Single Ticket in Florida Wins $1.58 Billion Mega Millions Jackpot
A single winning ticket was sold in Florida for one of the largest lottery prizes in U.S. history, a Mega Millions jackpot of $1.58 billion, the company said early Wednesday.
The winning numbers in Tuesday’s drawing were 13, 19, 20, 32, 33, and the gold Mega Ball of 14. The company did not identify the owner of the winning ticket.
It is the second time in less than a month that a ticket has won a lottery jackpot of more than $1 billion. On July 19, a single winning ticket sold in California won a $1.08 billion jackpot in the competing Powerball lottery.
Huge jackpots have become more common in the multistate Mega Millions and Powerball lotteries in recent years because of changes to the games and higher ticket prices. Between the two lotteries, eight jackpots in the United States have reached $1 billion or more since 2016, including five in the past two years.
The Mega Millions jackpot of $1.58 billion is now the third-largest in U.S. history. The largest lottery jackpot to date, a Powerball drawing, was won on Nov. 7, 2022, with a prize of $2.04 billion. The second-largest jackpot, also a Powerball, was split three ways and amounted to $1.586 billion.
The winning ticket for the Mega Millions jackpot was one of more than seven million winning tickets sold across all prize levels. Two tickets worth $2 million each were also sold in Florida and North Carolina.
The winner of the $1.58 billion jackpot has the option to take the prize as a single, after-tax cash payout of $783.3 million.
Lottery jackpots continue to captivate the nation, with millions of people participating in the hopes of striking it rich. The allure of these massive prizes has led to an increase in ticket sales and larger jackpots. As the trend continues, it is likely that we will see more record-breaking jackpots in the future.
Eduardo Medina, April Rubin, and Mike Ives contributed reporting.
A correction was made on Jan. 12, 2023: Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the rank of the Jan. 10 Mega Millions jackpot. At that time, it would have been the fifth largest in U.S. history, not the sixth.
