Tools · Probability

Lottery Odds & ROI

Draw your own Powerball and Mega Millions numbers, then look at exactly how long the odds actually are, and what buying more tickets does (and mostly doesn't do) to them. The short version: the lottery is a bad investment, and it isn't close.

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Powerball

Five white balls from 1 to 69, one red Powerball from 1 to 26.

Press draw to pick your numbers

How long odds, exactly

69! 64! · 5! × 26

↓

1 in 292,201,338

Does buying more tickets help?

tickets, at $2 each

New odds 1 in 292,201,338

You'd spend $2

Guessing correctly on your first try is about as likely as calling the right number, once a second, non-stop, for

9.26 years straight

292,201,338 seconds ÷ 31,557,600 seconds/year ≈ 9.26 years

Or being dealt a royal flush in five-card poker (odds 1 in 649,740), on

450 hands in a row

649,740 × 450 = 292,383,000

Mega Millions

Five white balls from 1 to 70, one gold Mega Ball from 1 to 24. The pool dropped from 25 to 24 in an April 2025 rule change.

Press draw to pick your numbers

How long odds, exactly

70! 65! · 5! × 24

↓

1 in 290,472,336

Does buying more tickets help?

tickets, at $5 each

New odds 1 in 290,472,336

You'd spend $5

That's close enough to the entire population of the United States that winning on one ticket is a lot like being handed

one random American, and naming them correctly

U.S. population (2026 est.): ≈ 341,000,000, same order of magnitude as 290,472,336

Or stack a standard sheet of paper for every combination. The pile would reach

18 miles high, into the stratosphere

290,472,336 × 0.1mm ≈ 29.05 km (18.05 mi), over 3× the height of Mount Everest, above where commercial jets fly

Mega Millions cut its Mega Ball pool from 25 to 24 numbers in April 2025, shortening the jackpot odds slightly from the old 1 in 302,575,350.

Same $20 a week, thirty years

What the same weekly habit looks like as Powerball tickets versus a plain index-fund contribution.

Playing Powerball

Weekly spend$20

Over 30 years$31,200 spent

Tickets played~15,600

Odds of ever hitting the jackpot~1 in 18,700

Most likely outcomeno jackpot, ever

Even after 30 years of continuous play, your cumulative shot at the jackpot is still slightly worse than your lifetime odds of being struck by lightning (1 in 15,300, per the National Weather Service), and that's before accounting for the fact that most tickets win nothing at all.

Investing it instead

Weekly contribution$20

Over 30 years$31,200 contributed

Assumed return~10%/yr avg

Estimated balance~$171,000

Odds requirednone

Based on the S&P 500's long-run historical average nominal return (~10%/yr), applied to the same $20/week over 30 years. Past performance doesn't guarantee future returns, and real markets don't move in a straight line, but no jackpot is required to end up ahead.

Same habit, same 30 years, same $31,200 out of pocket. One path is a bet against a 292-million-to-one wall. The other just needs the market to do roughly what it's done, on average, for the last century.

The Mechanism

Why Buying More Tickets Doesn't Really Change Anything

Odds scale linearly with tickets, but the starting number is so large that linear scaling barely registers. Buying 100 Powerball tickets instead of 1 takes your odds from 1 in 292,201,338 to 1 in about 2,922,013. That looks like a big jump until you notice it's still worse than a lot of things people casually consider "basically impossible."

Try it above. Punch 10,000 into the ticket calculator on either game. That's $20,000 to $50,000 spent, and the odds still land somewhere around 1 in 29,000, worse than the lifetime odds of being struck by lightning. The jackpot doesn't get within reach by spending more. It gets within reach by the math simply not scaling the way intuition expects.

Contrarian View

The Unpopular Read

The standard financial-advice take is that buying a lottery ticket is simply irrational, full stop. The contrarian read: a couple of dollars spent rarely, for the few minutes of entertainment value in imagining what you'd do with the jackpot, isn't a financial mistake. It's priced the same as a lot of other small discretionary spending nobody scrutinizes with a spreadsheet.

The actual mistake is upstream of the ticket: treating it as a plan. Playing regularly in the hope it substitutes for saving, or sizing purchases to a jackpot you're not going to hit, is where "harmless fun" turns into a bad investment. The math above doesn't change based on intent, but the consequences of ignoring it do.

This is a case against the lottery as a financial strategy, not a case against ever buying a ticket.

📌 This is a fair random-number picker for fun. It doesn't connect to an official drawing and carries no odds of an actual prize. Numbers reset when you close the tab. Odds and rules reflect each game's published matrix as of 2026; jackpot odds shown are for the top prize tier only and don't include lower-tier prizes.

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