The incredible Mega Millions® jackpot run is over! A lucky ticket-holder in Illinois will be celebrating summer as the latest winner of a billion-dollar lottery jackpot. One ticket matched all six numbers in the July 29 drawing – the white balls 13, 36, 45, 57 and 67, plus the gold Mega Ball 14 – to win the prize of $1.337 billion ($780.5 million cash). The final value was higher than the estimate based on actual sales. It’s the second largest jackpot in the 20-year history of the game, topped only by the $1.537 billion won in South Carolina on October 23, 2018.
The jackpot had been rolling since it was last won at $20 million in Tennessee on April 15.
“Congratulations to the Illinois Lottery for selling the winning ticket for the $1.337 billion Mega Millions jackpot,” says Ohio Lottery Director Pat McDonald, currently serving as Lead Director for the Mega Millions Consortium. “We are thrilled to have witnessed one of the biggest jackpot wins in Mega Millions history. We’re eager to find out who won and look forward to congratulating the winner soon! Better still, this exciting jackpot run has had a significant positive impact on the revenues for good causes raised by our member lotteries.”
While the jackpot win is the big news, there were other big prizes won Friday night. Twenty-six tickets matched all five white balls to win the game’s second-tier prize. Six of them included the optional Megaplier (available in most states with an extra $1 purchase), which was 2X on Friday night, and are worth $2 million each: Three were sold in Florida, and one each in Arkansas, Iowa and Pennsylvania. The other 20 second-tier prizes are worth $1 million each and were won in 15 different states: two each in Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, North Carolina and Texas; and one each in California, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
For matching four white balls plus the Mega Ball, 375 tickets have a third-tier win. Of those, 68 also included the optional Megaplier and are worth $20,000 each; the remaining 307 win the standard $10,000 prize.
In total, there were 14,391,740 winning tickets sold across all nine prize tiers in the July 29 drawing, including the single jackpot-winning ticket.
In the 30 drawings in this jackpot run, there were more than 42.5 million winning tickets at all prize levels, including 68 second-tier prizes. Those big $1 million-plus prizes were won in 24 different states across the country: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin.
This is the fifth Mega Millions jackpot won to date this year. The fun started with a $426 million prize in California on January 28, followed by $128 million in New York on March 8, $110 million in Minnesota on April 12 (that state’s very first Mega Millions jackpot win), and $20 million in Tennessee on April 15.
The jackpot for the next drawing on Tuesday, August 2, resets to its current starting value of $20 million ($11.6 million cash).
