$1.1B Mega Millions Jackpot: When To Buy Tickets In NJ

NEW JERSEY — The odds of winning an estimated $1.1 billion Mega Millions jackpot are long, but New Jersey lottery players will hope for victory during Tuesday night’s drawing.

No jackpot-winning tickets were sold for Friday night’s contest. The winning numbers were 3, 20, 46, 59, 63 and the Mega Ball was 13. Drawings are held at 11 p.m. Tuesdays and Fridays.

To get included in Tuesday’s drawing, New Jersey participants must purchase their tickets before 10:45 p.m.

If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, call 1-800-GAMBLER®.

One New Jersey ticket won the $1 million, second-tier prize in Friday's drawing. The ticket — sold at In & Out Deli (1007 Route 46, Ledgewood) — matched all five white balls.

Friday's drawing also produced the following for the Garden State:

• a $30,000 ticket: matched four of the five white balls and the Mega Ball, purchased with the Megaplier option. Sold at Jackpocket (355 Warwick Tpke., Hewitt).
• two $10,000 tickets: matched four of the five white balls and the Mega Ball. Sold at Shoprite (250 River Rd., New Milford) and Quick Stop (1353 Ringwood Ave., Haskell).
• 10 tickets worth $1,500 each: matched four of the five white balls, purchased with the Megaplier option.
• 123 tickets worth $500 each: matched four of the five white balls.
• 234,150 tickets with prizes ranging from $2-600.

Although jackpot winners can choose to be paid through an annuity, with annual checks over 29 years, nearly all take the cash payout. For Tuesday’s drawing, that’s an estimated $568.7 million.

Tuesday night’s jackpot is the third-largest in the history of the game. The game’s record prize of $1.537 billion, was won in South Carolina on Oct. 23, 2018.

A player in Illinois claimed a $1.337 billion ticket in the July 29 drawing. The only other Mega Millions jackpot worth more than a billion dollars was claimed by a player in Michigan on Jan. 22, 2021.

A New Jersey ticket last fetched the Mega Millions jackpot on July 24, 2020. An anonymous player in Bayonne won a $123 million prize, with a $100.1 million cash option.

If a New Jerseyan wins the Mega Millions grand prize, they'd shatter the record for the largest lottery win in state history. That record belongs to a 2018 participant who won a $533 million jackpot through a ticket purchased in Riverdale. The winner took the $324 million cash option, which was worth $175 million after taxes, according to lotto.com.

Long streaks without a winner allow jackpots to grow larger week after week. The last time the Mega Millions jackpot was claimed was Oct. 14, when two winners in San Jose, California, and Fort Myers, Florida, shared in a $502 million jackpot.

Some of the other big Mega Millions jackpots include:

• $656 million, shared by three players in Illinois, Kansas and Maryland in March 2012.
• $648 million, shared by two players in California and Georgia in December 2013.
• $543 million, won by a California player in July 2018.
• $536 million, won an Indiana player in July 2016.
• $522 million, won by a player in California in June 2019.

Although weeks without a winner cause the jackpot to grow, Tuesday’s is still a far cry from the record $2.04 billion Powerball jackpot won in California on Nov. 8. The player has yet to come forward to claim the prize.

The Powerball game also claims the second-largest lottery jackpot in U.S. history, but barely. A $1.59 billion prize in January 2016 was shared by three winners in California, Florida and Tennessee.

The odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot — about 1 in 302.6 million — don’t increase with a flurry of ticket sales. To put that into perspective, if New Jersey held a raffle to determine its next governor and let all residents, including children, qualify, each New Jerseyan would be 32.7 times more likely to get the position than to win the current Mega Millions prize.

But the odds of winning the jackpot are better than the odds a meteor will hit your house, according to a report from Business Insider. And the odds of a perfect NCAA basketball bracket chosen by a coin flip are 9,223,372,036,854,775,808, or 1 in 9.2 quintillion.

Although no one claimed the jackpot in the Friday, Jan. 6, drawing, five players matched the five white balls to win the game’s $1 million second-tier prize. Two $1 million tickets were sold in New York, and one each was sold in Florida, Maryland and New Jersey.

Across the country, 115 tickets matched four white balls plus the Mega Ball to win the third-tier prize. Fifteen of those tickets are worth $30,000 each, because they included the optional Megaplier (available in most states with an extra $1 purchase), which was 3X on Friday night. The other 100 third-tier winning tickets are worth $10,000 each.

Mega Millions is played in 45 states as well as Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands.