$785M Mega Millions Jackpot: When To Buy Tickets In NJ

NEW JERSEY — The odds of winning an estimated $785 million Mega Millions jackpot are long. But lottery participants in New Jersey have high hopes for Tuesday night’s drawing.

No jackpot-winning tickets were sold for Friday night’s drawing. The winning numbers were : 1, 3, 6, 44, 51 and the Mega Ball of 7. Drawings are held at 11 p.m. Tuesdays and Fridays.

For inclusion in Tuesday's contest, New Jersey lottery players must buy their tickets before 10:45 p.m.

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

The odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot — about 1 in 302.6 million — don’t increase with a flurry of ticket sales. But they 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.

Tuesday's prize exceeds the state record for the largest lottery jackpot won — a $533 million Mega Millions jackpot for a ticket sold in 2018, according to lotto.com.

New Jersey last generated a Mega Millions jackpot winner in 2020. One ticket sold that February in Edison netted a $202 million jackpot ($142.6 million in cash), while a ticket sold the following July in Bayonne won a $123 million jackpot ($100.1 million in cash).

Long streaks without a winner allow lottery prizes to grow larger. Oct. 14 marked the last time someone claimed a Mega Millions jackpot, when two winners in San Jose, California, and Fort Myers, Florida, shared in a $502 million prize.

The huge Mega Millions jackpot comes less than two months after a record $2.04 billion Powerball jackpot was won in California on Nov. 8. The player has yet to come forward to claim the prize.

More than 2.775 million winning tickets were sold in Friday’s Mega Millions drawing, with prizes ranging from $2 to $1 million. One ticket sold in Ohio matched the five white balls to win the game’s second-tier prize of $1 million, and 82 tickets matched four white balls plus the Mega Ball to win third-tier prizes of $10,000. And 16 of those tickets are worth $30,000 each because players put out another $1 to buy the Megaplier option. That number was 3X Friday.

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 $395 million.

Mega Millions said its jackpot has gone over $700 million only three other times, “and all three times those rolls continued on past $1 billion.”

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