How Many Mega Millions Tickets Are Sold Since the $5 Price Rise?
In April 2025, Mega Millions had its biggest shake-up in years. The price jumped from $2 to $5 a ticket, every ticket got a random 2x to 10x multiplier on the smaller prizes, and one Mega Ball was taken out of the barrel to make the Jackpot a little easier to win.
More than double the price is a big ask. So did players keep buying? We estimated the tickets sold in all 818 draws since 1 January 2019, 164 of them since the change. Let's find out!
- How do we know how many tickets are sold?
- Before and after the price rise
- What it means for the Jackpot
- Is a $5 ticket ever worth it?
- So, did the price rise work?
How do we know how many tickets are sold?
Mega Millions doesn't publish its ticket sales with the results, but the winners give it away. The most common prize is for matching just the Mega Ball, which happens on 1 in 35.17 tickets. Multiply its winners by those odds, and you get a pretty accurate estimate of the tickets sold. It's the same method we used to estimate how many Powerball tickets are sold.
Before and after the price rise
The bigger the Jackpot, the more tickets are sold, so we compared draws with similar Jackpots. Each dot below is a draw: blue before the price rise, orange since.
| Jackpot | Tickets per draw, at $2 | Tickets per draw, at $5 | Spent per draw, before | Spent per draw, since |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under $100M | 10 million | 4.7 million | $21M | $23M |
| $100M to $200M | 12 million | 5.2 million | $25M | $26M |
| $200M to $500M | 18 million | 6.5 million | $37M | $32M |
| $500M to $1B | 50 million | 11 million | $100M | $57M |
| $1B and over | 158 million | – | $316M | – |
Players are buying far fewer tickets. At the smallest Jackpots, sales fell by 55%, but each ticket costs 2.5 times as much, so the money spent per draw hardly changed: $21M before, $23M since.
The big Jackpots are a different story. With a Jackpot of $500M to $1B, sales fell by 77%, and the money spent per draw by 43%. The buying frenzy that came with a big Jackpot has cooled right down.
Since the change, the biggest Jackpot has been $980M, on 14 November 2025, when we estimate 24 million tickets were sold.
What it means for the Jackpot
Fewer tickets means fewer chances for someone to hit the Jackpot, even with the slightly better odds. Before the price rise, the Jackpot was won every 16.7 draws on average. Since, it's every 22.2 draws.
There's an upside for whoever does win though: with fewer tickets out there, they're less likely to have to share it.
Is a $5 ticket ever worth it?
To work out what a ticket is worth, we add up every prize divided by its odds: the expected value. Thanks to the built-in multiplier, the smaller prizes pay back around 112c per $5 ticket, or 22c for every dollar spent. That's more than the Powerball's 16c.
The Jackpot then adds 1 cent per ticket for every $2,904,723 of Jackpot. For a $5 ticket to pay back $5, the advertised Jackpot would need to reach $1.13B, which hasn't happened since the price rise.
And that's before the catch. Almost every winner takes the cash, about half the advertised Jackpot, then pays 37% federal tax on top of state tax, and might have to share. Allowing for all that, the best value a ticket had since the change was 43c per dollar, with the $980M Jackpot of 14 November 2025.
See what's left of a Jackpot in your state with our Mega Millions payout calculator.
So, did the price rise work?
For the smaller Jackpots, Mega Millions takes about the same money with far fewer tickets. But the giant Jackpots don't pull in the crowds like they used to, and a $5 ticket is still never worth its price.
Thinking of switching? We compared both games in Powerball vs Mega Millions. Or try a few thousand draws for free in our Mega Millions simulator.
Our figures are estimates. Tickets sold are estimated from the winners of the Mega Ball prize, and the value of a ticket assumes a cash option of about half the advertised Jackpot and numbers picked at random.