Biggest Lottery Jackpots in History: US & World Records (2026)

The biggest lottery jackpot in history is Powerball's $2.04 billion prize, won on a single ticket in California on 7 November 2022. Nine of the ten largest jackpots ever paid are American — Powerball or Mega Millions — because the US games advertise uncapped, annuity-based prizes that can snowball through months of rollovers. Europe's records are smaller headline numbers but paid as lump sums, often tax-free, which narrows the real-money gap more than the billboards suggest.

The 10 biggest US lottery jackpots

#	Advertised jackpot	Game	Draw date	Winning ticket(s)
1	$2.04 billion	Powerball	Nov 2022	California — single ticket
2	$1.787 billion	Powerball	Sep 2025	Missouri & Texas — split two ways
3	$1.765 billion	Powerball	Oct 2023	California — single ticket
4	$1.602 billion	Mega Millions	Aug 2023	Florida — single ticket
5	$1.586 billion	Powerball	Jan 2016	California, Florida & Tennessee — three tickets
6	$1.537 billion	Mega Millions	Oct 2018	South Carolina — single ticket
7	$1.348 billion	Mega Millions	Jan 2023	Maine — single ticket
8	$1.337 billion	Mega Millions	Jul 2022	Illinois — single ticket
9	$1.326 billion	Powerball	Apr 2024	Oregon — single ticket
10	$1.269 billion	Mega Millions	Dec 2024	California — single ticket

Figures are the advertised annuity values from the official game archives, current to this page's last update; a fresh mega-rollover can always add a new entry, and the live leaderboard is on our current lottery jackpots page.

World record jackpots by game

Game	Record jackpot	When	Note
US Powerball	$2.04 billion	2022	World record, single ticket
Mega Millions	$1.602 billion	2023	Biggest single-ticket Mega Millions win
SuperEnalotto	€371.1 million	2023	Europe's biggest — shared by 90 ticket shares in a syndicate play
EuroMillions	€250 million	2025	Equals the game's jackpot cap; cannot be beaten unless the cap rises
La Primitiva	€101.7 million	2015	Spain's biggest draw-game jackpot
Oz Lotto	AU$111.9 million	2012	Australia's record for the game
El Gordo de la Primitiva	€33 million	2011	The weekly Sunday game — not the Christmas raffle
France Loto	€30 million	2021	National record for the flagship game
BonoLoto	€10.6 million	2024	Record single-winner pot for Spain's daily game

Why US jackpots dwarf everyone else's

Three structural reasons. First, no cap: Powerball and Mega Millions roll over indefinitely, while EuroMillions stops at €250 million. Second, annuity advertising: the US headline is the value of 30 yearly payments; the lump sum most winners take is a bit under half of it, whereas a European record is cash. Third, scale: two games sell across a third of a billion people, and long rollover runs turn ticket sales into a snowball. Adjust for the cash option and US taxes and the gap shrinks — a $2.04 billion headline resolved to roughly $998 million cash before tax — but even so, no other lottery on Earth has paid anything close.

El Gordo: the biggest total prize pool in the world

One Spanish institution belongs in this story with an asterisk. The Christmas Sorteo Extraordinario de Navidad — “El Gordo” — distributes a total prize pool in the billions of euros every December, the largest of any lottery event anywhere. But it's a raffle with thousands of winning ticket numbers, and its famous top prize pays a fixed amount per ticket share rather than one rolling jackpot, so it doesn't compete in this table. (The El Gordo de la Primitiva in the table above is SELAE's separate weekly Sunday draw game.) Both are covered in our El Gordo guide.

The billion-dollar era in numbers

The first ten-figure jackpot arrived in January 2016; a decade later, more than a dozen US jackpots have crossed $1 billion, and every entry in the top-ten table above clears $1.25 billion. The cash behind the headlines is smaller but still historic — the record $2.04 billion prize carried a $997.6 million cash value, which its winner took. Rollover runs long enough to build these prizes used to be once-a-decade events; the three-draws-a-week Powerball calendar and Mega Millions' faster-growing post-2025 format have made them roughly annual instead.

Will we see a $3 billion jackpot?

Probably — it's arithmetic, not prophecy. Powerball crossed $1 billion for the first time in 2016 and $2 billion six years later; Mega Millions' 2025 relaunch was explicitly engineered for faster-growing jackpots off a $50 million floor and a $5 ticket. Higher interest rates also inflate annuity headlines relative to the same cash pool. All it takes is one rollover run a few draws longer than 2022's, and the record — and every table on this page — moves again. The winners behind these numbers, and what happened to them next, are profiled in our companion piece on the biggest lottery winners ever.

Worth noting for perspective: a jackpot doesn't need the top-ten table to be historic locally. France celebrated its €30 million Loto record, and Spain's €101.7 million La Primitiva pot stood as national front-page news — scale is relative to ticket price, odds and what a lump sum buys in each country.