(NEXSTAR) – The winning numbers are in for Saturday night’s $1.8 billion Powerball jackpot and it’s time to check your tickets.
If your ticket reads 61, 23, 62, 44, 11 and a Powerball of 17, you just got a whole lot richer.
This lottery jackpot became the second-largest in U.S. history Friday morning when the pot grew to $1.8 billion. The excitement was so high, the Powerball website crashed at the time of the drawing on Saturday. The only time the jackpot has been larger was in November 2022, when an extremely lucky person in California won the $2.04 billion prize.
The lottery prize gets bigger every time there are no exact matches, and Saturday night’s drawing came after 41 draws with no jackpot winner. It may still be a few hours until we know if someone – or several people – won big this time.
How much a winner takes home depends on a few key factors. First off, if there are multiple people who match the winning numbers, the grand prize will be split among them. That actually happened in 2016 when a $1.586 billion Powerball jackpot had to be split among three winning tickets: one in California, one in Tennessee and one in Florida.
The next big factor is whether you choose to receive the winnings in one lump-sum payout or over 30 installments. If you choose the former, the cash payout is an estimated $826.4 million this time around.
Finally, you’ll have to fork over at least some of your prize in taxes. Everyone has to pay a big chunk to Uncle Sam in federal taxes, and most people also have to pay state taxes on their winnings. Only residents of California, Delaware, Florida, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming are lucky – they don’t have to pay state taxes on lottery prizes.
It probably goes without saying that you have to be very, very lucky to win the Powerball jackpot. Just how lucky? The odds are 1 in 292.2 million.
Even when there are no jackpot winners, there can be a winner of a prize as small as $4 and as big as $2 million. The odds of winning any prize at all are about 1 in 25.
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