Mega Millions Jackpot Jumps Again, Now at $740 Million

9-4-2024 – The Mega Millions® jackpot is still turning up the heat as September begins with style. After no ticket matched all six numbers drawn Tuesday night – the white balls 12, 41, 43, 52 and 55, plus the gold Mega Ball 9 – the estimated jackpot for Friday, September 6, is an estimated $740 million ($366.3 million cash). If won at that level, it would be the seventh largest jackpot in the history of the game.

Strangely enough, there has never been a Mega Millions jackpot won between $656 million (a past world record prize for any jackpot game, won in March 2012) and $1 billion. In all six previous jackpot runs that reached this lofty level, the top prize continued rolling past the magic $1 billion mark. Will that trend continue this time around?

With increasing enthusiasm for the largest Mega Millions jackpot since March, there is a growing number of winning tickets at all other prize levels. In the September 3 drawing alone, there were a total of 1,522,011 winning tickets. Two of them, sold in Kansas and Michigan, matched the five white balls to win the game’s $1 million second-tier prize.

Across the country, 32 tickets matched four white balls plus the Mega Ball to win the third-tier prize. Eleven of those are worth $40,000 each because they included the optional Megaplier (available in most states with an extra $1 purchase), which was 4X Tuesday night; the other 21 take home the standard $10,000 each.

The jackpot has been rolling since it was last won at $552 million in Illinois on June 4. In the 26 drawings in this jackpot run to date, there have been more than 19 million winning tickets across all non-jackpot prize tiers. These include 51 second-tier prizes of $1 million or more, won in 24 different jurisdictions from coast to coast: Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.

Only two Mega Millions jackpots have been won so far this year. Before the Illinois win on June 4, a whopping $1.128 billion was won in New Jersey. That prize is still unclaimed (winners in New Jersey have one year from the drawing date to claim).

Mega Millions is the only lottery game that has produced six jackpots exceeding $1 billion. All were won in different states – South Carolina was the first in 2018, followed by Michigan in 2021, Illinois in 2022, Maine in early 2023, Florida last August and New Jersey in March. The Florida prize on August 8, 2023, is the game’s current record jackpot at $1.602 billion.

Tickets are sold in 45 states, Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Tickets are $2 each; in most jurisdictions, players can add the Megaplier for an additional $1 to multiply their non-jackpot prizes. Half of the proceeds from the sale of each Mega Millions ticket remains in the state where the ticket was sold, where the money supports designated good causes and retailer commissions.

Drawings are conducted at 11 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesdays and Fridays in Atlanta, Georgia. The overall odds of winning any Mega Millions prize are 1 in 24; the odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 302,575,350.

The top Mega Millions jackpots:

Source: Mega Millions

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