March 12 (UPI) — American lottery games Mega Millions and Powerball will be offering jackpots totaling a combined $1.294 billion in their next two drawings.
Mega Millions’ $735 million drawing on Tuesday night is its sixth-largest jackpot ever. The grand jackpot’s cash payout is $356.7 million. No one has won the Mega Millions jackpot since Dec. 8.
In Mega Millions’ drawing Friday, no tickets matched the white ball numbers 19, 20, 22, 47 and 58 and the Mega Ball 1.
The new Powerball jackpot rose to $559, with a cash payout of $273.3 million, after no ticket matched its winning numbers during Monday’s drawing of 1,3, 7, 16, 66 with the Powerball 5.
Powerball has not seen a jackpot winner since Jan. 1, when a single ticket in Michigan won the grand prize, worth $842.4 million, which had a cash value of $425.2 million. That was the fifth-largest total in Powerball history and the 10th-largest U.S. lottery jackpot ever.
U.S. lotteries, while making the contests tougher to win, have built some enormous jackpots. In 2023, Mega Millions and Powerball saw two grand prize-winning jackpots of more than $1 billion each, the first time ever for the lotteries.
