How Many Powerball Tickets Are Sold, and Is a Ticket Ever Worth It?
When the Powerball Jackpot climbs past a billion dollars, it's hard to miss. It's all over the news, there are queues out the door of convenience stores, and people who never play suddenly buy a ticket. Just how many tickets are sold? And with a Jackpot that big, does a $2 ticket finally become a good deal?
We crunched the numbers of all 1,816 Powerball draws since 2012, using the same method as when we estimated how many Australian Powerball entries are sold. Let's find out!
- How do we know how many tickets are sold?
- How the Jackpot drives ticket sales
- When is a Powerball ticket worth $2?
- The catch: cash, tax and sharing
- So, is a ticket ever worth it?
How do we know how many tickets are sold?
Let's preface by stating that the number of tickets sold isn't published with the results. We do know the odds of each prize and how many tickets won it however, and that's enough to get a pretty accurate idea.
For example, let's look at the draw of 31 October 2026, which you can also find in our Powerball results.
| Match | Odds | Winners |
|---|---|---|
| 5 Numbers + Powerball | 1 in 292,201,338.00 | 0 |
| 5 Numbers | 1 in 11,688,053.52 | 3 |
| 4 Numbers + Powerball | 1 in 913,129.18 | 36 |
| 4 Numbers | 1 in 36,525.17 | 761 |
| 3 Numbers + Powerball | 1 in 14,494.11 | 2,074 |
| 3 Numbers | 1 in 579.76 | 52,576 |
| 2 Numbers + Powerball | 1 in 701.33 | 41,874 |
| 1 Number + Powerball | 1 in 91.98 | 309,327 |
| Powerball | 1 in 38.32 | 728,224 |
The most common prize is for matching just the Powerball, which happens on 1 in 38.32 tickets. To estimate the number of tickets sold, we multiply those odds by the winners of that prize (38.32 × 728,224), which gives us around 27.9 million tickets sold!
It's an estimate, but a good one: with hundreds of thousands of winners in every draw, chance evens out, and most tickets are Quick Picks with randomly chosen numbers.
How the Jackpot drives ticket sales
Unsurprisingly, the bigger the Jackpot, the more tickets are sold. But by how much? Each dot below is one draw: the further right, the bigger the Jackpot, and the higher up, the more tickets were sold.
| Jackpot | Draws | Tickets sold per draw, on average | Spent per draw, on average |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under $100M | 1,020 | 11.4 million | $23M |
| $100M to $200M | 315 | 9.3 million | $19M |
| $200M to $500M | 344 | 14.3 million | $29M |
| $500M to $1B | 113 | 35.7 million | $71M |
| $1B and over | 24 | 133.3 million | $267M |
Sales stay fairly modest while the Jackpot is "only" in the hundreds of millions, then really take off. At $1B and over, a draw sells 12 times as many tickets as a draw with a Jackpot under $100m!
The busiest draw in our data was on 13 January 2016, with a $1.59B Jackpot: an estimated 559.4 million tickets, or about $1.12B spent on a single draw!
When is a Powerball ticket worth $2?
Here's where things get interesting. To work out what a ticket is really worth, we add up every prize divided by its odds. This is called the expected value: what a ticket would pay back on average, if you could play the same draw millions of times.
The smaller prizes, from $4 for the Powerball alone to $1 million for 5 numbers, are worth 32c per ticket, or 16c for every dollar spent. The Jackpot then adds 1 cent per ticket for every $3M of Jackpot.
So for a $2 ticket to pay back $2 on average, the Jackpot needs to be at least $491M. That has happened in 141 of the 1,816 draws since 2012. Great news, right? Not quite.
The catch: cash, tax and sharing
Unfortunately, the advertised Jackpot isn't what lands in the winner's bank account. Three things take a big bite out of it:
- The cash option. The advertised Jackpot is paid as an annuity, in 30 payments over 29 years. Almost every winner takes the cash instead, which is roughly half, depending on interest rates.
- Tax. A big Jackpot is taxed at the top federal rate of 37%, before any state tax.
- Sharing. The bigger the Jackpot, the more tickets are sold, and the more likely it is that someone else picked the same numbers. If they did, the Jackpot is split.
Let's see what that does to the biggest Jackpot in our data: the $2.04B draw of 7 November 2022. With an estimated 229.9 million tickets sold, the chance of at least one other ticket also winning was 54%.
| Jackpot | A ticket pays back, per $1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Advertised Jackpot | $2.04B | 365c |
| Taking the cash option (about 50%) | $1.02B | 191c |
| After 37% federal tax | $643M | 126c |
| Allowing for sharing it, on average | $445M | 92c |
Even the biggest Jackpot in our data pays back well under a dollar once it's actually in a winner's bank account.
Each draw appears twice: once at the advertised Jackpot, and once after the cash option, tax and the chance of sharing. The advertised value crosses the $1 line once the Jackpot is big enough, but the real value never comes close. That's because the Jackpots that look like a good deal are exactly the ones that sell so many tickets that they're likely to be shared.
So, is a ticket ever worth it?
Financially, no. The best real value a ticket had in our data was 96c per dollar, in the draw of 11 October 2023 with a $1.76B Jackpot. Every other draw was worse.
But nobody buys a lottery ticket as an investment! For a couple of dollars, you get a few days of dreaming about what you'd do with the money, and that's a big part of the fun. Just keep it to what you're happy to spend.
Want to see how a Powerball habit would really play out? Our Powerball simulator lets you play thousands of draws with virtual money. And if you're still deciding which lottery to play, we compared the two big ones in Powerball vs Mega Millions.
Our figures are estimates. They leave out the optional Power Play and state taxes, and assume a cash option of about half the advertised Jackpot and numbers picked at random.
Gambling should be fun. If it isn't anymore, free and confidential help is available. In the US, call 1-800-GAMBLER. In Australia, contact Gambling Help Online on 1800 858 858.