This Mega Millions and Powerball odds calculator shows what the jackpot odds mean in your own terms. Buy two Powerball tickets for each of the three weekly draws for 20 years. That’s 6,240 tickets and $12,480 spent, and it gives you about a 0.002% chance of the jackpot: roughly 1 in 47,000. The odds per ticket are 1 in 292,201,338. Mega Millions is almost identical at 1 in 290,472,336, on a $5 ticket. The free calculator shows every prize tier for both games.
Mega Millions and Powerball odds: how they’re worked out
Both games draw five white balls and one coloured ball. Powerball picks whites from 69 and the Powerball from 26. Mega Millions picks whites from 70 and the Mega Ball from 24. For each tier:
White matches: C(5, x) × C(n − 5, 5 − x) ÷ C(n, 5) × 1 ÷ b with the bonus ball, or (b − 1) ÷ b without it
Any prize comes up about once every 25 Powerball tickets and once every 23 Mega Millions tickets, and the most common win in both is matching only the coloured ball.
Where the money goes
Powerball’s fixed prizes, from $4 for the Powerball alone up to $1 million for five whites, return an average of about 32 cents per $2 ticket. Everything else has to come from the jackpot, which you might share. That’s a useful number to keep in mind when a billion-dollar jackpot is on the news: the odds haven’t changed at all.
Mega Millions moved to a $5 ticket with a built-in multiplier in April 2025, and the 5/70 + 1/24 format above is the current one.
See every outcome play out over decades in the Powerball simulator. To pick numbers, use the Powerball number generator or the Mega Millions number generator.
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