2016, the first lottery Jackpot to pass $1.5 billion. It was split three ways, by tickets sold in California, Florida and Tennessee: about $529M each.

To put that in perspective, the record $2.04B Jackpot of November 2022 was won by a single ticket. So the biggest Jackpot isn't always the biggest prize: each 2016 winner got a lot less than the 2022 winner, and even less than some single winners of smaller Jackpots.

How often is the Jackpot shared?

Not often. Out of the 128 Powerball Jackpots won since 2012, 11 were shared, about 1 in 12. And never by more than 3 tickets.

That makes sense: most Jackpots are won long before they get big, when far fewer tickets are sold. The chance of a second winner only becomes real when the Jackpot, and ticket sales, take off.

What the odds say

Every ticket has the same 1 in 292,201,338 chance of winning the Jackpot. So if you win, the chance that someone else won too depends only on how many other tickets were sold. We estimate the tickets sold in every draw from the winners of the smallest prize, see how many Powerball tickets are sold.

Since 2019, when the results count the winners of every ticket, 54 Jackpots were won. Given the tickets sold for each of them, we'd expect about 6 of them to be shared. 4 were, a few fewer than the odds say.

The billion-dollar winners got lucky

The billion-dollar Jackpots are another story. That's when ticket sales explode, and so does the chance of sharing.

Going by the odds, about 3 of these 7 Jackpots should have been shared. Only 1 was. The luckiest of all was the winner of the record $2.04B Jackpot on 7 November 2022: with around 280 million tickets sold, there was a 62% chance that another ticket matched the same numbers. Nobody did, and the whole Jackpot went to a single ticket.

Of course, a handful of draws is a small sample, and luck evens out. Over the next few billion-dollar Jackpots, expect more of them to be shared.

Can you avoid sharing?

You can't change your odds of winning, every combination is as likely as any other. But you can make it less likely that someone else has the same numbers. Lots of players pick birthdays, so numbers above 31 are less popular, and patterns like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 are picked by thousands of people every draw. We looked at how much that matters in should you pick birthday numbers?

The easiest way is a Quick Pick: random numbers aren't any more likely to win, but they're far less likely to be shared. And if you do share a Jackpot, our Powerball payout calculator shows what's left after the cash option and tax, before you split it.

Every shared Jackpot

Want to see how long it would take you to win, let alone share? Try our free Powerball simulator, or check your own numbers against every draw with the Powerball number checker.

Jackpots are the advertised annuity amounts. Tickets sold are estimates: the winners of the smallest prize, times its odds. It's the prize won most often, by hundreds of thousands of players every draw, so luck barely moves the count.