The price of a Mega Millions lottery ticket is set to more than double at the end of next week. The hike is part of an overhaul of the national game that is expected to improve players’ odds and give away bigger jackpots more often.
Starting after the drawing on April 4, Mega Millions ticket prices will rise from $2 to $5 per play. It’s the first price hike since 2017, when the game was last revamped. The game’s administrators hope there will be a big enough payoff to keep players interested.
“Beyond big jackpots, players told us they want bigger non-jackpot prizes and that’s exactly what this new game delivers,” Joshua Johnston, lead director of the Mega Millions Consortium, said in a March 25 news release.
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Instead of paying an extra $1 for a multiplier that increases the prize for matching up to five white balls (but not the mega ball), it’ll be applied automatically. It also will be randomized — every non-jackpot win would be worth 2, 3, 4, 5 or 10 times the base prize.
The overhaul also promises:
Better odds. The odds of winning any prize improve from 1 in 24 to 1 in 23 and the odds of winning the jackpot improve from roughly 1 in 303 million to roughly 1 in 290 million.
This would be a reversal of the major changes in 2017, when Mega Millions altered the lottery formula and made it harder to win the jackpot. In part, that’s how big lottery jackpots became more common. Mega Millions awarded its first billion-dollar jackpot in 2018, and five more have followed since then.
Larger starting jackpots. Right now, when someone wins the jackpot, the game resets with a $20 million grand prize. After the overhaul, that starting jackpot will be $50 million.
Faster-growing jackpots. The game’s administrators estimate the average jackpot win will rise from roughly $450 million to $800 million after the overhaul.
Higher minimum prizes. Under the old rules, the minimum prize for a lottery win was $2, meaning a player who matched at least one white ball would win back the cost of their ticket. After the overhaul, higher base prizes and a built-in random multiplier mean players could get higher minimum payouts for all lottery wins.
For example, the player who matches just one of the white balls would win a $5 base prize (up from $2), which is then multiplied by 2, 3, 4, 5 or 10. So, the lowest multiplier would yield a $10 prize — twice the cost of the initial ticket.
In recent years, there’s been a surge in public interest in playing the lottery. U.S. lottery players spent more than $113.3 billion on tickets in 2023, according to the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries. That’s up from $73.8 billion in 2015.
Mega Millions can be played in 45 U.S. states, as well as Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Drawings take place twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays. To win the jackpot, players pick five numbers between 1 and 70, and a sixth number between 1 and 25.
